Behold, your day of reckoning...
Grails, a Portland-based quartet concerned with the deep, dark night of the curiosity of ritual, shamble their way into the Empty Bottle (1035 N. Western) on Tuesday, armed with booming drums, zithers, electronics, and other devices meant to levitate pyramids and scrolls and ankhs and other such ancient imponderables. The band's web site is stuffed with totemic images, including plenty of mountains, but two things really put the band's sound into modern-day hip perspective: 1) their recent tour with Silver Apples, advertised on the splash page, and 2) their links, which include portals to like-minded hobbits like OM, Neurosis, Truman's Water, Jandek, and Eluvium. Shake, strain, serve, enter rebirth.
On the home front, Chicago brings its two finest next-world ambassadors, with the motionless-sky guitar orchestrations of Lichens (plays second) dragged into the ground by Locrian's aggressive shouting-at-the-ground black metal-esque primevalism (opening act).
9:30, $8.
