Sound Opinions album recs

If you live in Chicago and you're into music, you probably tune in occasionally to Sound Opinions, which bills itself as the world's only rock and roll talk show. Hosted by Jim DeRogatis, who writes for the Sun-Times, and Greg Kot, the Tribune's main rock critic, it's a wide-ranging radio program on XRT with news, reviews and guests (in the recent past, members of Head of Femur, some of the Pitchfork crew, Tommy Ramone, Moby).

A lot of the music they discuss is pretty mainstream, but you get some good stuff occasionally. Tuesday night, for example, Jim and Greg spent most of the show talking about new or soon-to-be-released albums they'd been digging. I grabbed a pen and paper so I could share what I thought were their better recs:

1. The Magic Numbers - The Magic Numbers

2. Let Us Never Speak of It Again - Out Hud

3. Citizen Cain'd - Julian Cope

4. Ocean's Apart - The Go-Betweens

A couple live recordings from 2004:

Right Here (mp3) - The Go-Betweens

He Lives My Life (mp3) - The Go-Betweens

5. A forthcoming dBs record that I couldn't find any information on. But I did grab a new song:

World to Cry (mp3) - The dBs

6. I was most interested by this suggestion because they're from Chicago and I hadn't heard of them:

New Black - New Black

From the Thick Records site: "What if the B-52's had just one night of wild sex with Q and not U? And the resulting bastard child was neither boy nor girl, new wave nor no wave? . . . Quirky and complex, yet catchy as all get-out, New Black is your new tweak. Amid the yin and yang, the tension and release of this burning boy/girl pop explosion, are danceable backbeats, howling guitars, wailing keys and growling bass lines."

Don't let the B-52's ref put you off. New Black, with its gleefully pissed-off vocals, sounds more like a first-wave punk act (think X-Ray Spex).

Booze Olympics (mp3) - New Black

You Look Good Enough To Eat Tonight (mp3) - New Black

New Black plays at Subterranean in Chicago next Friday, August 12.