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Concert Fri May 06 2011
Preview: Surfer Blood & ....And You Will Know Us By The Trail Of The Dead 5/7
If you spend your Saturday night at the Bottom Lounge you can probably expect to see one kind of crowd at 8pm and an entirely different kind of crowd at 11pm. While at first glance this may seem like strange planning, it's actually not. The show is sponsored by Chicago's own independent Internet radio station, CHIRP. Mixing musical genres is what CHIRP does on-air, so it makes sense that's what the station would participate in off-air.
Moving on to what kinds of crowd to expect, the setting is a good start. The Bottom Lounge stage is kind of dark, it's a little grungy and grey insulation crawls out of spaces between steel beams in the ceiling. It's the perfect kind of setting for a band with lyrics like "There is no light; there is no light in this darkness." But that's not the only congruency between band and venue: ...And You Will Know Us By the Trail of the Dead's gritty, heavy-hitting guitars also seem to fit perfectly in the large, raw space. The same goes for the band's raw energy and dark, yet grandiose soundscapes. For Saturday's show it looks like the experimental prog-rocker's aim to take Bottom Lounge on a kind of musically inspired Tolkien journey (check out the cover art on recent release Tao of the Dead) while quite possibly destroying their equipment. In a word, the show promises to be "Epic", for those that like to throw the word around.
Acting like the light to the darkness of Trail of the Dead is the wonderfully catchy, guitar-heavy Surfer Blood . Surfer Blood is pop-rock to Trail's prog-rock. Surfer Blood is clean cut to Trail's edging-on-gothic-experimentalism. The only congruency between Saturday's two bands seems to be the way they love their guitar chords. The young five piece from Florida promise to bring Bottom Lounge out of the darkness of Trail of the Dead and into the Florida sun, with lots of reverb and rousing choruses. That combined with unmistakable references to bands you used to love, like Weezer and the Pixies (nostalgic sigh). It will make the later portion of the evening a stark contrast to the earlier portion.
Surfer Blood and ....And You Will Know Us By The Trail Of The Dead play this Saturday night, 5/7 at the Bottom Lounge. Tickets are $20 and the show is 17+. The Bottom Lounge is located at 1375 W. Lake St.
