The Shivers’ music is a tricky thing to describe with any real focus. Imagine Deer Tick, Leonard Cohen and The Velvet Underground. Or sometimes The Rolling Stones. They don’t fit into a particular niche unless you want to call that niche “amazingly pretty, emotionally resonant music that I cannot stop listening to or talking about” and then that would be a pretty great niche.
The Shivers are the brainchild of Keith Zarriello (vocals & guitar) who writes some of the more poetic lyrics you’ll ever hear. He sings them with such a raw sincerity that even if you’re not in love with someone, you’re taken to a place where you do feel that way, whether you like it or not. In Beauty, the line “I need to grieve and need to need and be in love” hits you like a sock full of quarters.
Balancing out The Shivers is the lovely Jo Schornikow (vocals and piano) whose whispery lead vocals in Feather sent a chill through the crowd at Martyr’s. She’s quick with a witty aside about hard drugs (when speaking about their song More) or ambiance (at the beginning of The Sweat – which was dubbed “appropriate” due Chicago’s humidity), and her harmonies are lovely and added a certain richness to the music.
In concert, The Shivers are not always wringing your heart out—sometimes they’re funny, sometimes Keith sings his guts out and sometimes Jo gets a sparkly piano solo. Sometimes they even toss in a cover. To the absolute delight of the crowd at Martyr’s, they made a reference to Deer Tick as a sort of big brother band and played a version of Ashamed that will make all the little hairs on the back of your neck stand up. And when we thought it couldn’t get better than that, they brought out their rendition of The Magnetic Fields’ Love Is Like A Bottle Of Gin. They hadn’t planned for an encore, but the crowd asked for one and they obliged with Just Didn’t Need To Know.
Honest to God, if you can read this, you should get The Shivers in your lives. I’ll even make you a mixed tape.
DATE: Tuesday, August 2, 2010
PHOTOGRAPHY BY: Brendan Shanley ( @lostinprint )
REVIEW BY: Stacey Andeen ( @staceyandeen )
