Ever since local indie-rock project Options debuted with 2014’s What You Want, main man Seth Engel has continued to release short-and-sweet songs that are equal parts hooky and glum. By now, Engel can pretty reliably pull your heartstrings while tempting you to break out your air guitar, but after seven albums, he also started dabbling in other sounds. Options’ 2021 mixtape, On the Draw, is dappled with electronics (keys, percussion, even a bit of bass), and Engel heads further in that direction on last month’s self-released Beast Mode. Most noticeably, he fools around with vocal effects, sometimes processing his low-key singing so that he sounds like a toy robot. This slight shift casts Options’ instrumentals in a new light, bringing a gusty chilliness to Engel’s sharp, whittled-down riffs that makes them hit like ocean spray on an autumn day. The metronomic guitars on “Slow Burn” thrum with the caged energy of 1980s UK postpunk, but they never release it in a great crescendo—instead they create sustained tension with the feeling that something big is due at any moment.
Options Soft Surface and Jaff Graffner open. Tue 8/12, 9 PM, Empty Bottle, 1035 N. Western, $20.39, 21+
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Leor Galil (he/him) started writing for the Chicago Reader in 2010. He joined the staff in 2012 and became a senior staff writer in 2020.
Galil mainly covers music, with a singular focus on Chicago artists, scenes, and phenomena.
He’s won a handful of journalism awards; he’s won two first-place awards from the Association of Alternative Newsmedia (for music writing in 2020 and arts feature in 2022) and a Peter Lisagor award (for Best Arts Reporting and Criticism in 2022).
Galil lives in Chicago. He speaks English and can be contacted at lgalil@chicagoreader.com.