Infinite Pennsylvania, or What It Was Like to Move to Chicago (Again)
Plus, Bandcamp Friday!
After driving for three days through seven states I am finally (somewhat) settled into my new apartment in Logan Square, a scenic and formerly hip neighborhood on the north side of Chicago, Illinois. At my going away party on Saturday night one of my friends asked what the closest neighborhood-to-neighborhood equivalent for Logan Square was in Brooklyn. I said somewhere between Greenpoint and Bushwick. Whether that comparison is an insult or a compliment depends on your perspective. What I was trying to illustrate was that when I last lived in Chicago Logan Square was an epicenter of “hipness”. It was where all the indie rock bands, tattoo artists, screen printers, graphic designers, and other assorted “creatives” lived. It had all the cool coffee shops, the most intriguing restaurants, the bars with cheap drinks and the bars that gave off the most ominous auras. Seven years later Logan Square isn’t hip at all. Its main avenue is firmly in the bro zone. All of the “cool” kids I knew here back in 2017 are married and live out in the near-suburbs. Some even have kids of their own! The 2020s version of Logan Square probably doesn’t hold any interest for the 20-something of the present. For 30-somethings like myself Logan Square is a great place to live. It’s quiet. The streets are lined with trees. The apartment has a big yard for ~*My Girlfriend’s*~ dog to hang out in. There are still restaurants that aren’t that expensive. I’m only a few blocks away from my new practice space. There’s public transportation nearby. Honestly, can’t ask for much more.
This is the third time I’ve driven all of my stuff between New York and Chicago. Well, more accurately this is the third time I’ve been driven along with my stuff between New York and Chicago. I’ve only ever lived in these two cities so I never learned how to drive. I first moved to Chicago in 2008 for college and then stuck around until 2017 when I moved back to Brooklyn. I wanted to try NYC in my 20s while I had time. I wanted to be closer to family in case things got hectic in the wake of the 2016 election. Things ended up getting hectic though not in the shape I would have guessed. In the wake of 2020 the chapter of my life that I’d moved to Brooklyn to enjoy was firmly closed in both a literal and metaphorical sense. When my living situation fell apart this summer I packed up and travelled across the infinite terrain of Pennsylvania for a third time back to Chicago.
This drive had by far the worst weather of the three moves. On the first day of driving we didn’t see sunlight once. We endured steady rain through New York, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, and Ohio. No doubt this had something to do with Hurricane Helene’s parallel journey across the southeastern coast. Which is to say that as much as driving through the rain sucked we didn’t have it all that bad relatively speaking. The morning I hit the road my friend and former roommate Frank “Friend of Music” Meadows showed me horrific footage of flooding in Asheville, North Carolina on his phone. Asheville is not a coastal town. It’s way up in the mountains. Seeing a city like that half underwater defies belief. A few days after I went west Frank drove south toward North Carolina to begin the next phase of his life. My heart goes out to him and all his people dealing with this inconceivable flood.
Frank and I used to play in a band called Bellows. It’s going to take a while to get used to saying “used to”. Frank started playing keys with Bellows in 2019. The same year I filled in on drums for two tours before joining the band officially in 2020. The four of us, (Frank and I plus Oliver Kalb and Jack Greenleaf) would meet up every week to work on the songs that eventually became Next of Kin. After a few months we started calling ourselves the Backyard Boys, since we’d meet up in Oliver’s backyard to mask off and shoot the shit while the rest of the city was locked down. When it became clear this year that Frank and I were bouncing out of the city the four of us made loose plans and firm promises to try and reconvene for a tour once the yet-unnamed new Bellows album dropped. I’m going to miss these guys a lot.
There’s no good time to end a good band. I’m grateful that all of my projects reached at least some form of closure before I left. Laughing Stock recorded every song we’d written before I left. Cryptide released our debut EP and played a great show at Our Wicked Lady. Fictiones threw a huge warehouse party at the start of the summer. I finally got to play a few shows with Told Slant. Bellows went on one last short tour. I was even able to sneak in a recording session for a new Lamniformes EP in mid-September. There are a few dangling threads. There are a couple unfinished Laughing Stock demos that will haunt me with their potential. The Cryptide show went so well that I wish I could play another. I wish that the death metal project I started up with Ivan Belcic (Kosmogyr) and Coleman Bentley (Fliege) had made more progress before I moved, but we’ll hardly be the first extreme metal band to operate remotely.
The weather on our drive got a whole lot nicer once we hit I-69. I’m not joking but that is pretty funny. Gloom all the way through to Indiana, then clear skies in Michigan and Illinois. ~*My Girlfriend*~, shocked by last week’s reveal that I hadn’t heard it yet, put on Third Eye Blind. We listened to our Music League Playlist. I put on Marcos Valle’s Previsão Do Tempo and dälek’s Absence. On the last day we put on Pitchfork’s list on the 100 best songs of the 2020s so far. We haven’t stopped talking about “American Tterroristt” since. Mixed results otherwise. I’m not sure what to make of the implication that Chat Pile’s “Why?” is the best metal song of the 2020s. I might get into that at another time.
Before I left I told my friends that I’d probably spend my first week in Chicago sitting completely still and staring at the wall. It hasn’t worked out that way. I’m still unpacking. It is going to take some time to figure out how to integrate my stuff into ~*My Girlfriend’s*~ feng shui. There’s a dog to pay attention to. Shopping lists to put together. Accounts to be updated. The two of us are already overwhelmed by the number of TV shows we have to watch together. I have a bunch of people to reconnect with. I suspect by the time I’m caught up all my time to rest and reset will be booked up. With that in mind I’ve been micro-dosing relaxation by taking long breaks between each sentence. In fact I think I’m going to take a real long pause right now. I’ll talk to you again next week, and paying subscribers can expect a fun bonus on Monday. Until then, here’s to new beginnings and old returns.
# # # # # The Self Promo Zone # # # # #
My Lamniformes shirts and cassettes are all still packed in a storage space. That’s not to say that you shouldn’t buy one, just that if you do it might take a while to arrive. Instead, I’d encourage you to consider a few digital releases this Bandcamp Friday. Given the subject of the rest of today’s letter, I’d like to point you toward Sisyphean in particular. Sisyphean was the last thing I recorded in Chicago before moving to New York in 2017. It was inspired by the brutality of Chicago winters, as well as the city’s history of post-metal, post-rock, and slowcore music. I’m excited to play some of these songs again in Chicago once I get a band together.
As I mentioned above, Laughing Stock have a full length’s worth of material cooking up in the lab. Until those songs start trickling out into the world I’d recommend After Nature, a three song collection we put out in August. Two out of the three songs are Laughing Stock at our hardest and most punk rock. Sandwiched in between is “Cara”, showcasing our prettier and more dance-floor friendly side. All three slap, imo.
Around the same time I joined Laughing Stock I also started playing with Cryptide. After two years of mysterious tidal rituals we bring you… SURF METAL. Halfway between the wildest surf rock and the grimmest black metal, these six songs will make you bang your head and hang ten in equal measure.
I love my Backyard Boys, and I’m super proud of Next of Kin. Hunkering down in Oliver’s basement and drilling these songs, then recording them, and then mixing them, was a sustained bright spot across an otherwise miserable time to live in New York City. I’m honored that Oliver trusted me with these very personal and vulnerable tunes. It’s been a treat to play them live for the last few years too!
Finally, an extra shout out to Frank for asking me to play drums on three of the songs from his album Dead Weight. I can’t say enough how much it’s rocked to have Frank in my life as a collaborator, co-navigator of the NY music scene, and most importantly as a friend. North Carolina is lucky to have him back and NYC is going to have a massive gap to fill.
\ \ \ \ \ Micro Reviews / / / / /
Here are five micro reviews from my high school and college collection of burnt CDs. Long time Lamniformes Instagram followers will recognize these from my stories back in 2021, however they’ve been re-edited and spruced up with links so that you can actually hear the music instead of just taking my word for it.
Steal This Album! by System of a Down (2002) - Nü-Metal
This record is a collection of B-sides and leaks from the era between their self-titled debut and Toxicity. The songwriting is sharper than the debut but the zany aggression of the first record is still there. Despite being made up of cast offs, this record is a much better listen than their last two albums. “Inner Vision”, “Highway Song”, and the one with all the vowels are all certified great SOAD tunes. The political tunes may be ham-fisted, but they still pack a punch!
De Stijl by The White Stripes (2000) - Rock
I had a brief dalliance with the early 00s garage rock revival because, well, it was the early 00s. This one does not have “Seven Nation Army” on it. Apparently Meg and Jack White had just divorced before this dropped, so if you want to read that into the record go ahead, I guess. I prefer music that is sincerely nuts to music that is knowingly naive. Even without getting into the whole “garage rock killed nü metal” culture war thing I just do not enjoy listening to this. Feels smug about its connection to “real” rock & blues.
Oceanborn by Nightwish (1998) - Power Metal
The biggest name in the astoundingly popular field of European faux-operatic, diva-centric metal bands. This stuff does HUGE numbers overseas but almost never gets taken seriously in the US metal press. This is the band’s second record. I think fans hold it in particularly high esteem but I might be wrong. Look, I get why the American metal press doesn’t cover this stuff. It is maybe the corniest shit on earth. Like, half Disney power ballads, half Trans-Siberian Orchestra. So while I think someone should do a serious deep dive into this style, I am not the man for the job.
Colors by Between the Buried and Me (2007) - Progressive Metal
The album that turned this metalcore band into the hottest name in prog metal in late 00s. This earned them an opening slot for Dream Theater and assured that they’d never be stuck in the daytime slots at Ozzfest ever again. A single continuous piece of music that goes all over the damn place, tied together by a series of repeating motifs. I feel a bit iffy about some of the genre tourism these days, but taken as a whole it is a statement of total artistic freedom in the face of a style and scene that demands adherence to a formula. BTBAM took whatever rules they were supposed to follow and ripped them to shreds (or shredded them to shreds, I guess). I still find the finale very moving for that reason.
The Machinations of Dementia by Blotted Science (2007) - Progressive Metal
An instrumental metal super group, most notably featuring the bassist of Cannibal Corpse alongside certified weirdo Ron Jarzombek on guitar. Each tune is meant to illustrate a different type of neurological activity. Also its almost entirely built on tone rows based on the whole-tone scale. Strap in! It’s exceedingly clever, I mean the final two songs are a musical palindrome for god’s sake, but once you get used to the concept and musical fireworks I’m not sure its actually much fun to listen to. Maybe I’ll break this out once a year or so, but probably not more than that.
Montana would agree with Logan Sq as the Bro area for sure. We wish you a peaceful transition and happy life back in Chicago. Hugs
There was a window time where I was susceptible to *really* getting into Nightwish, and what stopped me was discovering people who were already really into Nightwish.
Good luck getting resettled. That was a lowkey aching read.