The bar-slash-brunch place called Township hosts the evening’s revelries. From the outside, it looks like a cute little corner café with picture windows and weird found-art chandeliers hanging from the ceiling. Once you get inside and walk past the little metal tables, coffee station, and waiter dressed in a white shirt and black apron, you get to a large, well-lit, but mostly vacant room with a single maitre d’ standing behind a podium in the middle of the room. This man takes the concertgoer’s twelve dollars and issues fluorescent armbands for those wishing to buy liquor, PBR, or fancy IPA, then he ushers you into yet another secret room. This third room is painted black, has a cutout in the wall connecting it to the main bar, and is lightly populated by bearded men in eccentric garb and women who wear thick-rimmed glasses. There’s also a stage with a bunch of speakers and lights overhead.

Before Nightlands comes on, the opening band, Chicago locals Thin Hymns, play an excellent set. They sound like the Dirty Projectors, but more melodic and less disjointed, yet still kind of weird and dreamy in a way that only three men with falsetto or nearly falsetto voices can pull off.

Nightlands’ set starts at an hour ‘til midnight, which, for most people, is a little late on a Sunday. The already ample arm-swinging room of the individual audience member grows wider as the weaker music fans are weeded out by a process of attrition. “Oh I have to work tomorrow, I’ll see y’all later.” becomes a mantra repeated with increasing frequency throughout the night. It doesn’t help that Nightlands’ music can best be defined as a “lullaby”.

This particular Nightlands show is composed of four music makers on stage. First, of course, is the main man and Philadelphian, Dave Hartley who plays the guitar, foot pedals, and sings. There’s also a slide guitarist to his left and another slide guitarist/trumpeter/bass clarinetist/foot pedalist to his far right. The fourth music maker is a wooden electronic drum machine sitting on top of an amplifier, sitting on top of a chair, with a microphone in front of it. The metronomic rhythms of the drum machine do little to alleviate the sleepy-time feel of the show, especially from songs like the cover of Art Garfunkel’s “99 Miles From L.A.”.

None of this is to say that the show is bad. It’s just dreamy and when the time is closer to Monday breakfast than to Sunday dinner it is a little hard to stay focused. The down-to-clown partner seems more down than the clown as she rests her head on the writer’s shoulder. Nightlands takes the remainder of the audience into a gentle closing of the bar and ending of the weekend as the drum machine sits bumping away.

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This is clear from track number one, “Time And Place,” where the multilayered vocal tracking invites the listener into a lush soundscape populated with rollicking drums, synths, and other instruments Hartley might have invented in the studio. The result is a tone-setting opener that primes the audience for what is to come.

This includes a few hits and a few misses. The fourth track, “Nico,” is one of the latter, as it showcases what happens when this sound experiment goes wrong, with too much action distracting and detracting from the song itself. In the end though, it is still an “interesting” listen. “I Fell In Love With A Feeling,” on the other hand, is a perfect example of what can happen when everything goes right for Nightlands. The vocals combine with horns, on top of solid and steady rhythm guitar, to prove that in addition to indie quirkiness, Hartley can also pull off  a “catchy-as-hell-pop-tune”.

They are on the road starting in November, so look up when they arrive in your city to see if their forest of sound approach can translate when put in between four walls. In other words, take a night to get lost in the Nightlands.

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Efterklang headlined this Wednesday at Lincoln Hall in Chicago, along with uber-chill, extremely talented opener Nightlands. The latter group lay the groundwork for a trance-ish evening of indie-pop and art rock. Their excellent use of vocal harmony and lead singer’s on-point performance complemented the four-piece perfectly, backed by drums, Hartley’s guitar, and two synth stations. And if the evening had simply continued as such, that would have been totally fine.

But out comes Efterklang, a group of rakish prototypical hipsters whose first impression might lead a more judgey set to conclude that they’re all style and no substance. And then, amidst a swooning background of drums and sparse starry-eyed electro-synth, Katinka Fogh Vindelev begins to sing. Classically trained for music performance in Denmark (the band’s country of origin, and former operating base, prior to their recent relocation to Berlin), Vindelev delivers stunning operatic vocals, transcending what, in another band’s hands, might run the risk of being gimmicky or pretentious, and instead tying together a jaw-dropping mélange of sonic texture and rapturous stagecraft. If something’s rotten in Denmark, it’s definitely not the music schools. And if there’s such thing as love at first note, Katinka might have a few new suitors in Chicago.

Next onto the stage comes front man Casper Clausen; confident and charming, his stage presence drips with a crooner’s sense of classic showmanship, and his deep vocal delivery gets upstaged only by his striking falsetto. He invokes a sense of gravity from the music that balances well against his cheery disposition between tunes.

Thus helmed, the band goes on to deliver a powerful set featuring mostly tracks from their newest release, Pyramida, a full-length LP deriving its source material from 1000+ field recordings, collected by the band on an island called Spitsbergen, off the northern coast of Norway. The island is home to a defunct Russian mining town, called Pyramiden (hence the album’s title), and inspires the album’s intense engagement with isolation and the human spirit therein. The music itself is trippy and beautiful, while staying accessibly rockin’, and no one’s having more fun with it than the band’s own members, all of which translate into a truly exceptional live show.

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