Nice to Meet You: Soft Speaker
Audiophiles, get ready to fall in indie love with Chicago band Soft Speaker.
I often find myself reusing the term “indie rock” to describe any band that I can’t quite figure out. It’s a cop-out most music critics and writers use I think, probably because the term itself garners more attention than saying what it really is. Chicago band Soft Speaker fits this mold. It would be easy to dump them into the broad category of indie rock, but it wouldn’t be fair to the band. I’ll have to settle for a term of my own creation: crazy, weird psychedelic alternative Midwestern rock. It’s a mouthful but once you listen to Soft Speaker you’ll understand every word of it. Rising from the ashes of the old Chicago band the Saturday Nights, guitarist/vocalist Paul Foreman and drummer Joe Daley found that a two-man act wasn’t their thing and needed to enlist a couple of worthy talents to add to their new project. Old friend Nick Rocchio was happy to fill in as an additional guitarist and vocalist and a short Craigslist ad brought their Blair Douglass on the bass. With such a happy little family set in stone, making the actual music became child’s play.
Soft Speaker has carved out their own piece of the Windy city with their debut EP Conditions. All those kids in the record store wearing Dinosaur Jr. shirts and rifling through obscure 90s LPs would fall in love with Soft Speaker’s sound on this album. Conditions bursts with collective effervescence on their opening track “Mercury Park,” bringing about that euphoric fervor that gets your senses alert and your mind excited. It’s lo-fi with a hi-fi aesthetic. It’s classic, gritty 90s alternative with the spirit of our youth. We all know that good music is hard to find, but Soft Speaker makes it easy to fall in love with them. The track that sold me was “Burden You.” Starting off with Daly’s drums and a great guitar riff, it turns into this high-energy song that can identify with any struggling graduate such as myself, finding themselves ripe with youth but frozen by today’s world. Knowing that most of Rocchio’s lyrics are heavily inspired by his experiences with unemployment makes the connection even easier to make.
Their single “Danger Red” is the best representation of everything Soft Speaker can do with four minutes and some instruments. Douglass’s bass has that punchy low sound that I love, accenting every lyric within the track. It’s like if Pavement had a baby with early Nirvana, pre-Courtney Love. Those solid lyrics, that great natural guitar squeal. That clap breakdown! How could you not love this song?
If you’re a Chicagoan and like what you hear, Soft Speaker will be playing at the Hideout June 5th at 10:30 pm.
Posted by Amy Dittmeier on Jun 05, 2009 @ 9:00 am
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