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Preview Sat Apr 05 2014
Cities Aviv Gets the Weekend Started Right Tonight at Empty Bottle
A few months ago, I wrote about the band Weekend. They were in town opening for Dissapears at Empty Bottle back and we gave away a pair of tickets to see them. I went to the show, later on that week, and they were truly fantastic. Loud, desolate, and claustrophobic. That intense wall of sound that they created during the chorus of "Oubliette" is probably a highlight of things I experienced last year. All of this is to say that Weekend is back in town, tonight at Empty Bottle. I recommend checking them out and I also recommend checking out their stellar album Jinx, but Weekend isn't the point of this; their opener Cities Aviv is.
Cities Aviv is a rapper from Memphis who finds himself deconstructing what rap is while challenging preconceptions of what rap is supposed to be. Sometimes tagged with tumblr-born genre descriptors such as "cloud rap" or "trillwave" along with rappers such as Spaceghostpurrp and producers such as Clams Casino, I discovered him while in the midst of a depraved insomniatic state in the middle of the night a few years ago when he appeared on the overlooked track by Lushlife, "I'm a Buddhist, She's a Cubist." I was stricken by his surrealist wordplay and etherealized delivery, vaguely reminding of things like Tricky's "Hell is Round the Corner." I sought out his mixtape, Digital Lows (album artwork potentially NSFW) and was enraptured by songs such as the hazy sounding "Jaguar" and the beautifully dense Depeche Mode sampling, "Die Young." His latest album, Come to Life came out earlier this year and continues his experimentation. "IRL URL" acts as a triumphant call to arms while other tracks are zoned out and introspective. You should check him out. Our friends at the Chicago Reader agree.
Cities Aviv plays tonight, April 5, at Empty Bottle opening for Weekend. Local band Supercell Mothership kicks the night off. Tickets are $12 at the door and the show starts at 9:30pm. You must be 21+ to attend. You can get tickets here.
