No Expectations 083: Depot Dog

Can’t-miss new LPs from the Bug Club, Lia Kohl, Sima Cunningham, and Why Bonnie.

Photo by Pawel Czerwinski on Unsplash

No Expectations hits inboxes on Thursdays at 9am cst. Reader mailbag email: Noexpectationsnewsletter@gmail.com. The newsletter I help run at my day job with WTTW News (PBS Chicago) can be found here. 

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Headline song: hemlock, “Depot Dog” 

Thanks for being here. I spent Labor Day Weekend relaxing on a boat in Michigan Saturday, seeing King Gizzard and the Lizard Wizard play a three-hour-plus set at Chicago’s Northerly Island Sunday, and watching the U.S. Open from the comfort of my couch all day Monday. I don’t think it gets much better than that. 

 

The three-day weekend ruled and after the massive King Gizzard Discography Deep Dive last week, I still want to be in total vacation mode. I might take next week off from this newsletter but in the meantime, here are four new LPs from Friday to enjoy now. 

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Four LPs for the weekend 

The Bug Club, On the Intricate Inner Workings of the System

Welsh punks the Bug Club write relentlessly catchy songs doused in sarcasm and caustic energy. They previewed their Sub Pop debut On the Intricate Inner Workings of the System with the lead single “Quality Pints,” which breathlessly repeats the hook to the point of abrasion. However, before it grates, it entrenches itself into the part of your brain that wants to sing along. The trio effortlessly charms throughout this LP, proving that their snarky attitude is just as palpable as their proclivity to write killer songs. Last year, I included their sprawling LP Rare Birds: Hour of Song in the No Expectations 2023 list and the follow-up finds the band elevating their craft while scrapping the spoken word tracks. There’s a clear forward momentum on a track like “We Don’t Care About That,” it’s angry, infectious, and a total blast, complete with a clanging guitar solo and a masterful hook. 

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Lia Kohl, Normal Sounds 

There are Sunday morning records, post-work patio albums, and LPs you put on to help you focus, get work done, or clean the house. Recently before I go to bed, I’ve been leaning toward meditative, adventurous, and largely instrumental releases like Normal Sounds. Lia Kohl is one of the most perceptive and innovative musicians in Chicago’s improvisational and experimental music communities. She’s a gifted cellist and composer, who turns her focus here to found sounds and the mundane background noise of everyday life. Normal Sounds features seven tracks, all of which boast titles like “Ice Cream Truck, Tornado Siren” and “Car Alarm, Turn Signal.” And yes, each song is punctuated by field recordings of each object mentioned in the title. The compositions are all equally stunning and surprising with thrumming synths, sprawling overdubbed cello, and more. It’s a refreshingly immersive way to find the magic in the familiar.  

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Sima Cunningham, High Roller 

As one-half of the Chicago art-rock band Finom, Sima Cunningham would already be one of the most influential musicians in this city. But that great band is only part of her story. Cunningham’s a galvanizing figure and community builder who founded the small but mighty music festival Postock and performed on countless albums by Jeff Tweedy, Iron & Wine, Twin Peaks, and more. She’s an excellent solo songwriter too, who’s been prepping High Roller for a long time. Over the years, I’ve seen her play these songs at Hungry Brain, Constellation, the Hideout, and more. I couldn’t be more thrilled to hear them fully realized on a proper album. Recorded with her partner Dorian Gehring along with a cast of collaborators like Clay Frankel, Elizabeth Moen, and her brother Liam Kazar, Cunningham builds a world of ornate folk and overwhelming emotional resonance. The title track is a ripper but the grief-stricken closer “Adonai” is so full of catharsis that I had to sit in silence after I heard it for the first time. 

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Why Bonnie, Wish on the Bone

There’s tangible drama and emotional stakes in Why Bonnie’s twangy and explosive rock songs. Now signed to Fire Talk, the Brooklyn-via-Texas band transforms the breezy Americana of their debut 90 in November into something more expansive, ambitious, and confident on Wish on the Bone. Here, lead songwriter Blair Howerton expertly creates cinematic tracks that soar and subdue. An example of the former is “Fake Out,” the band’s loudest song to date which finds Howerton at her most commanding as a frontperson. It’s a striking vocal performance that showcases a band finding a new groove. Elsewhere, the quieter moments are just as potent, like on “Three Big Moons,” which boasts fiddle and some golden harmonies. The woozy closer “I Took The Shot” beautifully highlights an exciting and mesmerizing possible direction I hope the band takes on LP3. 

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What I listened to: 

The No Expectations 083 Playlist: Spotify // Apple Music 

1. Styrofoam Winos, “Angel Flies Over” 
2. The Medium, “Golden Angels” 
3. hemlock, “Depot Dog’ 
4. Why Bonnie, “Three Big Moons” 
5. 22 Degree Halo, “Virtual You” 
6. The Bug Club, “We Don’t Care About That” 
7. Tasha, “Love’s Changing” 
8. J. Mamana, “Tenderness Lost” 
9. Floating Action, “Eyes Freeze” 
10. Allegra Krieger, “Came” 
11. Kate Bollinger, “Sweet Devil” 
12. Adriana McCassim, “Love Slow” 
13. Abbey Blackwell, “River or a Road” 
14. Sima Cunningham, “HIgh Roller” 
15. Resavoir, “Future - Knox Fortune Remix” 

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Gig Recap: King Gizzard and the Lizard Wizard, Geese at Northerly Island (9/1) 

Listen, I published a few thousand words on this band last week so I’ll keep this recap brief. All I’ll say is that there are few live experiences more fun, more energetic, and more welcoming than a King Gizzard show. On Sunday, they ripped through a “three-hour marathon set” that flew by and even stretched out for an extra 15 minutes for closer “Head On / Pill.” I saw a few songs I’d never caught live before like “You Can Be Your Silhouette” off 2017’s Sketches of East Brunswick and the incredible synth-table songs from The Silver Cord. They roared through Nonagon Infinity cuts and their metal headbangers with such breathless intensity that I’d recommend anyone, even my parents, to experience this for themselves. 

Openers Geese have long been a favorite. I interviewed them for VICE in 2021 before their debut album came out but I, along with my team, got laid off so the thing was never published. It’s a shame but Geese reinvented their sound on the thrilling, manic follow-up 3D Country and they brought that same frantic energy to their warm-up slot at Northerly Island. This was one of the best nights of my summer. 

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What I watched: 

The U.S. Open

Every year around this time, I try to clear my schedule to watch as much grand slam tennis as possible. It’s been a favorite since I was a kid and the only sport I can play without fully embarrassing myself. On Friday, American men’s tennis pros Frances Tiafoe and Taylor Fritz will go head-to-head in the semifinal of the U.S. Open. Tiafoe is my favorite athlete on the ATP tour right now: he feeds off the crowd’s energy, is a consummate showman, and has the talent to win a tournament. Fritz has a killer serve and could win too. Whoever wins Friday’s match will be the first American in the final since Andy Roddick (2006), which was too long ago. I’ll root for whoever makes it in. Plus, there’s a good possibility the Women’s final will feature two Americans, Jessie Pegula and Emma Navarro.  

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What I read: 

Four Days With Phish, America's Greatest Jam Band for 40 Years and Counting (GQ) 

Lampooned by critics and largely ostracized by the mainstream music industry—they’ve never won a Grammy, and they’ve never even been nominated for the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame—they have become obstinate DIY pioneers. Through the late ’80s, they toured hard, playing most anywhere that would have them, to slowly growing crowds. A series of legendary keggers on friends’ farms late in that decade led to a string of increasingly massive rural bacchanalias in the ’90s, shows that became the proving ground for the recent rise of American festival culture. Bonnaroo began only when Phish took a post-millennial break, using the production infrastructure the band had built to turn a Tennessee field into a temporary music city.

Mondegreen, the band’s first festival in nearly a decade, was a reminder of how idealistic and benevolent such gigantic events could feel. After 40 years as a band, Phish have had a remarkably busy year—in April, a four-day residency at Las Vegas’s Sphere that established an artistic standard for the luminous round room; in July, a nimble rock record, Evolve, with a few of Anastasio’s most poignant-ever moments as a songwriter; a monthlong summer tour that found the band playing nearly 200 distinct songs, once again building novel shapes from some of their repertoire’s oldest forms.

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MJ Lenderman Keeps It Raw (New Yorker) 

This month, Lenderman will release “Manning Fireworks,” his fifth album in five years. He is often described—accurately—as the next great hope for indie rock, or however one might now refer to scrappy, dissonant, guitar-based music that’s unconcerned, both sonically and spiritually, with whatever is steering the Zeitgeist. “Manning Fireworks” could have been released in 1975, or 1994, or 2003, but that is not to say it’s deliberately nostalgic; Lenderman is simply making the kind of warm and astringent rock and roll that has felt untethered from time since 1968, when Neil Young released his self-titled début.

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Andy Roddick on What’s ‘Bullshit’ About Modern Tennis (New York) 

Shortly before my interview with Andy Roddick last week, I learned it was his 42nd birthday. ‭Roddick isn’t big on birthdays, he declared, and after our interview he planned on having a low-key dinner with his wife, the model and actor Brooklyn Decker. “I certainly don’t expect any fanfare,” said the former world No. 1 in his characteristically self-effacing manner. But this one had some particular arithmetical significance: Exactly half his lifetime ago, at the tender age of 21, Roddick won the U.S. Open. He remains the last American man to win a Grand Slam, an accomplishment that looms large over the bloc of restless young American players who’ve cropped up in the last decade desperate to end the drought. With an impending semifinal match between Taylor Fritz and Frances Tiafoe, we’re guaranteed the country’s first male Slam finalist since 2009, and the first at the Open since 2006. Roddick was the last to do both, but one gets the sense that he is somewhat uncomfortable with the distinction. “There were way more accomplished American players,” he told me. “I just happened to be the last one.”

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The Weekly Chicago Show Calendar

Back in May, 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. Please subscribe but no matter what, I’ll link it out each week here.