Bear Mace, Slaves of the Wolf
Formed in 2012, Bear Mace have grown into a formidable force in Chicago metal. Their third full-length builds on their gloriously filthy merger of old-school Florida death metal with Bolt Thrower grooves, with some of their tightest songwriting and playing yet. Bear Mace’s lyrical themes—the futility of war, the dystopian present—may be even heavier than their riffs, but they’re balanced by the fun of the band’s sound. The breakneck speeds and unrelenting guitars of “Prophecy” could start a circle pit in your living room. Chris Scearce has one of the most impressive growls this side of Lake Michigan, and on “Captured and Consumed,” where he goes verse-for-verse with the great Kam Lee (Death, Massacre), he more than holds his own. (JL)
Cheer-Accident, Admission
Cheer-Accident describe their 26th full-length as a “pop album,” but for this rigorously idiosyncratic band, “pop” is a relative term. True, Admission doesn’t include any of the steeplechase prog-rock acrobatics Cheer-Accident have perfected—unless you count the 7/8 in “Gold-Plated Savior,” and I don’t. What it does do is engineer playful confrontations with listeners who’ve trained their brains on more conventional pop. If you’re waiting for a chorus—which these accessible songs suggest will be forthcoming—you might wait a long time.
Founded in 1981 by Thymme Jones (vocals, drums, keyboards, trumpet), Cheer-Accident have been playing live since 1987, around the time Jeff Libersher (guitar, bass, keyboards) came aboard. Admission is a family affair, incorporating nine other musicians in the band’s crowded orbit—among them violinist Billie Howard, slide trumpeter Mike Hagedorn, and vocalists Carmen Armillas and Angie Mead. (Mead sings on three songs, more than anybody but Jones, and she cowrote two of them.) “My Love” delivers its sweet melody in lopsided five-bar phrases, and its “bridges” ratchet up the tempo while stacking horns and keys in wild profusion. “Palos Hills” begins delicately, with Mead’s gentle singing leading an arrangement that’s 80 percent negative space; next it adds braided lines on flute, violin, viola, and slide trumpet; and finally Jones takes the mike, his pinched, grainy holler segueing into a distorted guitar solo that snakes through pounding piano chords and huge, tumbling drum fills. Then the song abruptly ends, without anything repeating even once. Vacuum-cleaner synths dominate the fuzzy, sinister “Redwood Creek” (which I’m pretty sure uses six- and seven-bar melodic phrases), and Mead belts out my favorite lyric on the record in a skyscraping voice: “There will come a day / When I will walk away / It’s just not today.” I’m going to take that to mean that 26 albums aren’t enough for these lifers—and that even though they’re calling Admission their best yet, we’ll still get more. Cheer-Accident play a release party at Martyrs’ on Saturday, August 2. (PM)
Cocojoey, Stars
Singer, keyboardist, and producer Joey Meland, aka Cocojoey, debuts on Chicago label Hausu Mountain with Stars, their first full-length since the self-released 2022 album Cocojoey’s World. They’ve been making music since age six, moving from video-game scores to nu metal to black metal to noise and then spending a long stretch in other people’s projects, trying on fusion, funk, folk, and pop. As Cocojoey, Meland has developed an overstimulated and overstimulating aesthetic that incorporates most of that stuff and more. Their voice, ludicrously limber even without processing, leaps from dazzlingly clear high notes to sandpaper shrieks and from breathy crooning to goofy, endearing speak-singing. Frisky, sunny synth pop or bouncy robo-funk might collide with a blurt of machine-gun cybergrind or a fractal explosion of splintered synth tones and bitcrushed kick drums. Meland pairs thrash-metal tempos with silly, earnest melodies, racing through hard-charging techno, glossy jazz fusion, and warp-speed Nintendo music—with odd meters and dropped beats that make things even harder to follow. It’s as though they built a robot brain that could generate show tunes and then turned all its knobs up to 11.
Meland’s lyrics mostly seem to address the struggle to sidestep your ego and stay on the humane side of your brain in a world that constantly pours poison into your skull. In “Midnight Licking Hours,” they study their cat’s self-care routine in order to “read the feline pharmacopoeia.” In “Trust in Events,” they direct a wish inward: “Stop editing my life and send the text.” Despite all the chaos and tumult in this record, it feels good-natured, not aggressive—the only thing Meland ever seems to get mad at is their Crohn’s disease. Artists who make music this hyperactive and cluttered often seem to be hiding behind it, but Meland leads with their heart. You can feel that sincerity in these songs, even though getting your head around them is like trying to read a newspaper in a room with five kittens—you’ll have a lot more fun once you give up and just let them climb all over you. (PM)
McKinley Dixon, Magic, Alive!
Annapolis-born rapper McKinley Dixon launched his career as a college student in Richmond, Virginia, before landing in Chicago early in the pandemic. Like his two previous albums, 2021’s For My Mama and Anyone Who Look Like Her and 2023’s Beloved! Paradise! Jazz!?, Dixon’s new one confronts loss and the impacts of grief and trauma on the Black community, using vivid storytelling and genre-bending production. On Magic, Alive! he takes a step back from autobiography to tell a story about three young kids who lose their best friend and try to use magic to stay in touch beyond the grave. Despite the weight at its heart, the album never feels forlorn or mired in grief. Dixon’s rapping is laser sharp, and his fusions of jazz, hip-hop, funk, and psych rock are fun and inventive, but it’s his empathetic treatment of his characters that really roots Magic, Alive! in connection and healing. Dixon headlines Schubas on Thursday, September 4. (JL)
Chad Kouri, Mixed
On his latest album, Michigan-born, Chicago-based visual artist and musician Chad Kouri affirms his mixed-race heritage through a spiritual lens. He worked largely solo, playing tenor saxophone, synthesizers, hand percussion, and more (his occasional collaborators include veteran drummer Vincent Davis), and he often used a Zoom H6 to capture the music wherever and whenever it happened. Kouri created the nine tracks on Mixed at Experimental Sound Studio and a few other Chicago locales, as well as in Michigan, New Mexico, and Siena, Italy. These kaleidoscopic, celestial meditations, often improvised, draw from Kouri’s long history in Chicago’s underground jazz and experimental-music scenes as they embrace the here and now. (JL)
Pixel Grip, Percepticide: The Death of Reality
The three members of dark electronic outfit Pixel Grip have been pals since they met during high school about a decade ago, but following the success of 2021’s Arena, their lives got messy and they didn’t see much of one another. Their new record, Percepticide: The Death of Reality, recorded in Los Angeles with producer Joo-Joo Ashworth, was born out of their reconnection. With a seductive mix of atmospheric pop, minimalist EBM, and full-throttle dance-floor bangers, the album deals with grief, trauma, and resilience while doubling down on the band’s ongoing celebration of the club as a place of self-expression and liberation. Pixel Grip headline Metro on Friday, November 14. (JL)
More local releases out in June:
BYSH, Please
Cyclops, Cyclops EP
Death Tape Super Bass: Mass Lunacy: Blood Cognizance
Elastic People, Pranked!
FFLLC, Soft Suffering
Ben LaMar Gay, Yowzers
Robert Wm. Gomez, QBob: Remastered OST
Mats Gustafsson, Ken Vandermark, Tomeka Reid, and Chad Taylor, Pivot
Jabobo, All Your Summer Days
Lifeguard, Ripped and Torn
Lipsticism, Wanted to Show You
Vic Mensa, Sundiata
Pan•American & Kramer, Interior of an Edifice Under the Sea
Please, The Human Condition
Professor Emeritus, A Land Long Gone
Ready for Death, Pay With Your Face
Replicant, Daybreaker
AJ Rosales, Phasedrift
Shoulderbird, Neighbors
Smut, Tomorrow Comes Crashing
Solar Sailor, Stellar
To the Mount of the Holy Stone, Supermassive Black Hole
Tortoise, Oganesson Remixes
U.S. Maple, Long Hair in Three Stages reissue
Virgin Mother, Affection
Warm Darn, Soft Butch Miscellanea
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2025-06-26 15:26:02
