Following a lengthy 4-year hiatus, Portland indie rockers Typhoon returned to the Metro stage as part of Tomorrow Never Knows to bring their third full-length album, Offerings, to life. Centered around a man’s loss of memory and identity, the record is a grand, sweeping, and ominous instant masterpiece. Luckily, their Chicago performance did justice to both this daring conceptual opus as well as the band’s long absence from the stage.
K.Flay excels at diving headfirst into the underbelly of romance and attraction. When she sings about love and hurt, you can feel the knife she’s holding behind her back. Yet somehow, her latest album Every Where Is Some Where delves even deeper into her psyche. She describes her shortcomings before going into her mental and sensory needs in “Blood In the Cut,” while discussing the worry she injects into her family in “Champagne” (in a fast-paced hip hop style Twista would appreciate). “You Felt Right” dreamily discusses another failed relationship, but with no hard feelings. She has enough of those in reserve for the people who really deserve it.
Transformation is the story of Swedish rapper Yung Lean. Three years since the release of the viral video for “Ginseng Strip 2002” that put him on the map, he hit a stride in 2017 as he found himself featuring for big names on the scene like Frank Ocean and Travis Scott. He closed things out with his third studio album Stranger, riding into the new year on the back of his most innovative, personal work yet. In Stranger, he’s leaving behind the lyrical cliches that incited skeptics of his past work and is delving deeper into his roots backed by a softer, more minimalist take on the dreamy production that has defined his sound from the jump. If he keeps up with this progression, the 21-year-old is looking less like a one-hit wonder and more like a young hitmaker to watch in 2018.
Chicagoans bitch about our dreadful winter weather just as much as we choose to embrace it. Even in the recent temperature drop, parka-covered civilians flood the streets with an air of normalcy and frigid determination. If there’s one thing we’re willing to brave the cold for, in particular, it’s good music. So when Tomorrow Never Knows sets up its thirteenth annual run during the freezing month of January, what happens? Chicago shows up.