MAYOR DALEY | Facial Expressions | (Rotted Tooth)
Mayor Daley's MySpace page
Mayor Daley have a reputation as a band with an unstable lineup—the former members listed on their MySpace page outnumber the current ones six to three. Fortunately they seem to thrive on chaos. The queasy noise rock onFacial Expressions—the first release on the vinyl-and-cassette label run by Cacaw drummer Kyle Reynolds—sounds ready to fall apart at any second, like the Zipper at the county fair, and listening to it feels an awful lot like cheating death on a carnival ride put together by day laborers. Mayor Daley’s songs tend to be sludgy, lumpy, and long—only one of the four here clocks in under ten minutes—and their unambitious arrangements never include more than drums, bass, turded-out guitar, and Kelly Carr’s vocals, which are firmly in the haunted-woman tradition of Siouxsie Sioux and Lydia Lunch. Sometimes—like toward the end of “Showdown”—the band’s playing is so loose and poundingly simple that you can easily imagine they’ve turned their instruments over to a bunch of outpatients who wandered in off the street, but then they’ll turn around and deliver a tight bit of almost jazzy swing—maybe to prove they can do it, but probably just to fuck with us.
Mayor Daley, Cacaw, Onyou
Sun 8/2, 9 PM, Empty Bottle, 1035 N. Western, 773-276-3600 or 866-468-3401, $3.
