There might be nothing more difficult in rock music than crafting a good pop song. Except to make a couple albums full of them. Pop songs are so tricky because they need to sound effortless and ebullient while being catchy and tight – and that requires hard work, which makes effortless and ebullient all that more difficult.
After a summer of anticipation, the Quad City Symphony Orchestra (QCSO) kicked off its 86th season Saturday, October 7, at the Adler Theater. The mammoth performance of Shostakovich’s Fifth Symphony, the intimate emotion of Mendelssohn’s Violin Concerto in E Minor, and even the rabblerousing overture to Verdi’s opera Nabucco delighted the senses.
With few surprising pieces, this year's Quad City Symphony Orchestra season is best described as "solid." By relying on repertoire mainstays like Beethoven's Third Symphony, Brahms' Fourth, and the Verdi Requiem, music director and conductor Donald Schleicher has created a season that will surely please the Adler crowd but offer them sparse originality.
You remember rock, don’t you? That arena sound that required no hair spray, no leather, no preening, no showy solos, no attitude? The only things you needed were guitar, drums, bass, and a singer. That’s exactly what the local band Blue Ash Ink has on its self-titled, self-released album.
Progressive rock has never been cool. It has sometimes been respected, but those periods have been fleeting and hastily apologized for. The genre had many practitioners in the early 1970s, bands unafraid of releasing 30-minute pieces (they can’t properly be called songs) rife with self-indulgence and pomposity.
There’s nothing fancy-pants about Kelly Pardekooper’s music. It’s as unassuming, familiar, comfortable, and rugged as denim. That’s not to say it’s pedestrian. Far from it. Pardekooper’s new album, Johnson County Snow (on the well-regarded Trailer Records label), is simply spectacular, with 10 beautifully crafted pieces of corn-fed rock from Iowa City.
There are times when I’m out and about that I feel the Quad Cities are a great place to catch a symphony, listen to some jazz, or ponder art, and the most recent Quad City Symphony Orchestra (QCSO) pops concert left me in a state of cultural bliss.
We’ve all heard confessional lyrics, but how does one go about writing soul-baring music? Listening to Shannon Wright’s striking Maps of Tactic (her second album on Chicago’s Quarterstick Records) feels like looking at somebody’s innards.
The Nixons sound needy. I don't want to make too much of it, but if you go to see them at the Pig Pen in Clinton on August 24, please give the guys a hug and tell 'em you love 'em. Listen to Scott Bush, the brand spanking new guitarist for the Dallas-based band, after fumbling around looking for a description of his band's sound: "They can call it whatever they want, as long as they like it.
Say this for Veruca Salt: Static it ain’t. The Chicago-based band, which makes good on a canceled show at RIBCO this Thursday at 10 p.m. with Ophur, is hardly the same outfit that made a minor splash in 1994 with American Thighs and the single “Seether.

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