No Doctors
ERP Saints EP
Blastitude's choice for "Best Band in Chicago" three years running (yes, even better than Wilco and the Sea and Cake) are moving to the San Francisco Bay Area, and we're gonna miss 'em around here. At least they've left a farewell to this city that nurtured them for three years, a 20-minute EP release called ERP Saints. More specifically, ERP Saints is a tribute to the Chicago neighborhood that nurtured them, the one and only East Rogers Park, the gentrified ghetto by the lake, far far away from Chicago's other far hipper Parks like Wicker and Humboldt, somehow all at once a condo-happy yuppie neighborhood, a low-rent hippie boho hamlet, a sleepy tree-lined university town, a working-class beachfront community, an inner-city artists colony, and a gang-related ghetto, and it's all happening on every block. Throw in Gay/Lesbian, Mexican, Jamaican, Haitian, Bosnian, Thespian, Hasidic Jew, Indian, Pakistani, Progressive, Activist, Immigrant, Refugee, and you're almost there . . . maybe you're even here, in which case you should stop by some time! Through all this, the No Doctors walked for three years and formed a bond they called the ERP Saints. I asked them for a key to this mystery and their response was simple: "Respect your neighbors." Respecting your neighbor and, um, sainthood are rather Christian sentiments, and, although this band has always shown itself to be more than conversant with the "Devil's Music", ERP Saints clearly marks a new direction by No Doctors that is somehow more elevated and enlightened than anything they have previously done.

Not to say that this album is more Christian, or even Christian at all, but I will comment on three examples of this new direction. 1. Here, the band does not utilize the murk and obfuscation of the lo-fi and/or trash aesthetic (although it has previously served them well) -- the No Sides label points out that this is the band's first 100% professional recording (done at the reknowned Key Club studio in Benton Harbor, MI). 2. There is no bass player or other auxiliary members, the band a lean and mean gtr/gtr/sax/drums quartet. 3. Finally, and most importantly, the songwriting is notably different. The second track is a true-and-blue slow jam, a 1962-style doo-wop ballad with a hook ("It always hurts . . . . so bad!") that has been going through my head over and over and over -- and the CansaFis sax break has been too! Then, the third and final track is simply amazing, a ten-minute epic called "Future Awaken Widen." Over an expansive, yearning musical setting that sounds like the band has suddenly found themselves inheriting their Van Vliet and Coltrane and Coleman influences all at once, lead vocalist Chauncey Chaumpers lays down some intense shit, addressed to a "sweetheart," while the guitars and sax chatter emotionally above an eternal rock'n'roll precipice, the very sound of a Tower of Babel of the mind being sculpted and redecorated into a funky church spire in the name of love -- which is sort of like a vision of East Rogers Park, come to think of it.

Larry "Fuzz-O" Dolman, Blastitude #17