Chicago’s Sleeper Car bends alt-country expectations on its second album, Love & Anxiety. The fiddles and pedal steel add twang, but the band’s real forte is its commitment to a folk-rock tradition that stretches all the way back to the ’60s. All five guys (including the excellently named Tie Die Charlie) plant roots in a songbook that nods to Dylan, the Byrds, and, by extension, Woody Guthrie. That’s not to say they sound anything at all like any of them, but Sleeper Car’s Americana aesthetic paints a timeless portrait of wide-open spaces and endless highways.
Sat., Sept. 22, 9 p.m., 2007
This article appears in Sep 19-25, 2007.