Wednesday, October 14, 2009

"I know that you've been wandering around this town looking for a cure, but you just better shoot me down."


When we started getting ready for TELL IT..., one thing was clear to me.

IF: a play is a 'music play',
THEN: there must be both play and music.

I mean, I love plays, and I love music, and if we're going to create plays about music we had better have an awful lot of both. You've been hearing from some of the people who are bringing the former. Here's one of the latter.


Louis and the Hunt, aside from having a great name, are a really killer band. A three-piece that can go from the most delicate, lyric sound you could imagine to wall-to-wall rock and roll at the drop of a hat, they are frankly not to be trifled with. They will trick you into whistling and then steal your metaphorical lunch money. They'll make sounds so ethereal that you'll swear you've gone to church and then they'll blow the doors off. If it were appropriate to use expletives on this, our faithful blog, I would say that they will eff your ess right up.

People are drawn to different bands, singers, writers for wildly different reasons. I can be drawn in by any number of things: a great and surprising percussionist, a vocalist with a unique and effortless sound, a killer horn section, a remarkable turn of phrase or two, inventiveness in structure, a great marriage of technical skill and unabashed rock and roll abandon -- all of these things can hook me. Well, Louis and the Hunt have yet to throw trumpets my way, but otherwise that list pretty much sums it up. They've got seven or eight tracks up on their MySpace, including the brand-new and seriously lovely 'The Wolf and I', a lyric from which appears as the title for this blog-entry-thing.

It's been a busy month for these three gentlemen. This Saturday they're playing a fundraiser for Wunderkammer Magazine alongside another band, two poets and a visual artist. Apparently October is the month of multidisciplinary collaborations that involve Louis and the Hunt. They'll be playing the first Sunday and second Monday of TELL IT..., they're (I think?) recording an album, and along the way played a hell of a show at Schubas. Check it, along with a brief but really interesting interview with vocalist/songwriter Ryne Estwing:

Wunderkammer Artist Series: Louis & The Hunt from jmharper on Vimeo

I think you'll love them as much as we do. And I mean, really -- who doesn't want to see that guy sing an Elvis Costello song, a Paris Hilton song, and six or seven others in one night?

Catch Louis and the Hunt all over Chicago, all of the time -- but specifically at the side project on October 25th and November 2nd as one of three bands taking part in TELL IT & SPEAK IT & THINK IT & BREATHE IT. Go see them before they get huge and you can't afford to. Tickets here.

No comments: