Saint Motel -Speck Mountain -Miracles of Modern Science
Event on 2012-03-08 21:00:00
Saint Motel
With sophisticated savvy and singularity, the Los Angeles quartet Saint Motel has built a formidable reputation on the back of inventive indie pop and wildly fun live shows. Mixing blistering pep with unique flair and rousing rhythms, Saint Motel's aural catharsis is pure bliss with a twist of cynical humor. Once pulled in by the pulsating and joyous melodies, delight can be found in the surprisingly avant-garde lyrical subject matter. Stories reveal themselves through thematic twists and turns with a narrative voice both subversive and sincere. We find our contemporary hero assessing the world through a lens of poetic contrasts — running down the line of his modern concerns and realizing that a mangled face can be beautiful, that honest feedback can be as lethal as any weapon, and that one might be better off when he has nothing at all. With such honest motifs strung together by tongue-in-cheek notions, delivered with such charm, the band's intentions are often left open to interpretation. And so, what might be easily perceived as sexy with one listen, with another might seem mean-spirited or flatly perverse. That is the flair of Saint Motel's rapturous pop and the graceful dichotomy of its existence.
Speck Mountain
Speck Mountain are an ambient-soul band possessed as much by the grit of southern soul as the spell of infinite drones. Co-leaders Karl Briedrick and Marie-Claire Balabanian provoke each other with intuitive, womb-curled melody, exploded texture, and spiky, strutting rhythm—and so far I’m just talking about the guitars. Marie-Claire also keeps a full-sized Aretha loaded in her throat like some kind of ungodly spring reverb, but has the sense to only let her uncoil just enough, never overdoing it. Karl and Marie-Claire fill out the songs with lyrics in thrall to the mysteries of compulsion, and the ache and rapture of giving in.
at Hideout
1354 W Wabansia Avenue
Chicago, United States