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Mass Shivers
Chicago’s Mass Shivers were touring behind their sophomore album, 2008’s exquisite Ecstatic Eyes Glow Glossy, when a van accident in Pennsylvania derailed the group, in more ways than one. Everyone recovered, but the event proved the band’s undoing. We’re left mourning one of our favorite local acts. Thankfully, the trio left a parting gift.
The posthumous Contoured Heat kicks off with a bang, or more precisely, a headbanger: “More Bumper than a Body Shop,” a throbbing, white-hot scorcher. The psych-boogie of “(I’ve Got the Power)” quickly follows, crying, “The crippled and the beaten get even.” Perhaps it’s a vengeful call to arms directed at the Keystone State highway system.
Steering the group through it all is fearless frontman Brett Sova, whose penchant for acid-dripping freakouts, like the dual guitar interweaving on “Languid Liquid,” carries over to his solo work as Axis:sovA. His chugging wah undulates throughout the impossibly funky “Torrid Sex in East Berlin.” Twenty years earlier, it could’ve laid claim to the coolest-ever Cold War–closing soundtrack. Instead, the boys take a bow with a blistering swan song.
