CHECK ENGINE Check Engine (Southern) Chicago’s music scene is rife with musicians doing double and triple duty; nearly every recording I’m reviewing in this week’s column is by some kind of alter ego or side project. That includes Check Engine, which features vocalist and saxophonist Steve Sostak and guitarist Chris Daly of Sweep the Leg Johnny, along with ex-Lynx bassist Paul Patrick Joyce, guitarist Joe Cannon, and drummer Brian Wnukowski. They seem to be trying to move away from Sweep’s abrasive math rock into more melodic pop–Big Star meets Drive Like Jehu, as their publicist puts it–but that’s not the feel I came away with. Sostak and Cannon–who sounds a little like Fugazi’s Guy Picciotto–bellow occasionally over complex, angular, intertwining rock riffs; once in a while the group cools down and plays with dynamics, but only on the peppy “Pain Don’t Hurt” does their pop sensibility outstrip their penchant for precision noodling.
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DIVERSE Move (Chocolate Industries) In a promising development for the local hip-hop scene, Evanston MC Diverse (aka Kenny Jenkins) takes a hint from Philadelphia’s titanic Roots, backing his brainy but fluid rhymes with live (and live-sounding) tracks. This four-song EP features Rebel Souls drummer Ted Sirota, Isotope 217 bassist Matt Lux, one-time Roots bassist Josh Abrams, and sharp DJ Norman Rockwell; their liquid grooves seem to breathe along with Diverse, whose pitch-bending accents, melodic phrasing, and rounded consonants suggest a pre-rock Mos Def. A full album is due later this year.
OWEN Owen (Polyvinyl) Owen is Mike Kinsella–best known as Tim Kinsella’s brother and sometime bandmate in Cap’n Jazz, Joan of Arc, and the Owls. His solo debut features none of the throat-shredding emo or navel-gazing abstraction of those other combos; it’s pretty, plainspoken, and gentle to a fault. With the exception of a brief vocal cameo by Caithlin De Marrais of Rainer Maria, Kinsella does everything: the swirling acoustic guitar arpeggios, the misty synth patterns,the soft-touch drumming and coloristic vibes, and the hushed singing are all his. Unfortunately he does them all in pretty much the same proportion and rhythm on all nine songs, making it hard to tell when one ends and another begins, or to remember any of them when the record’s over.
