The mission of the Arabesque Music Ensemble (formerly the Chicago Classical Oriental Ensemble) is to recreate the sounds of the Near East from earlier periods. They are like early music consorts in classical music and New Orleans revivalists in jazz.

Even when Bob Mould was a young punk fronting Hüsker Dü during the 1980s, he grasped that mature intelligence and loud electric guitars could forge a near-seamless partnership. Like Pete Townshend and Richard Thompson—his closest artistic forefathers—he hasn’t turned away from the knowledge, welcome and unwelcome, that age can bring. On District Line, the unwelcome knowledge is that growing older is no guarantee, where the heart is concerned, of growing wiser. The welcome knowledge is that Mould can still crank pain through amplifiers and catalyze it into something that can feel like catharsis.