Music Top 5: January 2018

1
ST. VINCENT
(Chicago Theatre)
The multiple-threat (singer, songwriter, guitarist) indie-pop-rocker tours her gorgeously iconoclastic new album, “Masseduction.”
January 12

2
THE WAR AND TREATY
(SPACE)
Individually, Tonya Blount and Michael Trotter, Jr. are two of the most compelling voices in gospel-tinged roots rock. Together, you’d swear they could raise the dead.
January 25

3
ERIC BENÉT 
(City Winery)
It might be forty, fifty years since we’ve had an R&B falsetto as purely, thrillingly seductive as this one. Just sit back and be ravished.
January 19

4
XIU XIU
(Thalia Hall)
The bravura experimental trio goes all-in for an audacious, often hair-raising exploration of Angelo Badalamenti’s score for David Lynch’s “Twin Peaks.”
January 6

5
SAMANTHA FISH
(Lincoln Hall)
Singer-guitarist Fish has the gut-ripping chops of the great bluesmen, and the casual bad-girl insouciance of the women who drove them to the blues in the first place.
January 31

Robert Rodi

Robert Rodi is an author, spoken-word performer and musician who has served as Newcity’s Music Editor since 2014. He’s written more than a dozen books, including the travel memoir “Seven Seasons In Siena,” and his literary and music criticism has appeared in the Los Angeles Times, the Chicago Tribune, Salon, The Huffington Post and many other national and regional publications.
Contact: robert@newcity.com