Review & Photography by Nathan Vestal for MPM
The Empty Bottle is the kind of place where ghosts hang around for last call. Sticky floors, bruised walls, and a stage that’s seen every shade of sweat and salvation.
On this October night, the place was overfull — leather, lace, denim, latex — a communion of Chicago’s dark hearts. Outside, the streetlights flickered under cold rain. Inside, breath steamed against red light.
Two Someoddpilot Records acts with Chicago roots — Still Machine and Black Cross Hotel —chose this night to unleash their new records.
Echoes Within for Still Machine.
Songs for Switches for Black Cross Hotel.
Two records, one label, one release show — a double baptism in rust and fire.
Blood Lemon’s addition to the lineup created a perfect trinity of danger: Still Machine’s furious precision, Blood Lemon’s eerie beauty, and Black Cross Hotel’s gothic industrial catharsis. What followed wasn’t just a concert — it was a bloodletting.
Still Machine opened like a riot in progress. No intros, no warm-up, just a shriek of feedback and a drumbeat that could knock teeth loose. Their new record already had a cult whisper around it — metallic hardcore scraped raw through the gears of industrial noise — and live, it hit like demolition. The band looked like they’d been dug up after a blackout: sweat already soaking their collars, cables snaking like veins across the stage.
Frontman Ray Dybzinski prowled like he hated the space between himself and the crowd. He screamed as if every word cost him blood, face contorted, eyes locked on no one and everyone. Behind him, Jason Goldberg’s bass clanged with factory precision while Matt Martin’s drumming sounded like he was exorcising something ugly. Every song ended like a collapse. “Echoes Within,” “Ama Nesciri,” “Sympathetic Light” — fresh from the new album and full of violence and release, all sharp edges.
It wasn’t pretty. It wasn’t meant to be. Still Machine don’t play songs; they build wreckage. And this night was their christening — the birth of a record meant to be heard through broken speakers in the middle of nowhere.
Then Blood Lemon took the stage and changed the gravity of the room. Where Still Machine had burned white-hot, Blood Lemon came on like a shadow that moves when you aren’t looking. Three silhouettes under cobalt light: Melanie Radford on bass, Lisa Simpson on guitar, and Lindsey Lloyd on drums. The Boise-based band began with “The Stone Castle,” a drifting, spectral track that started in whispers and built into thunder. Radford’s bass tone was huge — thick, buzzing, dark as motor oil — while Lloyd’s drumming felt like ritual movement, precise and hypnotic.
Radford’s voice carried like smoke — hushed, melodic, but heavy with intent. Radford and Simpson traded off on vocals throughout the set, their voices weaving together to create a sensual, ethereal sonic flicker that hovered over the crowd, as if every note was a slow-building sonic orgasm. Simpson’s guitar shimmered with delay and feedback that felt like memories bleeding together, while Lloyd’s drums built a heartbeat underneath, steady and patient. By the time they hit “High Tide,” you could feel the entire room leaning forward, caught in the slow burn. It was hypnotic — the sound of sorrow turned physical.
They played like they were underwater, every movement deliberate, every swell timed to pull you deeper. When the final notes of “Burned” faded, the crowd just stood there — no cheers, no noise — just breathing. Then the applause came like rain breaking through. They’d turned the Empty Bottle into a church for ghosts.
By the time Black Cross Hotel took over, the crowd had already been through fire and water. What came next was the funeral.
The stage went black. A low hum started — mechanical, ominous, like a power plant waking up. Then a voice, distant and warped, started repeating something indecipherable. The room went quiet except for that hum. Then boom: the first note dropped like a body.
Dee DeEmme stepped out of the fog wearing a black coat, half priest, half phantom. The rest of the band followed — Andrew Ragin and Marcus Eliopulos on guitars, Sanford Parker on bass, Mike Miczek behind the kit — all faces lost in the strobe flashes. They were there to baptize their new record, Songs for Switches, and the whole thing felt less like a release show and more like a séance.
The sound was massive — the kind of industrial weight that sits on your chest. “The House God Doesn’t Visit” was pure menace, guitars cutting through the mix like metal teeth. “Church Basement” built to a wall of sound that made people grab at each other just to stay upright. Between songs, DeEmme barely spoke, just stared down the crowd, breathing heavy.
“Rot Together” turned into the night’s anthem. The crowd shouted the chorus like it was a prayer, fists up, sweat flying. The lights strobed red, then black, then gone. You could feel the floor bending underfoot, the amps buzzing, everything vibrating on the edge of collapse.
They closed with “Blood Dance,” a new track that’s already legend — part ritual, part riot. DeEmmes’ head flung back, arms out, screaming as a human conduit. When it ended, there was no encore, no fake exit. Just that 60 hertz hum, a flicker of light, and the feeling that everyone in the room had been changed by something unseen.
When the house lights came up, people didn’t talk much. Some hugged. Some just stared at the stage like it might start again. Outside, the cold hit hard. The street was wet, the city quiet.
StillMachine and Black Cross Hotel, labelmates, friends, co-conspirators — two bands pushing from different sides of the same wall. One grinding noise into chaos, the other sculpting it into liturgy. And Blood Lemon, standing in the middle, ghostly and human all at once, the sound of the shadow in-between.
It wasn’t a show. It was a ritual — a night where something old in the Chicago underground stirred awake again.
For a few hours, the Empty Bottle wasn’t just a venue. It was a vessel. And when it emptied, it left behind exactly what it promised: nothing but echo, sweat, and the faint pulse of something still alive in the dark.
