Avec
This is one of my boss's favorite restaurants in Chicago. It was mentioned in Anthony Bourdain's "Nasty Bits" (which is so fun!) as one of his favorites as well. So when it was time for me to take Laura out for her birthday, that's where we went. It has small and large plates. Laura and I split these along with a cheese plate, 2 desserts & 2 bottles of wine. It was so yummy. Everything was so simple, but so good. One of the desserts was chocolate bars. Just pieces of milk and dark chocolate. Soooooo good. There are these communal tables so you get some of your neighbors' conversation. But that worked out very nicely when we were talking about the "deluxe" focaccia with taleggio cheese, truffle oil and fresh herbs that we DIDN'T order. Regulars were sitting next to us and insisted we try some of theirs. Um, yeah, it was amazing. The only thing is that it's all wood with bench seating. So after 3 hours of girl talk my ass was killing me. The wine & chocolate helped. But still. Yet overall, it was a yummy, wonderful experience.
Spiritualized
I think mentioned these guys in my Pitchfork entry. They were back in town and playing on a rainy Monday night. I was VERRRRY tempted to stay home. But Tim loves these guys and assured me they'd be amazing. I knew that in my head, but the rain! And the sleepiness! And the Monday blahs! Nevertheless I went. They were AWESOME. Btwn Pitchfork and now I've listened to more Spiritualized albums. Which are really good. But live? There are no words. Awesome and amazing and incredible seem cliche (probably because I used them to describe the new "90210"-- I need a thesaurus). Anyway, this band has been around since the early 90s. But as I've mentioned here before, I was listening to "Brown Eyed Girl" not "minimalism and lush symphonics" that "blossomed into rich, shimmering sonic panoramas". So thanks to Tim for furthering my music education. And for dragging my butt out of the house. I'm so glad that I've gotten to see these guys. If you can check them out, you should. If you don't believe me, here's what the Trib said:MUSIC REVIEW
Jason Pierce, Spiritualized walk the line, let tension flow
By Joshua Klein Special to the Chicago Tribune
September 10, 2008
You've got to hand it to Jason Pierce. Starting with the band Spacemen 3 through his ongoing work in Spiritualized, he's remained remarkably true to the course he initially set out on. No question, Pierce has a gift for gospel-drenched junkie blues, his music the search for something bigger than himself, be it God, love or even chemical. Indeed, at its best Spiritualized is a real rush (so to speak), an opiate wall of sound.At the same time there's a thrilling tension to the music, as the band alternately embraces beauty and smothers it in white noise, and it was this tension that dominated Spiritualized's set Monday night at Metro. One after the other, each song came across as a self-contained epic of excess and unlikely balance that explored and exploited the contrast between grace and dissonance. A fuzzed-up but no less uplifting version of "Amazing Grace," for example, led into the abrasive chaos of "You Lie, You Cheat," which in turn segued into the euphoric "Shine a Light." "Lay Back in the Sun" was pure smiley-faced hedonism—"good dope, good fun"—but "She Kissed Me (It Felt Like a Hit)" focused on the darker side of drugs (or at least drug metaphors).Yet Spiritualized's most recent disc, "Songs in A&E," is perhaps more reflective than Pierce's earlier work, at least in context. In England, Pierce's home, "A&E" stands for "accidents and emergencies," and it was in the accident and emergencies ward where Pierce spent a long time recovering from a near-fatal bout of pneumonia before finishing the record. Certainly knowing that affects how one hears songs such as "Death Take Your Fiddle," which features such doom-laden lyrics as "morphine, codeine, whiskey, they won't alter/ the way I feel now death is all around." At the same time, though, new songs such as "Soul On Fire" were downright hopeful in their hedonism. "Let's see how fast we can live until our times start slowing us down," sang Pierce.
Hidden behind sunglasses and avoiding the usual stage banter, the virtually expressionless Pierce, looking every bit perpetually hungover, let his songs do the talking for him, never so much as glancing at the crowd (which more often than not stood rapt and respectively silent) as he laid his soul bare. Buoyed by a pair of backup singers, with a sound that aimed for the heavens, Pierce walked a fine line between elegy and ecstasy, offering redemption and inspiration somewhere in the middle even as he aimed ever higher.
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