Friday 8
Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites »
TIFT MERRITT A few years ago North Carolina’s Tift Merritt released an unremarkable if solid debut album, Bramble Rose, that stuck to the well-traveled byways of commercial alt-country: Lucinda Williams polished to a 70s Linda Ronstadt sheen. But she’s certainly grabbed my attention with her follow-up, Tambourine (Lost Highway), which sounds like Emmylou Harris doing Dusty in Memphis. Producer George Drakoulias and a gang of LA studio pros give the album a big sound, laying on the faux-gospel backing vocals awfully thick, but Merritt’s terrific, idiom-flouting songs and spectacular singing–which combines Harris’s crystalline clarity with undeniably soulful throatiness–consistently transcend the heavy hand on the console. From Stax-worthy ballads like “Still Pretending” (where she reminds me of an extroverted Hope Sandoval) to the rafter-raising “I Am Your Tambourine,” she never makes a misstep. Braam opens. 7:30 PM, Abbey Pub, 3420 W. Grace, 773-478-4408 or 866-777-8932, $8 in advance, $10 day of show, 18+. –Peter Margasak
Saturday 9
Monday 11
ZEKE There were reports of this punk-metal outfit’s death last year, when bassist Jeff Matz and drummer Donny Paycheck defected to Camarosmith. But Zeke, it turns out, is unkillable. Matz and Paycheck have returned to the fold, and the band has a new deal with the most-appropriate Relapse Records–their latest, ‘Til the Livin’ End, is a fresh hot meal of brains: fast, heavy, nasty, and praying five times a day in the direction of Motorhead. Filthy Jim and the Resinators open. 9 PM, Double Door, 1572 N. Milwaukee, 773-489-3160 or 312-559-1212, $8. –Monica Kendrick
AFRIKA BAMBAATAA As far as I’m concerned not one of the current crop of neo-electro dipshits has produced anything that can touch Afrika Bambaataa’s 1982 jam “Planet Rock.” Three years ago Tommy Boy Records founder Tom Silverman asked Bam to make a new album, and that invitation has finally yielded Dark Matter Moving at the Speed of Light. On it the electro-funk pioneer revisits the sound he devised with the Soul Sonic Force more than two decades ago, surrounded by a motley crowd of upstarts–plus new-wave automaton Gary Numan, irrelevant now as ever. As one might expect under such circumstances, the album fails to equal Bambaataa’s best, but it does make perfectly plain what the electroclash knobs have been missing: deep, tight James Brown grooves percolate on every track. 10 PM, Smart Bar, 3730 N. Clark, 773-549-4140, $10. –Peter Margasak
