Led by married songwriting duo Tom and Mary Erangey, Chicago sextet Curious Grace & Black Rabbit is “an indie art rock band that unites the talents of six performers who draw on everything from 70s/80s Brit rock, prog, and classical, to Irish traditional music and metal.” As you’d expect for such a description—as well as influences that include Thin Lizzy, Queen, Joe Jackson, the Beatles, Elvis Costello, ELO, and “the guy who plays down at the pub on Saturday nights”—their music is wonderfully eclectic, dense, and simultaneously celebratory and grave. In particular, their latest LP, #WorldOnFire, is a charmingly complex yet welcoming slice of fantastical social commentary. Billed as “an album for this moment,” the band notes that it was “born out of the madness and magic of living in a Twitter-driven world that can’t tell whether a dream is upside down or downside up.” In creating it, the troupe “tapped into the angst, the defiance, the uprising” to create a record that “celebrates complicated dreams, heroines, and heroes.” In a nutshell, they evoke the lively elegance of Phideaux (including male/female vocals), the steampunk theatrics of Gandalf’s Fist and Dirt Poor Robins, and the sobering deliveries and commentaries of Andy Tillison (The Tangent) while yielding a vastly gripping, imaginative, meditative, and cohesive conceptual production. From: https://www.rebelnoise.com/reviews/curious-grace-black-rabbit-worldonfire
