While it would have been awesome to attend one of the official Presidential inaugural balls (which featured, among their marquee acts, Jay-Z, Kanye West, Common, the Arcade Fire and Fall Out Boy), I was more than happy to settle for the Hideout’s unofficial Big Shoulders Ball, which brought a busload of Chicago’s finest—including Andrew Bird, the Waco Brothers, “Honeyboy” Edwards and Tortoise—to the Black Cat for a night of music, celebration and Windy City pride. Head over to PopMatters to check out my review and photos.
This week, I reviewed Andrew Bird’s Noble Beast and its bonus disc, Useless Creatures, for PopMatters. While I love just about everything Bird has done so far, I just wasn’t feeling Noble Beast for reasons that I had a great deal of difficulty pinpointing. As a result, my review ends up sharing a lot of flaws with the album it purports to describe—rambling, unfocused, unnecessarily long. Does this mean that I’m as good a writer as Andrew Bird is a musician, composer and songwriter? I certainly hope so!
