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2/24/2006

Tangleweed in this week’s Chicago Reader

By Kenneth Rainey. Filed under: GigBlog, News, TweedBlog.

The Chicago Reader’s Monica Kendrick said some nice things about us and our little CD in this week’s Chicago Reader.

TANGLEWEED You know you’ve found a good CD when you can’t decide whether to wax more rhapsodic about its music or its liner notes. Liner notes first: Tangleweed’s debut, Just a Spoonful and Other Folksongs of Rural Cook County (Squatney), includes some deadpan and brutal parodies of po-faced folk-geek annotation. (On the manifold hardships and hardscrabble lives so commonly endured by folk musicians: “Most were forced to leave college after graduation.” On “Old Joe Clark”: “There are lyrics for this tune, but I’ve never heard them sung by someone sober enough to be intelligible.”) The music’s a rough-and-ready, busy take on the squeaky, scratchy, lively brand of bluegrass, which I much prefer to the slick, hillbilly-fusion variety. Tangleweed also plays as part of Pictures and Sounds 2006, a multimedia event presented by WHPK and the University of Chicago Film Studies Center; see Saturday for more info. Three on the Tree and Lost Ghost Lounge open. –> 10 PM, Red Line Tap, 7006 N. Glenwood, 773-274-5463, $5. –Monica Kendrick