current line-up:

Gregory Jacobsen - vocals / Alex Perkolup - bass / Charlie Werber - drums Jon Beavo - keyboard / Jeff Goulet - guitar
Cory Bengtsen - sax / Kemi Dornehag - trombone / Sacha Mullin, L. Wyatt - vocals

The drawings and paintings of Chicago artist Gregory Jacobsen (one of which appeared on the cover of the June 30 Reader) aren't exactly easy to look at: his favorite subject is body horror, and he loves to combine bright, kid-friendly colors with beautifully rendered deformities and mutilations and revolting masses of flesh and hair and membrane. I'd love to see him get a booth at the Renegade Craft Fair someday, just so he could hang a couple of his paintings of oozing vulval teratomas and see how empty that corner of the room would get.

On and off since 2001 Jacobsen has also had a band, Lovely Little Girls, and it's a total package: challenging, dissonant, ever-changing experimental rock, conceptually linked songs, and ambitious themed stage productions that often involve makeup, prosthetics, partial nudity, and large casts of players. His longtime collaborator, bassist Alex Perkolup (also of Cheer-Accident), writes most of the songs; Jacobsen animates their lyrics with his abject, frenzied singing and grotesque, even violent stage presence.

Lovely Little Girls has been sidelined for some time; their Empty Bottle show on Fri 12/16, titled "Cleaning the Filth From a Delicate Frame," is their first since 2008. It's been a couple of years in the making, and Jacobsen and Perkolup only decided to perform it as Lovely Little Girls a few months ago, recruiting six new musicians: guitarist Jim Cooper (Detholz!), keyboardist Jon Beavo (Hot Garbage), drummer Charlie Werber (Guzzlemug, Murmur), saxophonist Cory Bengtsen, and backup singers Carmen Armillas (Cheer-Accident) and Sacha Mullin. Jacobsen described the set to me thusly: "With 'Cleaning' Alex and I are trying to do 'show tunes' in a tolerable and avant-garde way—stripping out all the annoying and execrable Glee-ness of it all and focusing on the abstract storytelling through song structure, ridiculous melodies, and multiple voices/narrators. Jesus Christ Superstar via Beefheart/Frith/Magma. The texts deal with food, sex, humiliation—our usual themes."

-Monica Kendrick, Chicago Reader, 12/13/11

We now have a theatrical, RIO-inspired Zolo group in the USA. The Lovely Little Girls meet the 20-year cycle head-on with a fantastically Euro-styled art rock cabaret that wouldn’t be out of place on Rec-Rec. Their sound and their playing are spot on. The imagery is a little dark for my tastes, but they can look however they like as long as they keep making this music.

-Zoloscope blog

I was excited to see Lovely Little Girls again, and they blew away their last set, which had already been pretty great. They've added some horns, every move of the set seems extremely thought out in a very effective way, and they've gotten heavier, almost like METAL. Scatological and goofy and, yes, "gender-fucked," they somehow hit at a perfect balance between pretentious-as-hell art-faggotry and hilarious self-deprecation.

-blastitude.com
(review of 7/10/03 show at Fireside Bowl)

Gregory Jacobsen's group Lovely Little Girls were superb, by the way. Their crazed crossbreeding of Brechtian narrative menace and Zappa/zuehl theatrics was a bracing rejoinder to just about anything you'd care to name...

-Tom Smith of To Live & Shave In LA
(review of 5/9/07 show at Nihilist)

It's kind of skronky...it's almost fairy-tale-ish, but horribly awry, in a really pretty disgusting way. I don't know.

-Tiffany Minx, Apop Records

These art-damaged locals don't seem too concerned with being the same band from one show to the next- this time singer Gregory Jacobsen, guitarist Alex Perkolup and drummer Eleanor Balson, who've been the core of the group for the past year, have corralled a trumpeter, a backup vocalist, a saxophonist and a bass player. Though there hasn't been a keyboard involved in ages, the band's queasily assaultive sound- think every bad drug experience you had freshman year packed into three minutes- is still reliably influenced by the Screamers. (Jacobsen considers hyperdramatic Screamers front man Tomata Du Plenty a role model.) Their shows are more like psychic warfare than entertainment- but what they're trying to get into your head is that even the most fucked-up music can be fun...

-Jessica Hopper, Chicago Reader   1/24/06

Gregory Jacobsen, aka Candy Shuntz, the ringleader of local act Lovely Little Girls, has been freaking out the few and the proud for some time, showing up to dance on Chic-a-Go-Go wearing a grotesque handmade mask or verbally assaulting listeners of WZRD's Frump! Strumpet! Strife! comedy and sound-collage show with outbursts about poo. Though he's taken part in other musical projects, like the Ritualistic School of Errors and White Sex & the Agenda, Lovely Little Girls is the first you might be inclined to call a "band." For their first show, held at the Butcher Shop space three months ago, Jacobsen actually played an instrument, a big ol' Casio keyboard--but he wasn't exactly untheatrical about it. His face was smeared with off-white paint, his hair contained in crooked pigtails, and he wore an all-spandex outfit consisting of turquoise leggings and a too-small sequined tunic. (Oh, and did I mention his dick was hanging out?) He squawked disgusting near nonsensical lyrics like "Her hips swayed curiously lopsided / Fingers plucking deeply split soiled steaks," occasionally getting right in someone's face to do it. Meanwhile the drummer--in a lobotomy-victim mask and a cardboard crown--blasted a childishly simple beat, and a guy in a wizard costume with a cardboard phallus for a nose moaned and played an equally sparse melody on synthesizer. Every so often another revolting character--a girl in a white satin dress who squirted fake blood from a device hidden between her legs, three monkeylike accordion players--would come onstage and dance spastically as well. Still, the presentation was less G.G. Allin than Henry Darger--twisted, but in a dreamy way. The numbingly repetitive music and intensely disturbing antics are constantly at odds; it'd be pointless for Lovely Little Girls to release a traditional recording, because that great tension so many rock bands strive for between instrumentalists here comes between the visual and the aural.
 
-Liz Armstrong, Chicago Reader
(review of 8/01 show at the Butcher Shop)