This aint your momma’s Courtyard Cafe anymore. And, it ain’t your professor getting coffee’s  or students who don’t want to study in the library’s either. Sure, there’s always been music in the venue, but this semester has been blowing the scene out of the water. So, what gives?

More dates, more money and timing, apparently, according to Kristin O’Brien, Courtyard Cafe’s Assistant Manager. “We started off the year with a lot more dates to book and with that came a larger budget,” she says. “Unfortunately, we didn’t know exactly what the budget was until late last semester. Thus we have significantly better quality shows this semester.”

And, as we know, she’s not exaggerating. Not only are SSLYBY and Company of Thieves playing this Sunday, Smoking Popes in February and the much talked about Hold Steady holding down the Union fort in April, it seems that the Courtyard keeps silently dropping bombs on their MySpace page’s showlist, bettering and bettering the concert list of this semester

An acoustic show with The Mountain Goats and John Vanderslice was just announced, and other show news — Maserati on March 13th, Decibully on May 1 and Miniature Tigers, a band I was told to check out literally yesterday, who will be playing with Maps & Atlases — has been sneaking out, too.

It’s a fair assumption that most of us agree that the venue itself isn’t all that spectacular (stepping up a half-foot to get onstage takes the excitement away from bum-rushing it, I suppose), but I gotta hand it to them — Courtyard is doing wonders for the UC music scene over the course of the next few months. Visit their MySpace for more show information, and stay tuned here for more music news in the coming weeks.

(Photo via)

Well….maybe “Courtyard or Die” wasn’t the best headline I could have used to provide options for yesterday evening’s activities. You know, considering you all sided with attending Frightened Rabbit’s inferably enthralling performance, while I sided with the torturous process of trying to have doctors poke and prod me to find out what sickness or death sentence would be bestowed upon myself while stuck between two nature-scene-painted walls of Provena.

I set out the two options — Courtyard, one, Die, the other — and unfortunately, I sided with the choice that provides its own reaper. A painful, long choice that yielded 4 hours spent in the waiting room reading and re-reading Elle while ignoring the town crazies screaming and crying in their chairs, all while counting down the minutes until Frightened Rabbit’s set, hoping and hoping I’d make it there in time. And, when I didn’t, it only got worse. Between spacing out during a urine test and forgetting to utilize the pee shot glass handed to me and having an IV burst during a CT scan, the blood and fluid going everywhere clearly became a metaphor of the non-concert option I had opted for. Well, either that, or a symbol of how next time, I should probably try to get sick in the Chicagoland area.

So, that’s my excuse for not attending the one concert I was insanely excited for this semester. If anyone has any tales or tunes from the show, feel free to post in the comment section.

Sigh.