No Expectations 080: Raw Feel

Great new LPs from Real Companion, Ravyn Lenae, and more. Plus, sign up for Daily Chicagoan, the newsletter I helped launch at WTTW News.

Aug 15, 2024

a red and yellow background with swirls and lines — Photo by Lucas K on Unsplash

No Expectations hits inboxes on Thursdays at 9am cst. Reader mailbag email: Noexpectationsnewsletter@gmail.com. (Please, no PR pitches).

Headline song: King Gizzard and the Lizard Wizard, “Raw Feel”

Thanks for sticking around at No Expectations after my week off. I hope you’re all having a good summer. I have a small bit of news below and then a few killer LP recommendations. Tell a friend if you dig this newsletter.

It would be so sick if you subscribed to Daily Chicagoan

Back in May, I was hired by WTTW News (PBS Chicago) to help build a newsletter and this week, it finally launched. It’s called Daily Chicagoan and it’s “a destination for local news and politics, urban nature and the environment, local culture and events, and Chicago history.” It’ll run Monday through Saturday, showcasing the independent reporting from the WTTW staff. I’ll be doing some original writing there too.

I’m really proud of it and I’m so grateful for my coworkers who made it great. If you’re an underemployed writer, you should start a newsletter and figure it out as you go along. That’s not the case for a storied local institution like WTTW and I’m happy we took the time to get it right. It’s very cool to feel so supported by so many talented folks. One of the hardest things so far is that it’s been really difficult to figure out a seamless way to say “WTTW News’ new newsletter.” Here’s what Wednesday’s edition looks like.

You can sign up here. It’d mean the world if you did. If you live around Chicago, I promise it’ll be worth it. Every Wednesday, I’ll also list all the live music I think you should check out. It’s the Weekly Chicago Show Calendar—now at WTTW News.

Four Just-Released AOTY Contenders

Real Companion, Nü-metal Heroes

If you’re into the conversational rock of bands like Bonny Doon, Friendship, and Good Looks, you’ll find a lot to love with Boone, NC’s Real Companion. It’s loose and occasionally rowdy heartland rock anchored by the incredible lyricism of frontman Seth Sullivan. On opener “Painted Hammer,” he’s self-deprecating, “Singing stupid songs / About stupid times.” During “Hometown Snakes,” Sullivan sings bluntly, “The loudest asshole in the room / Is screaming about his flip-flops / hope he's leaving soon / A decade of smoke / A decade of chains / It's all the same.” Nü-metal Heroes deals with growing older and feeling nostalgic for hard living youth, family trauma, and making it to the other side washed up but happy. It’s all beautiful and relatable.

Ravyn Lenae, Bird’s Eye

Almost 10 years ago, the brilliant R&B and soul artist Ravyn Lenae was featured on a song by producer Monte Booker called “Baby”. Along with rapper Smino, the three made up a collective called Zero Fatigue and I remember thinking at the time that each artist sounded like the future. Lenae was just a teenager when this song dropped and now 25 years old, she’s a generational talent. Everything she’s put out has been exceptional, from 2018’s single “Sticky,” to 2022’s Hypnos (I profiled her for Chicago Magazine then). Her latest full-length Bird’s Eye might be her best yet. Beyond her airy yet commanding voice, her biggest asset is her astounding taste as a songwriter, curator, and arranger. Every beat and arrangement sounds future-forward and adventurous and on this relatively pared-back LP, her innovation lingers as she lets each track speak for itself.

There are so many moments in Bird’s Eye that genuinely beguile and delight. Listen to any song and you’ll find a flourish in the arrangement or a tweak in the chorus melody that’s so left-field it’s shocking. Where she’s experimented with glitchy electronics and beats, the arrangements here feel organic and often analog: touching on bossa nova, rock, ‘70s pop, and reggae. It’s hard to pick a favorite track but the album captures summer’s sunny aura better than anything else this year.

King Gizzard and the Lizard Wizard, Flight b741

One of the reasons I took last week off—apart from just being super busy—is that I’m starting a Discography Deep Dive on King Gizzard and the Lizard Wizard. This idea started as a joke—who in the hell would rank the catalog of a band that’s put out 26 studio albums? But the more I dive into their catalog, the more this undertaking sounds like a blast. Listening and writing about over two dozen LPs takes time but I hope to wrap it up by the Australian psych-rock band’s “three-hour marathon set” in Chicago Labor Day weekend.

If you’re uninitiated, please know that I understand that listening to 26 albums is a daunting task, but the uber-prolific experimentalists’ latest Flight b741 is actually a perfect gateway. Some Gizz albums dabble in metal and thrash, microtonal guitar-led psych, electronic and chill vibes, but this offering takes on swampy choogle. Not too far from the sonic territory of 2019’s Fishing for Fishies, Flight b741 finds the band firing on all cylinders. Each tune features a round-robin approach to vocals with bandmates trading verses and choruses throughout (each member sings on the LP—a first in KGLW history), and it’s a thrilling listen. My early favorite is “Raw Feel.” While not a single, it captures the freewheeling joy of the band better than anything else on the record.

Peter Cat Recording Co., BETA

Right after I locked in writing this newsletter, I decided to check out Peter Cat Recording Co.’s BETA, because I’d seen raves from folks I trust like Paste’s Matt Mitchell. I was impressed enough to stop what I was doing to write this blurb, which should be endorsement enough. Peter Cat Recording Co. is an adventurous, refreshing, and inviting rock band from Delhi, India. Though they’ve been around for about 15 years, the quintet started touring the states just last year. BETA feels like their stateside breakthrough with immaculately lush production, expansive songs that turn in unpredictable ways, and accessibly timeless English-sung tunes. It’s a striking palette that’s hard to pin down due to their clearly voracious listening habits and their knack for breezy melodies. I just started listening but this is so obviously a record to dig into again and again. “Connexion” is an early favorite.

What I listened to:

The No Expectations 080: Spotify / / Apple Music

1. Real Companion, “Great Valley”
2. King Gizzard and the Lizard Wizard, “Raw Feel”
3. Closebye, “Hammer of My Own”
4. proun, “Exit the Room”
5. Wand, “High Time”
6. Edie McKenna, “Hail Mary”
7. Styrofoam Winos, “Don’t Mind Me”
8. Braden Lawrence, “Gary”
9. Eggy, “Come Up Slow”
10. Golomb, “Take My Life”
11. hemlock, “Hyde Park”
12. The Clearwater Swimmers, “Heaven’s a Bar”
13. Super Infinity, “Satellite (O No)”
14. Adrianne Lenker, “Once a Bunch”
15. Ravyn Lenae, “Days”

Gig report: Whitney, Hannah Frances, Lake j at Thalia Hall. (8/11)

This summer, I’ve found myself constantly in motion. I’ve been busy with work, hosting friends and family, socializing, going to shows, and writing this newsletter. Each thing is great and fulfilling, but I’m getting desperate to just chill—to rest, get away from screens, and veg out for a few days. Sometimes you can see burnout and the anxiety that comes with it fast approaching and it’s easy to let yourself succumb to it. You can also fend it off by spending an evening with loved ones watching live music. Longtime readers of this newsletter know the members of Whitney are some of my very best friends, so I’m not going to review their show other than to say they performed four or five new songs with a string section. Hannah Frances, the artist with my personal AOTY Keeper of the Shepherd and lake j (Twin Peaks’ Cadien Lake James) opened. It was just what I needed. I left the show feeling refreshed and grateful to live in a city that fosters so much great music.

What I watched:

Hard Knocks: Training Camp With the Chicago Bears

Bringing a child into the world and raising them to be a Chicago Bears fan is one of the worst things you can do as a parent. As a kid, watching that football team taught me about disappointment, heartbreak, incompetence, and failure better than any lesson I could’ve gained from literature or real-world experience. It’s a brutal life when you love that franchise. You hold out hope each season and you inevitably lower your expectations dramatically a month or two later. (There are only two or three times in my life that the Bears were Actually Good).

It’s a painful annual ritual that I will put myself through again and again but things might finally get better now. I’ve said this every year I’ve been cursed to love the “Monsters of the Midway,” but I truly believe drafting Caleb Williams at no. 1 will turn everything around. So far, the first Hard Knocks season documenting the Bears has me so hyped that I believe we’ll win it all. Can you imagine the pure vibes that would envelop Chicago if this actually happened? It might be a more powerful aura than what summer does to us. Or, it might unleash horrible darkness like what happened after the Chicago Cubs won the World Series in November 2016.

What I read:

How the Music Industry Learned to Love Piracy (NYT Magazine)

This is where the potted histories and prevarications of “How Music Got Free” truly begin to grate. The story they want to tell, in an emphatically triumphalist tone, is that the early pirates were David and the music industry was Goliath. But then the industry realized that David was actually pretty cool: All turned out well, and music was solved forever.
I may be speaking as a working musician here, but from my perspective — the perspective, I think, of almost any nonmogul with a stake in the industry — this is an obviously insane interpretation of events. The problem isn’t just the ever-decreasing viability of even established, popular artists keeping food on the table. There is also a cultural poverty that attends the streaming economy. There is the ruthless profit maximization and the constant steering of listeners toward the same music. There is the lock-step social engineering and manufactured consensus. There is the escalating — and demeaning — sense of music being treated as a utility that need not be meaningfully engaged with. There are the Spotify playlists peppered with songs generated by fake artists that Spotify owns the rights to, allowing the company to recapture its own royalty payments. And at the same time, there is the fact that nearly every space where consumers could once interact with music unsupervised by corporate gatekeepers — record stores, mail order, merch tables — has been put on life support.

Girl K sheds the indie rock band persona for decidedly pop road (Chicago Sun-Times)

She came up with the Girl K moniker in her high school math class, while doodling logos. When she did an open mic, someone complimented her on the name and it stuck.
At 19, she moved to Pilsen to be closer to the scene and to continue to perform in more DIY shows in the city. Patino would later join forces with guitarist Kevin Sheppard, bassist Alex Pieczynski and drummer Tony Mest to form her band through a DIY Chicago Facebook group. The four of them would go on to play gigs all over the city and release two albums, “Sunflower Court” in 2017 and “For Now in 2019" under the Massachusetts-based Take This to Heart Records label.
While the bandmates contributed to those earlier efforts and performed with her live, Girl K has always been Patino. In May, she fully embraced her inner indie pop princess with the single “Acidity.”

The Weekly Chicago Show Calendar

Three months ago, I was hired to help launch a newsletter for WTTW News and one of the things they asked me to do was to add selected concert listings to it. Now that the new newsletter, Daily Chicagoan, is up and running, the No Expectations Weekly Chicago Show Calendar will live there. I’ll link it out each week here. I appreciate your understanding.