Chicago Week: White Mystery

White Mystery – White Mystery – S/R

“Aaron”

This week marks the 173rd birthday of my much beloved former home, Du Sable’s famed city on the lake, the one and only Chicago!  Okay, technically the date of Du Sable’s  founding of the original Chicago trading colony is unknown, but for convenience’s sake we’ll recognize the March 4th anniversary of the city’s incorporation as Chi-town’s birth date. What makes this city so great?  By and large, my love for Chicago stems from the panoply of amazing bands that call the Windy City home, who not only all happen to be incredibly nice people but who also produce some of today’s most exciting music; and in honor of Chicago’s 173rd, this week’s posts will showcase the best of the many insanely talented artists operating therein.

And what better way to begin than with White Mystery?  Alex and Francis, the siblings White, embody all the above described qualities that define Chicago music: humble and approachable,  pursuing the higher calling of their personal muses while leaving behind mighty slabs of wax as artifacts of their journey.  Anyone familiar with Alex’s past work with The Red Orchestra will know that she possess THE most powerful, knock-your-socks-out-your-shoes incredible voices in rock n’ roll today, and with a guitar sound just as big to match.  In fact, what undermined much of her previous work was that her voice and guitar simply overpowered the rest of her band, and her tunes wound up at odds with themselves because of it.

Enter her brother Francis, perhaps the only other human being who could match the musical bombast of his sister.  The addition of Francis’s thunderous rhythms (and perfectly complimentary backing yelp) completes Alex’s vocals and guitar; on their self-titled debut longplayer, White Mystery create a storm of sound more cacophonous than ensembles with quadruple their numbers.  Opening cut White Widow is the perfect distillation of everything that’s great about the band; Francis beats out a frentic, galloping rhythm, his manic cymbal smashes counterpoint to Alex’s elemental guitar riff.  In comes Alex’s skyscraper of a voice, laying out what should be evident form the get-go: “You can’t tame me!”  Then somehow her guitar sound gets even fatter and fuzzier, and Francis swings back around with a rejoinder in his own mad yelp, not as powerful as his sister’s but perfectly complimentary: “You can’t tame me!”

White Widow is there and gone in 75 seconds, with all the brute suddenness of a tornado or flash flood.  In fact, only one song on the LP runs past the 3 minute mark, but White Mystery’s songs don’t need more than a few seconds to imprint themselves on your brain.  The tracks on the record mostly flow, or perhaps spontaneously combust is the better term, in and out of one another, leaving the impression of having witness the band’s incendiary concert.  In between  fraternal exhortations (“I stand here with my brother,” “C’mon Francis!”), Alex declares herself an undeniable force of nature, self-empowered (Respect Yourself, Don’t Hold My Hand) yet most concerned with quotidian pleasures (as in Farmer‘s lyric: “you feed all the pigeons on the way to the park,” or in all of Take A Walk).  While Alex’s riffs are mostly brutally simple, they are infectiously catchy and given far greater depth by Franicis’ manic drum patterns the choice backdrop for vocal pyrotechnics.

Aaron, the track selected to accompany this post is, like much of the cuts on White Mystery, wholly representative of that at which White Mystery excel.  Another primal yet catchy riff, rumbling drums setting the stage for Alex’s playful dominance, as she entreats Aaron  to “pretend to love ourselves.”  The song is rife with an undercurrent of self-incrimination, with references to “my mistake to do cocaine” and “my mistake not to communicate” underlying the desire of pretending to love oneself.  Though this tension gives the song a strange poignancy, it’s breakneck hurtle (130 seconds in length) and undeniable exuberance locate the joy even in such self-criticism.

White Mystery is simply a sheer joy of a record, just as White Mystery are simply a sheer joy of a band; and I give it my highest recommendation. Check out another cut from the LP in the Monday Mixtown below.  You can buy it from the band themselves here, or catch them at one of their killer live shows (I plan on attending their performance at the SxSW HoZac Showcase…if you’ll be in Austin, you should too!).

Advertisement