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Living in McKenzie Square Wilmette ILRealpro53on September 24, 2020 at 8:14 pm

North Shore Real Estate Chatter

Living in McKenzie Square Wilmette IL

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Living in McKenzie Square Wilmette ILRealpro53on September 24, 2020 at 8:14 pm Read More »

If Trump keeps talking like this he’ll lose the debate and the electionDennis Byrneon September 24, 2020 at 6:33 pm

The Barbershop: Dennis Byrne, Proprietor

If Trump keeps talking like this he’ll lose the debate and the election

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If Trump keeps talking like this he’ll lose the debate and the electionDennis Byrneon September 24, 2020 at 6:33 pm Read More »

Is Chicago a Distracted City?/ Bulletproof Back packs for Children/ A Chilling Wakeup/ The snooze Button wins again.BOB ANGONEon September 24, 2020 at 9:54 pm

JUST SAYIN

Is Chicago a Distracted City?/ Bulletproof Back packs for Children/ A Chilling Wakeup/ The snooze Button wins again.

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Is Chicago a Distracted City?/ Bulletproof Back packs for Children/ A Chilling Wakeup/ The snooze Button wins again.BOB ANGONEon September 24, 2020 at 9:54 pm Read More »

Resurrection Band opened the gates for Christian hard rockSteve Krakowon September 24, 2020 at 11:00 am

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Since 2004 Plastic Crimewave (aka Steve Krakow) has used the Secret History of Chicago Music to shine a light on worthy artists with Chicago ties who’ve been forgotten, underrated, or never noticed in the first place.

A heavy rock band preaching about Christianity isn’t new. We’ve had Jesus-loving hair metal (Petra, Stryper), Christian grunge (Creed, DC Talk), and stoner-rock bands that flirted with “white light” religious imagery (Trouble). Even Black Sabbath worked Christian themes into their lyrics.

In the not-so-distant past, though, religion and “the devil’s music” (aka rock ‘n’ roll) were widely considered oil and water–and before that, blues and jazz were often branded as inherently wicked. Sure, many rock stars found Jesus at some point, and their music usually changed too, at least for as long as their conversion lasted (think of Little Richard and Bobby Dylan). But the spectacle of heavy rockers openly singing the praises of the Lord still had the power to shock people–and not just Christian churchgoers–when Chicago’s Resurrection Band got started in the early 1970s.

Resurrection Band have their roots in Wisconsin, where front man Glenn Kaiser was born in January 1953. He lived in a poor rural area outside Milwaukee, his parents divorced when he was nine, and his older siblings had left home–so he turned to music young. By age 12, Kaiser had learned guitar well enough to play rock, R&B, and folk in Milwaukee bands. At first he worshipped Hendrix and indulged in the drugs of the era, but at 18 he had a religious epiphany.

Kaiser joined Jesus People Milwaukee, part of the fast-growing Jesus movement. It had emerged from the late-60s counterculture, catalyzed by hip but devout youth who wanted to spread the word of Jesus through modern means–and it gave birth to modern American Christian music as we know it.

When JPM split into four groups in 1972, one of them hit the road as the Jesus People USA Traveling Team, and Kaiser went with them–along with his band Charity, which also included his wife, Wendi. The team took their rolling ministry around the midwest and as far as Florida, touring in a red school bus with “Jesus” painted on the side. By the end of the year, Charity had renamed themselves Resurrection Band, and when the bus broke down in Chicago in 1973, the Windy City became their new home. No longer traveling, the team shortened their name to Jesus People USA and helped establish a burgeoning “intentional community” in Uptown that still exists–it’s one of the largest remnants of the Jesus movement to survive.

The early band consisted of Kaiser on guitar, sharing lead vocals with Wendi, plus bassist Jim Denton and drummer John Herrin Jr. (Wendi’s brother). They gave away their first release, the hard-rockin’ 1974 cassette Music to Raise the Dead, after concerts. They had trouble getting conventional gigs, since bookers didn’t seem to understand what they were doing, so they’d play at schools, prisons, and even on street corners. Later that year they released All Your Life, which featured the folky, acoustic numbers they could play at nursing homes and churches.

At the time, houses of worship were skeptical of Christian rock, especially heavier rock–and Resurrection Band were clearly schooled in the evil-sounding riffage of Led Zeppelin and Black Sabbath. Virtually no label wanted to go near the group, but a friend gave them $8,000 to record their first proper LP, 1978’s Awaiting Your Reply. Recorded in marathon all-night sessions, the album sometimes sounds like a heavier Heart (think “Barracuda”) or Mountain with God-fearing lyrics. Tiny new Christian imprint Star Song took on the LP, and was rewarded when it hit number six on the gospel album charts. The label eventually became one of the largest indies in the genre.

The 1979 follow-up Rainbow’s End contained the song “Afrikaans,” one of the first by an American rock band to indict South African apartheid. Resurrection Band eventually earned a reputation for puncturing what Kaiser has called the “posturing” of the larger Christian church and addressing difficult social and political issues head-on. “I think most folks in the street want justice, grace, and help, not more empty words regarding everything from jobs, affordable housing, more racial and immigrant equity,” he explained in a 2015 interview. “And I do think at times the worst witness for the love of Jesus are we Christians.”

In 1980 Resurrection Band moved to Light Records and adopted a more streamlined, radio-friendly rock vibe. After three albums with Light and loads of successful touring at home and overseas (the group continued to direct all profits to JPUSA), in 1983 they signed to an even bigger Christian label, Sparrow Records, and shortened their name to Rez Band. They soon established their own studio, called the Tone Zone.

The 1984 album Hostage veered between over-the-top arena rock (with insane guitar solos by fifth member Stu Heiss) and a sleek new-wave sound that upset some old fans but attracted lots of new ones. Mid-80s singles such as “S.O.S.” and “Loves Comes Down” climbed high on the Christian rock charts, and Rez Band’s music videos were among the first from the contemporary Christian music business to be aired on MTV. In 1985 the group slimmed down their name again, to simply “Rez.”

Rez had enjoyed several years as the dominant band in Christian hard rock. By the late 80s, though, Christian music had grown big enough that they started to feel the competition. Stryper blew past Rez with the platinum-selling 1986 album To Hell With the Devil, and crossover artists such as Amy Grant (who recorded the smash “The Next Time I Fall” in 1986 with Peter Cetera) shot up the charts too.

Denton also left the band to attend seminary, replaced by longtime Rez roadie and songwriter Roy Montroy. They moved to their own Grrr Records imprint, and after an uncharacteristically long three-year gap between albums, in 1988 they released the bluesy, hard-rockin’ Silence Screams, which returned to their plainspoken, forceful engagement with what they saw as the day’s social, political, and spiritual ills–racial profiling, greed, terrorism, abortion.

After three more records in that vein, the group feared they’d fallen into a creative rut, so they hooked up with Ty Tabor of King’s X for the 1995 concept album Lament (once again as Resurrection Band). It took the form of a song cycle chronicling the central character’s disillusionment and spiritual redemption, and they performed it in its entirety at concerts. The album was well received by critics and fans, but Resurrection Band’s tour to support it would be their last. When it was over, the group called it quits–though they continued to reunite most years for a set at the Cornerstone Festival, founded by Jesus People USA in 1984 and by the 90s held in western Illinois.

The timing of Resurrection Band’s split was perhaps lucky, as JPUSA had come under fire in 1994, after Ronald Enroth published his book Recovering From Churches That Abuse–it detailed claims of ritual exorcisms, corporal punishment, removal of children from supposedly “unfit” parents, and other outrages within the JPUSA community. It wasn’t the first time JPUSA had faced unsavory accusations, and it wouldn’t be the last–other charges have included widespread sexual abuse and an authoritarian leadership structure that required members to work without wages even as the commune netted more than $2 million per year.

Resurrection Band got back together to make the “unplugged” LP Ampendectomy in 1997, and then Kaiser went solo. On his own, he’s drifted further into blues and Americana–he has a brand-new album in that vein called Swamp Gas Messiahs. He remains loyal to the principles and values of the Jesus movement, and he says on his website that Resurrection Band could still re-form. They played Cornerstone as late as 2011, and his own Glenn Kaiser Band performed there in 2012–the final installment of the festival, as dwindling attendance had forced what was once one of the country’s largest Christian music events to close up shop. v

The radio version of the Secret History of Chicago Music airs on Outside the Loop on WGN Radio 720 AM, Saturdays at 6 AM with host Mike Stephen. Past shows are archived here.

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Resurrection Band opened the gates for Christian hard rockSteve Krakowon September 24, 2020 at 11:00 am Read More »

Chicago rapper KC Ortiz brings buckle-your-seat-belts fun to The CampgroundLeor Galilon September 24, 2020 at 1:00 pm

Rapper KC Ortiz grew up in Mobile, Alabama, and fell in love with Chicago after her drag mother showed her a video of local female-impersonation pageant Miss Continental. As she told Windy City Times last year, “I hadn’t transitioned at that time and didn’t know that world existed. When I saw that video, I wanted to go so bad. I visited Chicago and knew I had to move here.” Since relocating to the city in 2006, after a stint in the air force, she’s become ingrained in a hip-hop circle that overlaps with the city’s LGBTQ+ community; celebrated queer Chicago collective and label Futurehood released her great 2016 debut, Beach Street. On her new self-released EP, The Campground, Ortiz’s blunt verses are simultaneously voluptuous and tough as nails, and her southern twang gives even the severest beats some swing. She drops meaty, assertive rhymes with a triumphant punch, and her frisky performances can make any instrumental sound better. v

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Chicago rapper KC Ortiz brings buckle-your-seat-belts fun to The CampgroundLeor Galilon September 24, 2020 at 1:00 pm Read More »

Chicago Beer Weekend, September 25-27Mark McDermotton September 24, 2020 at 1:31 am

The Beeronaut

Chicago Beer Weekend, September 25-27

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Chicago Beer Weekend, September 25-27Mark McDermotton September 24, 2020 at 1:31 am Read More »

Stunning photos from ‘Chicagohenge’ 2020ChicagoNow Staffon September 24, 2020 at 12:46 am

ChicagoNow Staff Blog

Stunning photos from ‘Chicagohenge’ 2020

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Stunning photos from ‘Chicagohenge’ 2020ChicagoNow Staffon September 24, 2020 at 12:46 am Read More »

Stirring up ‘Good Trouble’ for the Notorious RBGAlison Moranon September 24, 2020 at 4:36 am

Token Female

Stirring up ‘Good Trouble’ for the Notorious RBG

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Stirring up ‘Good Trouble’ for the Notorious RBGAlison Moranon September 24, 2020 at 4:36 am Read More »

Chicago Bears: 3 early surprises after Week 2Patrick Sheldonon September 24, 2020 at 11:00 am

Chicago Bears (Photo by Jonathan Bachman/Getty Images)
Chicago Bears (Photo by Jonathan Bachman/Getty Images)
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Chicago Bears, Matt Nagy

Chicago Bears (Photo by Nuccio DiNuzzo/Getty Images)

There have been some pleasant surprises for the Chicago Bears so far this season.

We are officially through two weeks of the NFL season and the Chicago Bears are undefeated. To some, that might be one of the surprises of the young season, though there are certainly some other surprise undefeated teams across the league.

But outside of their record, there are other surprises that have contributed to them being in this position. We will highlight some of those in a minute, but let us take a second to recognize a few that did not make our list.

First, we have to tip our collective cap to head coach Matt Nagy for not only adjusting his playcalling but completely revamping this offense. All offseason, fans have called for a renewed commitment to the run, and that is exactly what they have received. Despite a shortened offseason, Nagy has transformed the offense from one that primarily operates out of the shotgun, to one where Mitchell Trubisky is under center.

Speaking of Trubisky, while still struggling with the same inconsistency that has plagued him his entire career, he has shown some improvement in a few areas — particularly not fleeing from a clean pocket as much and doing a better job going through progressions. Though there is still much work left to do in those areas and others, it’s nice to see some progress.

But what about some other surprises we have seen so far this year? Well, we have three more below, so let’s dig in.

Next: To the Moon!

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Chicago Bears: 3 early surprises after Week 2Patrick Sheldonon September 24, 2020 at 11:00 am Read More »

Annihilus uses black metal’s powers for goodNoah Berlatskyon September 23, 2020 at 11:55 pm

Luca Cimarusti, aka Annihilus - MICHAEL VALLERA

Black metal is infamous for the unpleasantness of its message and its practitioners. Varg Vikernes of Mayhem and Burzum, one of the most important figures in Norway’s influential early black-metal scene, spent nearly 15 years imprisoned for murder (among other things) and continued to spout racist, anti-Semitic, and neo-Nazi invective after his release in 2009. Members of early Norwegian bands were also convicted or suspected of more than two dozen arsons of Christian churches. Fascist black metal persists as a subgenre to this day, and its reach is hardly limited to Scandinavia.

The ugliness of black metal’s worst people can overshadow the many ways its grotty, lo-fi, buzzed-out aesthetic has been pressed into service by politically progressive artists. Botanist’s warnings of ecological catastrophe, Pyha’s grinding anti-war howls, Panopticon’s indictments of coal companies, and Dawn Ray’d’s anarchist antifascism all take much less morally reprehensible stances with respect to evil and apocalypse. And newish Chicago black-metal project Annihilus comes at the genre from a different direction altogether, infusing the music with a comic-book fanboy’s enthusiasm for supervillains, epic darkness, and giant honking sandworms.

Annihilus is the not especially secret identity of Chicago drummer and bassist Luca Cimarusti, who’s also a longtime Reader music writer and former staffer. Cimarusti started playing shows when he was 17, and he’s spent around 15 years in various punk and noise-rock bands, including Heavy Times, Basic Cable, and his current group Luggage.

Cimarusti has always been interested in doing a one-man project, though, and despite his admittedly limited guitar skills, he started recording as Annihilus last year–in 2019 he released a demo and two EPs. The COVID lockdown, which put his band and other collaborations on hiatus, pushed him to finish the first full-length Annihilus record, Ghanima. It’s due Friday on American Decline, an imprint of Jordan Reyes’s Chicago label American Dreams.

As is typical of black metal, Ghanima expresses sadness, anger, and horror. The title of “W.T.W.B.” stands for “watching the world burn,” a phrase Cimarusti screams through sizzling layers of tortured, treble-heavy guitar as the tempo downshifts painfully from head-banging thrash to trudging doom. But Cimarusti says that typical black-metal imagery, drawn from satanism and paganism, doesn’t appeal to him much.

“I’m a pretty hard-core atheist,” he says. “So the idea of Satan has never been scary or oppressive to me. It’s been easier to lean into things that I’ve spent my life reading about and obsessing over, that are scary and evil and out-there, to influence the darker side of the music I make. So a lot of this record comes from Marvel Comics or science-fiction stories that have an epic evil arc in them. And then I can cherry-pick those ideas to represent my own feelings.”

Cimarusti has worn corpsepaint as Annihilus, but it's a pain to wash that stuff out of a beard. - MICHAEL VALLERA

Cimarusti started reading comics in the 90s and has been an obsessive collector ever since. “I’m the kind of person who’s at opening night of every Marvel movie still, and it will be that way for the rest of my life,” he says, laughing. He christened Annihilus with the name of one of the Fantastic Four’s chief antagonists–Cimarusti describes him as “a bizarre alien insect, who is from a different dimension and is just bent on the destruction of humanity. He’s kind of heavy and kind of scary and seems like an obvious evil entity to lay into to make a project that is meant to be dark.”

Several songs on the album take inspiration for their (largely incomprehensible) lyrics from comic-book sources. “Destroy the Future” is based on Tom King’s 2015-’16 run of The Vision, in which the robot hero tries to live a quiet, normal suburban family life, with unhappy results. “Matthew” refers to the human-resurrected-as-a-raven character in Neil Gaiman’s Sandman series–Cimarusti’s vocals, buried low in the mix, sound a bit like distant cawing.

Cimarusti also riffs on the classic Frank Herbert science-fiction series Dune. “Wormsong” is based on lyrics Herbert wrote for his desert-dwelling Fremen, celebrating the terrifying glory of the giant sandworms called Shai-Hulud, which create the precious psychedelic spice that enables space travel. The dragging tempo and blown-out, buzzing guitar make it easy to imagine monsters rising from the earth, maws agape.

Metal in general, and black metal in particular, can get belligerent about defending its subcultural cachet–decking yourself out in corpsepaint and burning a church is a great way to freak out the normies. But Cimarusti’s love of Dune isn’t territorial, and he doesn’t feel the need to shut out those he perceives as insufficiently devoted. While some Herbert nerds have expressed skepticism about the trailer for the upcoming Dune film by Denis Villeneuve, Cimarusti is openly ecstatic.

“Oh my God, I think it looks awesome! There is so much in it that looks so exciting,” he enthuses. “And the attention to detail is mind-blowing! At the very beginning, when Paul wakes up, you see in his bed there’s fish carved into the headboard. That’s a big part about Caladan, the planet that he’s born on–it’s an ocean planet, and there’s all this talk in the book about how there are fish carved everywhere in the palace. So the detail being honored there was very, very special. I thought that was really cool.”

Black-metal musicians are often pretty self-serious, but Cimarusti has a leg tattoo of his cat Buck as deceased Mayhem singer Per "Dead" Ohlin. - COURTESY LUCA CIMARUSTI

Of course, geek culture can be unpleasant too. Reactionary movements such as Gamergate and Comicsgate have mobilized their adherents to target and harass people who criticize the sexism or racism they see in games or comics. Violent, church-burning Satan worshippers are hardly the only assholes.

Annihilus comes from a place where fandom and black metal aren’t about exclusionary hate and bile and violence but instead about using dark emotions as a way to bond with people. Cimarusti makes that clear when he talks about the title of the album. Ghanima, he explains, is another Dune reference–it’s the name Emperor Paul Atreides gave his only daughter, borrowing a Fremen word for “spoils of war.”

Another metalhead might reasonably take “spoils of war” to refer to looting the bloody corpses of one’s enemies. But Cimarusti characteristically turns in a more inclusive direction. “Given the fact that this record was finished during COVID and kind of a weird time for the world, the name ‘Ghanima’ seemed like it applied to the feeling of having finished a huge project,” he says. “It’s like I got through this somehow with something to show and to share with people.”

And so a word for plunder becomes about overcoming hardship together. That’s the spirit of Annihilus–a malevolent insect from an antimatter universe who wants you to enjoy the stygian darkness with him. Maybe by watching a cool Marvel movie. v

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Annihilus uses black metal’s powers for goodNoah Berlatskyon September 23, 2020 at 11:55 pm Read More »