Listening to Night Beats is like sitting in the back of a shag-rug van, or staring at a blacklight Grateful Dead poster in the dark for too long. Seriously, though, this group has mastered that chromatic, surreal music that is psych rock while managing to bring the sound back to earth and keeping the listener within a realm of reality. Their music is a trip, a slow-yet-fast voyage wavering in and out of garage, soul and funk. A live performance, as they will be providing soon with the Black Lips at a Lollapalooza aftershow, will be even more of an adventure, with those reverberations striking your ears at full blast. (Maureen Clancy)
August 5 at the Empty Bottle, 1035 North Western, (773)276-3600, 10pm. Sold out.
For “Want” of a Change: A Preview of Rufus Wainwright at Ravinia Park Rufus Wainwright isn’t the first singer-songwriter to reinterpret earlier work through an orchestral lens. And much of Wainwright’s third and fourth albums, “Want One” and “Want Two”—whose twentieth anniversaries are the prompt for this new tour—is fully scored. But when Wainwright hits the Pavilion stage at Ravinia tonight, the Chicago Symphony Orchestra will be behind him.
Brutal Finesse: A Preview of King Crimson at Ravinia There have been few new compositions from King Crimson these past two decades, but the live arrangements of songs from its catalog are often strikingly different than the recorded versions.
Cooling It: A Preview of Colleen Green at Cole’s Bar When Green strums power chords or chiming notes on top of her backing track, you might think you’re at Ramones karaoke night and Madonna is taking her turn.
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