This Weekend: Psych, Banjos, and a House That Books Better Than Rooms Ten Times Its Size
The Lollapalooza dust has settled, the out-of-towners have flown home, and Chicago gets its clubs back — which, if you ask us, is when the real season starts. This weekend, August 14–16, the west side and the factory triangle serve up exactly the kind of low-ceiling, high-reward bookings that make living here worth the winters. Here is where to point yourself.
Warm up Wednesday if you can: Brooklyn art-rock lifers Oneida hit the Empty Bottle on August 12 with Kinski and BCMC, one of those deep-catalog bills that rewards the curious. Then on Thursday the 13th, Austin psych travelers Holy Wave bring their reverb-soaked drift to the same room — a perfect Bottle band, all hypnosis and haze, in a space practically engineered for it.
Thursday is also where the Hideout gets loud. On August 14, Chicago's own Racetraitor — the politically incendiary hardcore act that has been refusing to make things easy since the '90s — stages a record-release show at 1354 W. Wabansia, which is either the most or least likely room in the city to host a metallic-hardcore homecoming, depending on how well you know the Hideout's stubborn streak.
Friday, August 15, splits the city cleanly. At the Empty Bottle, Consensus Madness headlines a record-release show with The Hell, Bungee Jumpers, and Navaja — a full-throated local celebration with a bill four bands deep. At the Hideout the same night, singer-songwriter Tory Silver offers the quieter, more intimate alternative. You cannot lose; you can only pick.
But the weekend's must-see is Saturday, August 16, when the Hideout hosts Buffalo Nichols & Al Scorch — and this is the bill to build your night around. Nichols is a Grammy-nominated songwriter who takes the country-blues tradition apart and reassembles it into something haunted and modern; Scorch is a Chicago folk-punk fixture, a banjo player who attacks the instrument like it owes him money. Put them in a wood-frame room that seats a couple hundred and calls itself "a regular guy bar for irregular folks," and you have the platonic ideal of a Chicago summer Saturday. Meanwhile the Empty Bottle counters that same night with Precocious Neophyte, Herald Looms, and Saccharine for the noisier crowd.
The move this weekend is to go small on purpose. Everybody spent late July craning their necks at a distant festival stage; the antidote is a room where you can hear the banjo strings buzz and the record you are about to fall in love with is being sold, in person, by the person who made it. Bring cash for merch. Get there for the opener. The city gave the clubs back — go use them.
Sources: Empty Bottle on Do312; The Hideout on Do312