Pick Your Poison: Monday 9-22-14

The fall concert season is a busy one, and I want to do my best to make sure you’re fully aware of all the incredible shows and tours happening over the next couple of months, or in some cases even the next couple of days. Case in point, on Thursday Mutual Benefit will be rolling through Chicago for a show at the Empty Bottle. Last year’s Love’s Crushing Diamond wound up being my favorite folk album of 2013, which merited a Top 10 slot overall. And while their sound is best and most easily described as folk, it’s more of a chamber or orchestral folk reminiscent of Sufjan Stevens circa 2004 or so. It’s a sound I loved with unabashed passion, and am still very much a sucker for, apparently. But plenty of other positive reviews back me up on that assessment. Have I mentioned that it’s also the perfect record for fall, which coincidentally has its official start today? Time to break out the warm sweaters, curl up on the couch with a mug of hot chocolate, and let the sweet melodies sweep you away as the changing leaves blow around in the breeze outside your window. If there’s ever a visual description as to what a record sounds like, that’s it. But if you want to hear instead of read more about this record, stream “Golden Wake” and “Let’s Play / Statue of a Man” to get you started. Anyways, I had a magical experience with Mutual Benefit this past summer, when they played at the Pitchfork Music Festival. It was an overcast start to the day there weren’t a ton of people around yet, so I laid down in the grass, stared up at the sky and let their set transport me to somewhere magical. I can only imagine how rich it’s all going to sound inside the confines of the Empty Bottle. Now the band also recently re-released The Cowboy’s Prayer EP, which originally came out in 2011 and was available only as a Bandcamp download. It’s not quite the Mutual Benefit of 2013 (or 2014 for that matter), but you can hear foundations of what they would become based off of that. Have a listen to “Auburn Epitaphs” to get a better idea of what I mean. So the fine details on the show are as follows. It’s Thursday, September 25th at 9PM. Thin Hymns and Ricky Eat Acid are opening. Tickets are $12 and can be purchased here. I hope you’ll consider coming out to the show if you’re in town! Now how about today’s Pick Your Poison? There’s some solid tracks in this set from Anabot, Captivves, Douglas Francis, Elijah Ocean, The High Learys and Sneakout. In the Soundcloud section after the jump, stream songs from Andy Stott, Fear of Men (covering Ty Segall), Marianne Faithfull, Night Terrors of 1927 (ft. Tegan and Sara), Slim Twig, ZHU (covering CHVRCHES) and more.