My college bound cousin visited Milwaukee earlier this week to get a feel for the schools and the city. It was exciting on many levels, but the most exciting was him telling me that he’d just seen Maps & Atlases at the Union Terrace in Madison. It was similar experiences that led me to Milwaukee for college. I wanted to be somewhere where there was a lot going on, plenty of live music to experience.

His comments also reminded me I’ve not yet mentioned my fondness for the new Maps & Atlases record, Perch Patchwork. It was actually the above video from Yours Truly that forced me to pay attention to the record. I’m so glad I did. “The Charm” has become one of my favorite songs of the year.

MP3: Maps & Atlases – “The Charm”
++
Buy: Maps & Atlases – Perch Patchwork

Words: Jodi Root | Photo: Clayton Huack

Maps and Atlases served as the perfect bait to lure me to my most (and quite frankly, only) anticipated field trip into Chicago’s Lincoln Park – the city’s newest venue, Lincoln Hall. While Maps & Atlases put on an incredible, entertaining set– thanks to Muzzle of Bees contributing Champaign writer Jon Stone, we already knew that. Instead of repeating his previous praise, I’d like instead to focus on the highlights (and there are many) and characteristics of this new musical hot spot destination.

10 Thoughts/Comments on Chicago’s newest music venue:

1. Nice Staff – No attitude whatsoever. As a frequent reviewer, I can’t tell you how many times I’ve encountered some form of self righteous chip on the shoulder ‘tude from the doorman, scoffing when I mention I’m “on the list.” It’s almost a battle of who’s cooler – the girl who claims to be on the band’s comp list (which I guess is me), or the man in charge of said list, who questionably glares at my ID for uncomfortable durations of time and finally either gives me privilege of entry or satisfyingly turns me away with a smirk. DEFINITELY not the case at LH. We were first greeted by the bouncer on the bar side who offered us wristbands in passing outside and then directed us to the man in charge of entry, who despite my drunken faux pas, (“Thanks ma’am!”), laughed me off and held no hard feelings. The staff at LH were not only helpful and quick to please, but more than ready to be at your assistance. Maybe it’s because the venue is so new and they’re still working things out, but it almost seems as if they’re overstaffed—from a guest standpoint this is in means a negative observation. I did not have to wait more than a minute to be served by the bartending staff, cocktail waitresses or nice door dudes. Everyone seemed happy to be there and help the crowd out. Kudos to you, Lincoln Hall on excellent service. I imagine the restaurant service is probably superb as well, word on the street is there’s a current special on half price mac n cheese, this might be my incentive to return in the near future. . .

2. Upstairs! — This area was probably my favorite part of the venue. Not restricted to VIP, any concert goer was welcome to explore the upper level of LH, either sitting in chairs lined along the balcony looking down on the stage (think Subterranean’s upstairs but bigger and with chairs or Metro if you shell out big bucks for the VIP chairs). If you wanted to relax, there were spacey booths with wooden table tops in the back area, a handful of four seater round tables scattered between the booth area and the upstairs bar, and plenty of standing room throughout. The brick walls, concrete flooring and overall set-up is a perfect chamber for the sound below—good view, good sound, a place to sit (and stash your coat). Cocktail servers frequent the tables regularly and it’s a good spot to chat with your friends between sets.

3. Reasonable Drink Prices — While it’s definitely not the cheapest option in Chicago, (Go Empty Bottle/Subterranean), drink prices were very competitive and affordable for a venue. You’re not going to find any skunky warm $6 party cups full of Miller Lite here. I may have only sampled the $3 pbr bottles, but regardless I’m a big fan of any venue I can get an actual bottle of beer, let alone for under $5. From speaking to other friends who have caught shows here, they’ve mentioned it’s very comparable to Schuba’s, with mixed drinks being slightly more expensive – I’d guess between $4-6 will get you a well. Keeping in mind that can’t even get you a beer at the Metro or Vic, this isn’t a bad deal at all.

4. Awesome View —From Everywhere! Not only is the upstairs area ideal for an overall view, the main floor is one of the most superb layout for vertically challenged concert goers such as myself as well. Since Lincoln Hall was a former movie theater, the space is wide, open and elevated similar to stadium seating almost. I could see from the side, in the back, and even crammed between a smelly pack of stoner kids. With no barricade to block those in front, it seemed like everyone had a decent spot in the house. There was so much space, I even walked into a brick labyrinth at one point, puzzled by the abundance of standing room and areas. Maps and Atlases brought out a decent sized crowd, so it speaks a lot of Lincoln Hall to still have so much extra space for viewers to enjoy. (No sweltering Empty Bottle/Double Door crowd pits here).

5. The Sound! — This should probably be at the top of the list since it’s so amazing and obviously the most important attribute to any musical showcase, but my way of thinking boycotts logic. Not too much to say, but due to the combination of awesome set-up, skilled sound crew, top notch sound equipment/system and whatever else magic the dudes at Lincoln Hall got going for them, the sound was amazing. Not ear bleedingly loud, but loud enough to still give you your bang for your buck. No feedback, distortion—just loud, clear and beautiful beats. I may have only caught one show thus far at LH, but the clear/crisp delivery of sound def gets my nod for either best quality in the city, or at least equally comparable to that of the Bottom Lounge. Good stuff.

6. Location – While I’m not exactly a fan of feeling like a senior citizen at age 26, (maybe I should quit with the 18+ shows?), I was able to get over the fact that Lincoln Hall is located in college central Lincoln Park. Albeit not my typical stomping grounds, the location is convenient and not at all difficult to navigate. No mystery busses or various transfers, Lincoln Hall is centrally located in the city, accessible via a variety of CTA bus routes and is a mere 5-minute stroll from the Red/Brown line Fullerton stop. With an address of 2424 North Lincoln, it’s also easy enough to remember despite a pregame of Charles Shaw merlot. Not the closest venue to my pad, (that award would go to Old Town School of Music or Aragon/Riv), but definitely easy, easy, easy to get to. The fact that it’s in such a populated area also made me comfortable walking alone home at night, instead of looking over my shoulder in a shady alley area, (Hello, Hideout), it was well lit and in a central part of the city. Definitely an incentive to return, especially in the upcoming frigid Midwest wintery months.

7. Aesthetically Pleasing, Overall Set-Up – This venue is definitely sharp. The concrete floors, wooden bar/tables, sleek/metallic everything else is just plain nice to look at. The venue is new, clean and yet to inherit any graffiti eyesores from patrons. I’ve described the concert hall area in a bit of detail, but the restaurant and main room is also pretty great. Two full bars and more table space than I’ve seen at any other musical destination. The main area also sports a comparable jukebox to that of sister-venue Schuba’s—rocking a variety of hipster cred from classics like Dr. Dre’s “The Chronic,” timely hipster soundtracks such as Karen O & The Kid’s Where the Wild Things Are, Tarantino’s Inglorious Basterds, some newer hip hop such as Jay’s BluePrint 3 and Kid Cudi, older staples like The Carpenters, and an eclectic collection of Cowbell compilations. . . not so sure about the latter, but hey, I’ll give them props for unique selection.

8. Nice Bathrooms — Not only were the restrooms clean and fully stocked, but I wasn’t terrified to use their toilets. The floors were clean enough for me to place my jacket on them as I washed my hands and the overall appearance was sleek and sanitary – the girl’s metallic bathroom sink was pretty sharp looking, with one communal basin, but one of two faucets was already out of order–only a month within being open. Oh well, hopefully they still have a warranty—not the end of the world.

9. Pizza joint across street! — While I feel bad pimping food for the neighboring restaurant when LH probably serves an incredible variety of meals in-house, a girl’s gotta give props where they’s deserved. We’ve all been in the post-show drinking haze, craving a cheap, quick and easy fix – and the pizza joint across the street Vini’s is just that. I’m sure their business will be booming in the coming months as LH grows in popularity – while I gleefully gobbled a jumbo slice of sausage and guzzled my soda under $4, my girlfriend nabbed an even more impressive combo of a slice/soda/fries under $5. Late hours, a plus.

10. No coat check – Only downgrade? — If you’ve ever been in Chicago between the months of November and March (or sometimes April, even), you know this part of the country isn’t exactly a winter getaway. Lugging around a heavy coat in a crowded show can be annoying and bothersome, to say the least. Jackets are sacrificed in hidden corners, shoved in booths or bathroom stalls, or if you’re responsible and have standards, carried bulkily in your arms. I was pretty surprised to find out that Lincoln Hall does not have a coat check or area to hang your jacket. It’s not even the bigger venues that rock the coat check (Metro, Riv, Vic), but smaller digs like Schuba’s and Subterranean also offer this service for a couple bones. Empty Bottle even one-ups them all with, *gasp*, free coat hooks. Not a deal breaker by any means, there’s certainly plenty of booth/table space to fling your jacket and it’s only cold for a quarter of the year (wishful thinking), but still, think about it Lincoln Hall, please? I want to visit you again in the nasty cold cold months.

Overall, as you can tell, I was sold with my experience last evening at Lincoln Hall. An excellent evening with super intricate, delectable nerd rock (Local outfit Maps & Atlases were quite the treat,) and wonderful guest services, (again, props to the nice door dudes, especially the one who didn’t hate after I drunkenly referred to him as ma’am), I already can’t wait to return. If you’ve been waiting on your chance to check out this new venue, wait no longer. Also, if you’re a tweethead, make sure to add them on twitter, @LincolnHall – they’ve been selling 2-for-1 ticket deals and have frequent giveaways and free ticket contests on their daily feeds as well as news on upcoming shows.

Discuss: What is your favorite music venue in your city? What separates them from the rest? If you’ve been to Lincoln Hall drop a comment with your thoughts/reviews on the new place.

By Jon Stone | @jwstone

Over the weekend I saw three shows in Champaign-Urbana. Each show was a good show–great even. But wow, were they different experiences. This disparateness is one of the things that makes thinking and writing about music appealing: parsing through the musical experience looking for clues and connections of their quality with our resulting affinity. My goal here is to review each of these shows but also make a larger argument (that includes some theorizing–sorry: academic alert) about why it is we like the music we do and what makes for large-scale success.

That argument, however, requires some set-up. (Skip down to the reviews if you have no patience for such things. No one will know!). My friend Cory and I see a lot of live music together and we frequently find ourselves in friendly though sometimes heated discussion about the bands we see. One of the things we’ve been kicking around lately is this question of what makes a band appealing on a large-scale. In development is a theory of musical archetypes. These archetypes are broader than genre classifications: As you’ll see below and probably already know, it’s becoming more and more difficult to map genre within popular music–and likely, the easier a band is to classify, the less interesting they are. Again, these archetypes are much bigger, more general “types” and are also, therefore, difficult to name.  For now, I’ll explore two–a pairing– and call one “sing” bands and the other “think” bands (corny, but I’m looking for simple terms that sum up the central tenants of the archetype). It is likely that you love bands that belong to either archetype, which I will now attempt to explain:

“Sing” (or “oral”) bands dominate the music industry. In fact, I might go so far as to say that the genre designation “pop” encompasses most “sing” bands, but surely not without numerous exceptions (and “pop” bleeds over profusely into the “think” bands [and vice-versa], as you will likely see). “Sing” bands are those that we, (duh) sing along to. We feel the music and the melody on our lips. We hum along. We whistle later. We sing in the car. We we walk down the street singing even though we have our earbuds in, and most of all, we SING at the shows. “Sing” bands are great–they actually have it a bit easier than “think” bands. It’s not that the singer is the only thing going on in the band, but those words and vocal melody is, perhaps, the most important element. We connect with the band though that voice and lyric. It’s the first point of contact.

“Think” (or “aural”) bands are a little bit difficult to explain, but you’d know one if you saw/heard one. I’ll argue (and you may disagree) that we primarily experience these bands on an aural (non-speech)/cognitive level and because there isn’t a dominant oral cue to pull us in, the musicians have to get us there in some other way. Some do so in a display of technical skill, others with sonic experimentation, while still others figure some other non-oral ways of connecting with the audience. Whatever the case, these bands are usually best experienced live. Watching them do their thing seems important to the process (you frequently hear the description “I can’t believe they pulled that off live!”), but also, as I experienced with first band I’ll review below, there is something very corporeal to the experience. In other words, our minds and bodies respond.

Ok, on to the show reviews. Sorry to put you through that, but it seemed important to get off my chest for some reason.

Maps & Atlases:

I’m not really a math guy. Maybe that’s why I find the phrase “math rock” off-putting. I read somewhere that Maps & Atlases were math-rockers, and I was like, what, they play their set with TI-89 calculators or something? (ooh, bad joke.) Seriously, though–if math rock were the the term to describe the kind of intricate, syncopated (and wow! fast!) phrases that Maps & Atlases employ in their set, wouldn’t that make Les Claypool the father of math rock?  His imagined response to such a label is enough to again question its validity. And I don’t know that the guys in Maps & Atlases could (or would want to!) corroborate that genealogical shot in the dark.  Math-rock, indeed.

And man, Maps & Atlases are good! The show on Friday night at the Courtyard Cafe in the University of Illinois student student union was the first full set I’ve heard from the band, though  I saw them play as a part of our Pygmalion fest earlier in the year kind of on a whim. It left me wanting more. I think their first song at Pygmalion was the dizzy waltz titled “Ted Zancha” (see below) and I loved that drummer Chris Hainey was playing the glockenspiel and the drums at the same time. He really sets the pace in Maps & Atlases and he has to in a band so percussive. Dave Davison and Erin Elders play their guitars as if they were instruments of rhythm. Their dueling fret-tapping plays out on stage like an intricate dance–joined frequently in a trio by bassist Shiraz Dada.

It was during their Friday set that part of that above theory started to be formulated. Davison wasn’t knocking me out with his live vocals–which are unique to be sure, but get a bit buried in the other amazing stuff going on during the live set. But they got me dancing and thinking and counting (damn! math!–but seriously, I’ve never heard so many syncopated triplets [or whatever they were] inside an up-tempo, 4/4 measure). These guys have something really special going on and you can hear it on their latest EP You Me and the Mountain and you should, but you MUST see these guys to really understand. Take a little peek below to see what I mean, care of their MySpace page.

I got a chance to visit with Davison and Dada a bit before their set. I wondered about this hammered semi-acoustic, arch-top that Davison uses sometimes. He told me it’s a Harmony “Rocket” and was the first guitar he ever bought–$40 at a pawn shop. It had been his second-string guitar until he decided to take it on tour (rather than the beautiful 50′s era Gibson–his main axe–on a plane). Anyway, Davison knows the guitar tech who does work for fellow-Chicagoan Andrew Bird. “He took it and made it ring,” Davison said– and wow, did it ever.

Buy: Maps & Atlases – You, Me, and the Mountain
++
Myspace: Maps & Atlases

—

Elsinore:

When I first moved to Champaign a few years ago, I immediately tried to get a feeling for the local music scene. I didn’t know yet how amazing our little college town was at attracting interesting acts, and in Phoenix, AZ where I moved from there only seemed to be two options for live music: the unbearably huge arena shows and the small, under-appreciated local bands at semi-deserted Phoenix and Tempe clubs. I first saw and was impressed by our local band Elsinore at Urbana’s Corn Festival late in the summer of 2007, though they’ve been playing together for over five years now.

It wasn’t, however, until I saw Ryan Groff (lead-singer & songwriter) play a solo show that I started to get excited about his band. For all Elsinore’s musical prowess, it’s Groff’s work as a vocalist that makes the band a standout. And for those of us who fancy ourselves musical, his voice is truly cause for envy: It’s BIG with dynamic range that reaches higher than you think it should into the falscetto stratosphere. But along with the voice, his song-writing is strong and there is some real technical skill in the craft that you can see on display both at Elsinore shows and when performing solo.

I saw Elsinore (which I so hope was inspired by Strange Brew–”I’m taking you to the loony bin, eh.” “Take off, eh! Take me to the brewery!”) on Saturday night back at the Courtyard Cafe. Elsinore is currently on tour warming up material from their as-yet unreleased new album “Yes Yes Yes”.  From the material I’ve heard online and at shows, it’s going to be fantastic. Elsinore works well as an example in the “sing” archetype. You just can’t help it.  Near the end of “Wooden Houses,” for example, Groff starts singing the refrain: “This is how hunger strikes begin.” I promise that you will be hard pressed not to be singing along by the end of the song. Groff frequently introduces the song, as he did Saturday night, as a song about getting married while George W. was president. He may have even dedicated it to those of us who got married in that era. Dedication accepted.

Here’s a great clip of the band singing my song on the streets of Boulder and a link to them playing it in a more traditional setting. Check this band out, folks. They’re not just for mid-westerners. I wish them all the luck I can muster and promise to write again here when the record comes out.

Buy: Elsinore – Nothing For Design
++
Myspace: Elsinore

—

The Walkmen

After the Elsinore set was over, I wandered over to the beautiful Krannert Center for the Performing Arts. Krannert hosted the incredible guitar festival Ellnora a few months ago where we were graced with the talent of (to name just a few) Jerry Douglas, Bill Frisell, The National and National side-project “The Long Count” (which featured Kim and Kelly Deal and Shara Worden) as well as hosting the headliners from our amazing Pygmalion Festival each year that I’ve lived here (Andrew Bird, Yo La Tengo, and Iron & Wine).

Krannert is piece of art on its own and the Walkmen added to it by playing an incredible (free!) show on Saturday night. They played every song you might have hoped to hear and tried out several new ones (see the set list below). I’d never seen them before and I was so impressed by their focus, their musicianship, their unique style, and Hamilton Leithauser’s voice. Wow. The Walkmen have that it that is easy to hear but so difficult to write about. And they have received praise and success relative to that it. This actually becomes the most important part of my argument that I started above: this “it” is created by just the right mixture of the above sing/think archetypes. The Walkmen do this. Their set had me rapt: vintage instruments, mid-set instrument switching, one guitarist that sounded like three, impossibly fast, intense drumming, songs that I have had in my head ever since. It was all there. Radiohead and Wilco are the best examples I can think of in our modern music sphere. But think any respected band where there is a fairly wide-spread consensus on their quality. These are the bands that make us sing and make us think. They change and mutate the boundaries of our tastes. They make us want to research and explore their influences. They become our favorites.

Granted, some folks will disagree. And others have tastes that hard-line on either side and just can’t see what the big deal is about bands that fall outside of their particular leanings. To be clear, also, all of the bands I have discussed above have a mix of attributes from either archetype. There were fans SINGING along at the Maps & Atlases show and if you’ve seen Groff operate a loop pedal or analyzed the complexities of his vocal melodies you’ll realize how smart his music is. But sometimes bands just play their one note and that’s it and they seem happy to do so. For me, that’s just not enough.

The Walkmen’s set:

On the Water / In the New Year / new song /Canadian Girl / Four Provinces /What’s in it For Me / Thinking of a Dream I Had / Postcards From Tiny Island / new song / The Rat / new song / Donde Esta la Playa / All Hands and the Cook / Little House of Savages

Buy: The Walkmen – You & Me