FEATURED ARTISTS

Chicago’s Down The Line continues to demonstrate that you don’t need electricity to generate real power. Their music delivers mighty hooks and harmonies within smart writing and truly shining vocals. It’s an acoustic mix – guitar, mandolin, violin, harmonica, and djembe, driven by a lone-electric bass – that the Chicago Sun-Times praised as “an organic blend of rollicking pop.” The group prefers to describe their sound more simply: acoustic pop. (Although when pressed, they explain, “If The Cars had kids with Fleetwood Mac, well, they’d probably sound like us.”) However you label them, Down The Line creates music that’s pure, unique and unforgettable.

• Not to miss show: August 15th @ SPACE in Evanston

Eric Lindell is an American singer-songwriter, born in San Mateo, California, who came to national prominence after relocating to New Orleans. His recording career began in 1996. Beginning in 2006, he has grown in popularity from being a local/regional New Orleans-based artist to tour nationally and internationally. Eric’s music has been described by USA Today as “pumping soul into funk, blue and roots-rock.” Chicago Sun Times calls him “a tremendous talent with a poet’s soul… Lindell writes from the heart with a fully realized musical vision.”

A rock group formed in 1985 in Melbourne, Australia and led by New Zealand singer-songwriter Neil Finn. Finn is widely recognised as the primary songwriter and creative director of the band, having led it through several incarnations. The band owes its original success to the Australian live music scene, though references to New Zealand people and places are included in several of their songs. The group was on hiatus from 1996-2006 when it reunited with two albums released since.

Sun Kil Moon is a music project of singer-songwriter Mark Kozelek, best known for his previous band Red House Painters. Sun Kil Moon sees Kozelek undertake the writing, composing, singing and guitar playing, accompanied by Tim Mooney and Anthony Koutsos on drums, and Geoff Stanfield on bass. The band is named after Korean lightweight boxer Sung-Kil Moon. The just released ‘Admiral Fell Promises’ is Sun Kil Moon’s fourth, and the first that is all acoustic, played entirely by Mark Kozelek on nylon string guitar.

When Tracy Bonham set out to make her fourth full-length record, a lot had changed. She’d move back to Brooklyn, after spending three years in Los Angeles, had fallen in love and gotten married, and watched as the record industry cease to exist. A native of Eugene, OR, Bonham began singing at age five, playing the violin at nine and piano at age 14. After earning a violin scholarship at University of Southern California, she transferred to Berklee College of Music to study voice and began writing and recording her own material. On her 1996 debut The Burdens of Being Upright, Bonham established herself as a brash rocker with ironic nods to the emerging music of punk grrrrl bands. With blunt, direct observations on love and loss, the album went gold and earned the singer Grammy nominations for Best Alternative Music Performance and Best Female Vocalist.