Art

This weekend's Ears & Eyes Festival at the Hideout, which began Friday, has a pretty impressive lineup--and notwithstanding the presence of some strong out-of-town bands (like Friday's headliner, Parts & Labor), Chicagoans provide the bulk of the fest's substance.

Perhaps more than any other Chicago festival I've seen in two-plus decades living here, this one zeroes in on the local scene's proclivity for knocking down stylistic walls and disrupting genre hierarchies. The program includes a diverse slate of jazz and rock and lots of stuff in between, but more telling than the variety of acts is the approach of the individual musicians--from one project to the next they routinely cross back and forth between idioms, making an orthodoxy out of playing whatever they like.

The pairing of Athens stalwarts Vic Chesnutt and Elf Power yields lingering, autumnal melodies and songs that elude expectation. Dark Developments sways with a natural and stylistic drift toward the melancholy side of Chesnutt's allegorical songwriting. But the buoyant pop rhythms and mellow psychedelic textures of each number tussle with nihilism, culminating in a gray and wintry body of songs. "We Are Mean" is the album's Rosetta Stone, laying out the tensions that arise when these vibrant songs are brought to a point by such a dreary narrator. "The Mad Passion of the Stoic" and "Phil the Fiddler" unfold at the lumbering and difficult pace of the greatest Southern authors. As such, Dark Developments is as spectral and haunting as William Faulkner when he was on point, or Flannery O'Connor when just skirting the dark side.

This Friday night (Sept. 5)  Beep Beep Gallery will present its first "officially Beep Beep-curated" art show at Aurora Coffee in L5P, located at 468 Moreland Ave. right next door to Criminal Records.