The Slaps | Shop Dog | Cabin | Hemlock at Lulu's Downtown on February 2nd, 2025!

All Ages, Standing-Room Only

Doors at 7:30pm

Show at 8:00pm

As proven on their strange and beautiful new album Mudglimmer, the looming specter of artistic oblivion pushed The Slaps to lean into their idiosyncrasies: snaking rhythms, complicatedly interlocking guitar riffs, grubby yet alluring poetry, and homespun post-modern Americana sing-alongs all surge with a free-wheeling improvisatory verve informed by free jazz. It’s a stunning DIY comeback story, a doubling-down on avant-garde impulses that pays immediate dividends.

Spontaneous composition and earnest, threadbare folk collide on Mudglimmer. It’s a marvel of influential synthesis, evoking Slint’s comfortability with ominous tension (“Mudglimmer”), Tortoise’s slinky push-pull grooves (“Filthy Sex Manuevers”), Waxahatchee’s slice-of-life Americana gems (“Flip”), elliptical funk-punk a la The Minutemen (“Forward”), minimal grunge-pop in the vein of Sebadoh (“King”) and so much more.

Mudglimmer, in short, rips. Faced with existential threats, The Slaps reconfigured and reenergized — finding purpose, not in reaching for a brass ring, but in becoming fully, unashamedly, their own wonderfully confounding thing.

hemlock

hemlock is the swamp-raised "phone-fi" alt-folk project of multi-disciplinary creative force Carolina Chauffe and various rotating collaborators, currently anchored between Chicago, Austin, and Louisiana, but more often on the road. Their most recent album ‘444’ was self-released in October, featuring all-star Chicago band Bailey, Jack, & Andy (members of Friko, Free Range, and Red PK). This is means-to-an-end modern-day folk art for the open-hearted. Eager, intentionally imperfect, prolific.