Entries associated with the tag "Kaspar Hauser":

Thomas Comerford is an old-school believer in rock music who treats it as a serious art form--hell, the guy teaches a class on punk rock at the School of the Art Institute. His band Kaspar Hauser has just released a fine new album called The Sons (Spacesuit) that’s more concerned with tweaking fundamentals than discovering radical new twists.

Comerford and his current bandmates--bassist Matthew Seifert, drummer Steve Kiraly, and fellow guitarist Stephen Howard (Pinebender, Tight Phantomz)--place their faith in the kind of rock-solid attack that relies on an intimate and innate rapport between band members, the kind Joe Carducci once used an entire book to elucidate. Considering how often Kaspar Hauser’s lineup has changed over the years, the accomplishment is all the more impressive. The twin guitars burn and surge, moving precisely within the lean grooves.

Comerford’s nasal singing voice reminds me of Bill Callahan--though he sounds more engaged than Callahan--and I hear traces of Neil Young and the Rolling Stones in his tunes; “Frontier” mashes up lines from “House of the Rising Sun” and “In My Room.” He wrote the songs after the birth of his first child, and most of them reflect a kind of reckoning with adulthood, frequently observing childish behavior veering into crisis.

Kaspar Hauser celebrates the new release with a show tonight at the Beat Kitchen. Also performing are Jon Langford’s Skull Orchard and the Judy Green.

I first heard a couple of songs by Chicago’s Kaspar Hauser a few years ago, though I don’t remember exactly because they failed to make any impression on me. I’m pretty sure their dramatic improvment is part of the reason I'm mildly taken with their new album, Quixotic/Taxidermy (Backward Masking), though it's good enough that I'd pay attention even if I'd never heard the band before. Named after the feral German teenager who captivated Germany in the early 19th century (later the subject of the Werner Herzog film Jeder für sich und Gott gegen alle), the band was formed by experimental filmmaker and School of the Art Institute teacher Thomas Comerford in 1999, a year before he moved to Chicago from Iowa City. Through three singles and one album the line-up has been pretty fluid; the new record features musicians like Jonathan Crawford (William Elliott Whitmore, ex-Grey Ghost) and Kent Lambert (Roommate). 

Comerford, who writes all the songs and also plays guitar and keyboards, sings in a nasal tenor that reminds me of Bill Callahan (the artist formerly known as Smog), ripping through shambling, melodic rock tunes with a bored swagger. There’s a definite shot of the Rolling Stones here, particularly in the looseness of the arrangements, but Kaspar Hauser doesn’t seem particularly concerned with using classic rock ‘n’ roll riffery; the guitars sputter and clamber more than they groove. A few ballads embrace a darker, more atmospheric vibe—including a surprisingly good cover of Big Star’s “Holocaust,” a tough tune to mess with—but ultimately Comerford’s writing and the way he comfortably wears the skin of these warmly familiar songs is what puts the band over. Even when the songs seem like they’re about to fall apart, his singing threads them back together. Kaspar Hauser plays Subterranean this Sunday, March 11.