Four of a Kind
Victoria Vox
Thursday @ Rumba Café
A formerly pink-haired, punk-rocking, scholarship and award-winning graduate of Boston’s Berklee College of Music, with a degree in composition and decades of playing violin, oboe, trumpet, guitar, keyboards and bass, Victoria Vox has become inspired by the ukulele, one of the world’s easiest instruments. She writes songs on it and sings in a forthright, unpretentious style, with spare but diverting accompaniment (hmm, is that a muted trumpet or a kazoo?) on lilting tracks like “The Bird Song,” from her current CD, “Chameleon, “ which also brings back her guitar skills.
DJ Heather
Friday @ Spice
Chicago mainstay DJ Heather, arriving with the “House of Om Tour,” was initially recruited by Om Records’ Mark Farina, to help promote his own colorful “Mushroom Jazz” albums. Her specialty is house music, but her ears were first adjusted by her family’s eclectic collecting, and her own discovery of new wave, punk, ska, hip-hop, and industrial. She’s also mixed a lot of r & b, disco, jazz, and elusive lipstick traces of rare groove. Think, “Hey, don’t I know that song?”— and she’ll hit you with another beat. School’s out, Holmes!
Monotonix
Saturday @ Skye
Monotonix is an Israeli power trio of voice, guitar, and drums, with a wild stage show, a la The Darkness and Jon Spencer, but has Spencer ever pulled it off as well in the studio as Monotonix do on their EP, “Body Language”? Anyway, despite a relatively sludgy start, boogie, knights ‘n’ ladies, in your platform boots and spandex, when it’s time to prance through the title song, and the rest of the set rocks steady. Organs and other instruments are channeled through the basic dynamic duo when cool, under vocal acrobatics.
Jason Isbell
Saturday @ the Basement
Despite questions (like, “Did he jump or was he pushed?”) regarding singer-songwriter-guitarist Jason Isbell’s departure from the Drive-By Truckers, last year’s solo debut, “Sirens of the Ditch” (with most of the full- and part-time Truckers aboard), was worth whatever it took. Isbell’s studies, before and after Memphis State, included a Skynyrd-to-Zevon-bred flair for musical pulp fiction (minus the macho tear-jerking), early Steely Dan grooves, and Eudora Welty’s tragicomic character studies, plus Isbell’s distinctive sense of poetic justice (and injustice). The live show adds appropriate covers, like Talking Heads’ catchy “Psycho Killer.”
Originally Published: Issue 657 - July 2, 2008
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