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The Burn To Shine concept is breathtakingly simple. These documentaries film a handful of bands, playing one song each, in a house that's about to be destroyed. Eloquent in their abandonment, the houses speak of lives played out and places loved and forgotten. There are soap cakes left in the bathrooms and pictures remaining on the walls. Even this near-North Chicago house, constructed as one of three for the builder's three daughters, left empty for years, has its share of ghostly nostalgia. The sunlight streams in through dirty windows, striking brightly colored walls, just as it must have done when the owner was still pottering around, years away from the nursing home, enjoying life. You have to wonder what she would have thought of the clutch of very fine bands that grace her sitting room on this late summer afternoon.
The second of Brendan Canty's excellent Burn to Shine DVDs was curated by Chicago mainstay Bob Weston, and it draws from the second city's rich, genre-spanning musical tradition. There's plenty of red meat on offer in the rock and punk offerings of Tight Phantomz, Red Eyed Legends and The Ponys (here with ex-member Ian Adams singing "Chatterbox"). However, there's also room in the big tent for eccentrics like The Lonesome Organist. He sits at his drum kit, slapping out rhythms with his feet, while plunking out keyboard melodies -- then pumps the accordion, then stands to tap dance out a percussive cadence, drum sticks attached to his arms like a child's mittens. Chicago's strong alt-country tradition is represented by Freakwater, whose mournful "Jewel" combines high sweet harmonies and somber cello, and Wilco, in a surprisingly wan all-acoustic rendering of "Muzzle of Bees".
Finally, there are the bands which Chicago is famous, that uncertain mix of punk aggression and jazz chops. Shellac's song is an early highlight, a pummeling, angular, testosterone-reeking rendition of "Steady As She Goes". Drummer Todd Trainer is a crackling, spitting, live downed wire of energy here, pushing the odd-shaped fragments of noise into propulsive chaos; he earns his spot on the DVD cover right here, right now. However, of the just-past generation of Chicago rockers, it's Tortoise that really brings the goods. Tortoise can be a hard sell, so close to jazz but not quite there, their pristine songs too cerebral to really catch on fire. Here, though, you see them making the music, pounding out difficult time signatures and tossing motifs, still burning, from man to man. The sweat and the effort of making music as complicated as "Salt the Skies" is evident here in a way that it never was on record. This is no laid-back jam, but an apocalyptic collision of rhythms, melodic thought and improvisatory flights -- reined in, but just barely, by the band members' superlative ability to listen to one another.
The DVD closes, as the first one did, with video footage of the house's fall. The Washington-based edition ended with fire; in Chicago, where homes are inches apart, monstrous trucks must do the damage, their giant metal claws tearing through the rear of the building, chewing up walls and plumbing and furniture left behind. They emerge at the street front of the house when there's nothing else left, and the facade tips over like a movie set.
Chicago Burn To Shine does a fantastic job of summarizing a scene, giving us a broad range of bands and styles in a strangely affecting setting, but the Washington Burn To Shine was slightly more compelling. The concept -- music existing in a structure that's about to be destroyed -- was new then, and perhaps more moving because of it. The bands were more uniformly great, no clunkers, no dull spots. The Chicago version has some great highlights; Tight Phantomz, Ponys, Shellac and Tortoise all came to destroy and got it done. Even so, there are dead spots -- not quite boring, but not a revelation either. Take-or-leaves included Pit Er Pat, Wilco and The Red Eyed Legends. Also, and this is an unfair criticism, but... the fire was cooler. There's just no way around that.
Still, there's plenty here to justify a purchase -- The Lonesome Organist's frenetic set, the Tight Phantomz's Nightfooling stomp through "Ninja Talk", Shellac's take no prisoner's set and Tortoise's driving intensity. There's more coming, too. The next house will come down in Portland, OR, but not before The Decemberists, The Thermals, The Shins and others make a little noise.
-- Jennifer Kelly
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