Brock Heasley’s The Shift is a remarkably incoherent farrago of sci-fi tropes and Christian proselytizing.

The post Review: <i>The Shift</i> appeared first on Chicago Reader.

George C. Wolfe’s Rustin leans firmly toward optimism. That’s understandable; this is the first film centering Bayard Rustin, a key civil rights organizer whose influence on the movement has been downplayed in part because of his homosexuality. 

The post Review: <i>Rustin</i> appeared first on Chicago Reader.

The film is successful because it manages to create its own logical, nonsensical rules, which love then snaps.

The post Review: <i>Fingernails</i> appeared first on Chicago Reader.

Singer and guitarist Valerie June takes a broad-church approach to roots music. She incorporates elements of old-time, country, electric blues, rock, R&B, and neosoul into her vision of a single seamless American tradition. A big part of June’s secret is her distinctive voice, simultaneously nasal, rough, and dreamy, which recalls iconic singers such as Sara […]

The post Valerie June makes everything sound like old-time folk appeared first on Chicago Reader.

Popular music has plenty of upbeat anthems that celebrate the performer’s beauty and success—think Beyoncé’s “Irreplaceable” or Olivia Rodrigo’s “All-American Bitch.” It also has lots of downbeat paeans to the performer’s pitifulness, a la Beck’s “Loser” or Radiohead’s “Creep.” Much less common are enthusiastic, danceable tracks that boast of the singer’s ugliness and smallness, which […]

The post Genesis Owusu makes ugly, beautiful funk for freedom appeared first on Chicago Reader.

Gareth Edwards’s The Creator is a movie about AI that is hammered, welded, and spackled together from a whole lot of other better and more coherent films.

The post Review: <i>The Creator</i> appeared first on Chicago Reader.

There aren’t a lot of television shows that make the world a better place by existing. Sex Education is one.

The post Review: <i>Sex Education</i> (Season four) appeared first on Chicago Reader.

In July, I attended a community meeting at the Broadway Armory in Edgewater about the city’s plan to turn the Park District facility into a temporary shelter for asylum seekers. A group of protesters, angry that much of the armory’s programming would be relocated or otherwise disrupted, carried bright yellow signs reading “Don’t Displace Us.” […]

The post The <i>Reader</i>’s guide to World Music Festival Chicago 2023 appeared first on Chicago Reader.

Power and money will scoop out your soul, and fascism is very hard to kill. The real Pinochet died in 2006, but those particular truths, unfortunately, live on.

The post Review: <i>El Conde</i> appeared first on Chicago Reader.

The Body’s music is a remorseless, seemingly eternal trudge of numbing night that frequently contorts itself into a bizarre festering eclecticism, then returns to its fetid, featureless form. Formed in Providence, Rhode Island, the duo of drummer and programmer Lee Buford and guitarist and screamer Chip King (who also supplies electronic weirdness) have proved ominously […]

The post The Body unleashes unpredictably predictable doom appeared first on Chicago Reader.

There is a recent idiosyncratic, smart superhero movie about family and togetherness. It’s called Encanto. I’d suggest watching it and skipping Blue Beetle entirely.

The post Review: <i>Blue Beetle</i> appeared first on Chicago Reader.

The core of Australian four-piece Psycroptic is two prolific Australian brothers, drummer Dave Haley and guitarist Joe Haley, and they’ve been bashing out clotted tendrils of technical death metal with their main project for nearly a quarter century. The band’s early self-released albums are defined by charismatic vocalist Matthew “Chalky” Chalk, who alternated between bloody […]

The post Australian four-piece Psycroptic drown you in epic blackened death metal appeared first on Chicago Reader.

Talk to Me is a by-the-numbers genre horror exercise which could as easily have found a home at Blumhouse. It's elevated, though, by its attention to building sympathetic characters and by its remarkably ruthless willingness to tear those same characters apart. 

The post Review: <i>Talk to Me</i> appeared first on Chicago Reader.

The Out-Laws just wants you to like it. And by the end, I, at least, found myself doing just that.

The post Review: <i>The Out-Laws</i> appeared first on Chicago Reader.

Disinter have been spewing forth evil blackened death metal for more than three decades. The Chicago longtimers have changed their lineup many times since their 1997 debut full-length, Desecrated (Pulverizer)—only guitarists Mike “Bats” Martocci and Mike LeGros have survived from that era to the present. But their sound has maintained an unholy consistency, with fierce […]

The post Disinter will not stop the death appeared first on Chicago Reader.

The problem is that the decent Coen brothers knock-off and the better-than-decent rom-com don't really work together.

The post Review: <i>Maggie Moore(s)</i> appeared first on Chicago Reader.

Inspiration and overcoming are the Hollywood disability default. Jennifer Goodman, RJ Mitte, and their collaborators suggest that there’s a lot more to see.

The post See beyond disability in <i>The Unseen</i> appeared first on Chicago Reader.

I guess the one upside is that it's hard to imagine that the inevitable Extraction 3 will be much worse.

The post Review: <i>Extraction II</i> appeared first on Chicago Reader.

Aaron Lee Tasjan’s 2021 album was called Tasjan! Tasjan! Tasjan! (New West). The title captures the singer-songwriter’s exuberance and hints at his eclecticism—his records pack in so many different styles that listening to one can feel like you’re shuffling between three. Based in East Nashville, he’s perhaps most associated with roots music, per his “East […]

The post Singer-songwriter Aaron Lee Tasjan loves all the genres appeared first on Chicago Reader.

The Texas Rubies are the great Chicago alt-country phenomenon that wasn’t. Lead vocalist Jane Baxter Miller and guitarist and harmony singer Kelly Kessler were Kentucky transplants who met in Chicago in the early 90s and started writing hard-hitting retro-country songs in the tradition of Hazel Dickens and Alice Gerrard. They released one album, Working Girl […]

The post Chicago alt-country darlings the Texas Rubies come on home appeared first on Chicago Reader.

If you’re looking for wit or charm or invention or frills, you should probably skip it. But if you want to see Jennifer Lopez bloodily take apart a bunch of bad guys in the name of maternal love—well, The Mother will take care of you.

The post Review: The Mother appeared first on Chicago Reader.

The film’s rejection of bigotry is undermined by its own uncomfortable assumptions about whose story is worth telling and who gets to represent the community.

The post Review: R.M.N. appeared first on Chicago Reader.

Carlos Conceição has created a smart, strange film that is disjointed because colonialism is a thing of disjointed desires, histories, and deaths.

The post Review: Tommy Guns appeared first on Chicago Reader.

At its core, One True Loves isn’t really a zany screwball film. It’s a dramatic weeper with surprising heart.

The post Review: One True Loves appeared first on Chicago Reader.

Myopic Books in Wicker Park has a ton of poetry on offer, but the prices aren’t that much better than you could find new. The late, lamented Bookman’s Corner in Lakeview sold books so cheap it made it feel like you were stealing them—but there weren’t that many poetry books to steal. Between those extremes, […]

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Miirrors’ sound is as smooth as their name suggests. The Chicago outfit’s debut album, Motion and Picture (Pravda), is filled with giant, radio-ready alterna-rock meticulously designed and arranged for earworm bliss. Formed by singer Brian McSweeney and drummer Shawn Rios, who can trace their friendship back nearly 25 years, Miirrors originally focused on recording, but […]

The post Miirrors’ shining debut reflects the kinship of the band’s members appeared first on Chicago Reader.

Senegalese superstar Baaba Maal has been recording for close to four decades, and at age 69 he still sounds relentlessly, almost eerily contemporary. While his first album, 1984’s Djam Leelii, features himself and his teacher Mansour Seck on acoustic guitars in a mesmerizing, fluid triumph of griot tradition, he’s since embraced electronics and transnational collaboration. […]

The post Senegalese legend Baaba Maal makes retro Afrofuturist music on <i>Being</i> appeared first on Chicago Reader.

It’s a little late in the day for a Garth Brooks parody, but Mickey Reece’s Country Gold is fully aware of its own obsolescence.

The post Review: Country Gold appeared first on Chicago Reader.

A Winnie the Pooh horror film just seemed like it had the potential to be more pointedly cruel. Instead, we got a weirdly anonymous ursine rather than the best bloody bear in the world.

The post Review: Winnie the Pooh: Blood and Honey appeared first on Chicago Reader.

In Kurt Wimmer’s new reboot, a demon in the corn once again possesses the children of a rural town.

The post Review: Children of the Corn appeared first on Chicago Reader.

The limitations of human perception and human existence, and the longing to extend both, are at the center of the Block Museum’s latest exhibit, “The Heart’s Knowledge: Science and Empathy in the Art of Dario Robleto.”

The post <strong>Open your eyes to Science on Screen</strong> appeared first on Chicago Reader.

The wilfully mean-spirited desecration feels at points like wallowing in unpleasantness for its own sake. But the film has a larger point than adolescent snickering. 

The post Review: Unicorn Wars appeared first on Chicago Reader.

The film is much more interested in social embarrassment cringe and gags than it is in any sort of close examination of how racism affects interracial couples.

The post Review: You People appeared first on Chicago Reader.

For the most part, despite its adventurous structure, The Seven Faces of Jane shows us features we’ve seen before.

The post Review: The Seven Faces of Jane appeared first on Chicago Reader.

Norwegian artist Helge Sten, who makes music as Deathprod, trades not in massive dynamic shifts but in uniformly gray ambient soundscapes. He typically uses a variegated array of homemade electronics, samplers, out-of-date processors, and other audio detritus that echo, hiss, and throb like futuristic boilers arduously coming online while retro steampunk conglomerations cough and doppler […]

The post Norwegian electronicist Deathprod embraces a more minimal minimalism on <i>Compositions</i> appeared first on Chicago Reader.

The center of the film is Bale’s performance—a frozen surface which cracks open to reveal icy, rushing depths—and the cold New York landscape, with swirls of snow and bare tree limbs against the stark sky.

The post Review: The Pale Blue Eye appeared first on Chicago Reader.

As soon as you see the ridiculous “Iron Maiden meets fantasy novel with skulls” cover art for Dealer of Souls (Noble Demon) and hear the demi-classical opening, you know what Gomorra have to offer. And these German metalheads do not disappoint. Guitarists Damir Eskic and Dominic Blum blast out adrenaline-pumping, assault-by-lightning thrash riffs, while drummer […]

The post <strong>Gomorra trample all beneath their metal assault</strong> appeared first on Chicago Reader.

Some aging rock legends make music that feels like a shadow of the early work that cemented their fame. Not Nina Hagen, though. On Unity (Grönland), her first album since 2011, the German pop-punk icon unleashes a blast of feral camp that sounds if anything more Hagen than ever. Her distinctive theatrical voice has roughened […]

The post Nina Hagen’s pop-punk politics age Into awesomeness on the new <i>Unity</i> appeared first on Chicago Reader.

Lady Chatterley’s Lover may not have the power to shock that it once did, but in Clermont-Tonnerre’s hands it retains both romantic and social resonance.

The post Lady Chatterley’s Lover appeared first on Chicago Reader.

“I’m starting to turn into someone else . . . again,” moans Luis Vasquez on “Monster,” from his latest album as the Soft Moon, Exister (Sacred Bones). It’s true that Vasquez, who’d been holed up in Berlin during the pandemic, moved to Joshua Tree to record this effort. But whatever else might’ve changed about him, […]

The post <strong>The Soft Moon continues to hammer out industrial darkwave misery</strong> appeared first on Chicago Reader.

Chicago-born, Los Angeles-based rapper Open Mike Eagle is a seemingly inexhaustible font of laugh-out-loud one-liners, and he delivers as always on his latest album, Component System With the Auto Reverse (on his own Auto Reverse label). You need to be careful drinking anything while listening to it, lest uncomfortable snorking ensue when the rapper gets […]

The post Comic art rapper Open Mike Eagle keeps on fighting appeared first on Chicago Reader.

The term “world music” has never been adequate to the task we’ve set it—even in its most benign reading, it implies a division between the listener and the rest of the world. And if that listener is in the United States, our country’s global hegemony in popular music colors the term’s meaning too.  Americans don’t […]

The post The <i>Reader</i>’s guide to World Music Festival Chicago 2022 appeared first on Chicago Reader.

When Santigold emerged in the late 2000s, her hip alterna-pop seemed to waltz out of left field, incorporating elements of every genre she could put her hands on: punk, hip-hop, new wave, dub, and whatever else wasn’t nailed down. More than a decade later, it’s clear to see how her genre-smashing music paved the way […]

The post Santigold is still headed toward a new world on <i>Spirituals</i> appeared first on Chicago Reader.

Wanuri Kahiu’s Look Both Ways in other contexts might simply be a fairly inoffensive feel-good romance riff. As it is, though, the film’s lack of courage is painful and unforgivable.

The post Look Both Ways appeared first on Chicago Reader.

Kehlani’s second album, 2020’s It Was Good Until It Wasn’t (Atlantic), features the brooding, moody, left-of-center R&B that’s become their signature. The singer’s new LP, Blue Water Road (released this spring on Atlantic), is still left-of-center, but its musical palette is significantly lighter and more eclectic, with tinges of folk and orchestral pop. To that […]

The post Kehlani sails into perfect sun-dappled R&B appeared first on Chicago Reader.

I’m sure Bodies Bodies Bodies will have many enthusiastic fans. I’m just at the stage in life where I don’t take much pleasure in watching the kids hurt themselves.

The post Bodies Bodies Bodies appeared first on Chicago Reader.

“I’m a twentysomething / Don’t you think it’s about time?” Chicago singer-songwriter Claudia Ferme, aka Claude, sighs on “Twenty Something,” which opens her debut full-length, A Lot’s Gonna Change (American Dreams). The track breathes and pulses through dream-pop heaven with swirling, chiming guitars and distant, mellow horns. It’s meant to be redolent of a certain […]

The post Chicago singer-songwriter Claude makes dream pop for the youth, young and old appeared first on Chicago Reader.

It’s unlikely that someone’s going to see The Reef: Stalked and go out and murder a bunch of sharks. But the fact that we tend to see nature as victimizing us rather than the other way around does have an effect on the present and future of the planet. 

The post The much worse predator appeared first on Chicago Reader.

The smaller humans who saw the preview were delighted, and their parents didn’t seem to be suffering.

The post DC League of Super-Pets appeared first on Chicago Reader.

If you want to see Crispin Glover’s Olivia Newton-John impersonation, head around the bunny-headed Jesus, past the John Wayne Gacy display, and watch your head down the stairs.

The post Odd Obsession has returned appeared first on Chicago Reader.

California singer-songwriter Cuco (aka Omar Banos) makes distinctively woozy bedroom pop that mixes vocals in Spanish and English with laid-back beats, fuzzy guitar reverb, synth wash, 808s, and the occasional distant bossa nova horn. His summer-romance-and-weed-friendly formula has made him a force on streaming platforms, and rather than mess with success, he keeps the vibe […]

The post Bedroom-pop singer-songwriter Cuco keeps the good vibes flowing appeared first on Chicago Reader.

It’s impossible to listen to DakhaBrakha right now outside a political context; they’re a Ukrainian folk band based in Kyiv. After Russia launched its full-scale war on their country in February, the band published an impassioned anti-Putin post on their website. But long before that explicit statement of solidarity, the four-piece group were using their […]

The post DakhaBrakha create eclectic folk music for an antifascist Ukraine appeared first on Chicago Reader.

The effort is appreciated as far as it goes. But it doesn’t matter how enthusiastically you dial if you end up with a bore on the other end of the line.

The post The Black Phone appeared first on Chicago Reader.

Critics sometimes say that films like Running Man and Battle Royale implicate the viewer. When you watch them, you’re supposed to recognize the ickiness of your own enjoyment of uber-violence. But isn’t the ickiness also part of the enjoyment?

The post Cinema Deathmatch: Round One explores moral-panic entertainment appeared first on Chicago Reader.

Nashville rapper, multi-instrumentalist, and part-time extraterrestrial Namir Blade follows in the space wake of his beloved Sun Ra less through style than through vibes. His new self-produced album, Metropolis (Mello Music), gestures toward Afrofuturism in its woozy synths and hyper-modernistic cover art, but Blade is way too laid-back and into his own loopiness to construct […]

The post Rapper-producer Namir Blade rockets into an Afrofuturist haze appeared first on Chicago Reader.

Prison is a massive, racist source of violence and harm. A film about incarcerated people, especially one purporting to advocate for them, needs to engage with that fact.

The post Chicken appeared first on Chicago Reader.

Philip Glass’s soundtrack for piano, pipe organ, and chorus mirrors the repetition in the summoning spell.

The post Horror is a sound you can’t stop saying appeared first on Chicago Reader.

Congotronics International is rooted in Konono No. 1 and the Kasai Allstars, two bands from the Democratic Republic of the Congo that released music through legendary Belgian label Crammed Discs in the mid-2000s. Those groups’ hyperamplified, percussion-heavy sounds, which Crammed released in a series dubbed Congotronics (also the title of Konono No. 1’s 2004 album […]

The post Congotronics International is a supergroup as big as the world appeared first on Chicago Reader.

If you love Nicolas Cage, you’ll love this film—and who doesn’t love Nicolas Cage?!

The post The Unbearable Weight of Massive Talent appeared first on Chicago Reader.

Prolific experimental percussionist and electronic musician Claire Rousay has created a sprawling body of work that clunks and patters somewhere between noise and silence, music and abstraction. Her new release, Everything Perfect Is Already Here (out April 22 on Shelter Press), consists of two 15-minute ambient explorations that rustle and dissolve in gentle lyrical spasms. […]

The post Experimental musician Claire Rousay makes you listen to everything appeared first on Chicago Reader.

The Bayeux Tapestry dates back to the 11th century, so you can’t really say that high art appreciation of fiber work is new. There’s a big difference, though, between validating a giant record of European military conquest and the recent explosion of curatorial interest in quilting, knitting, embroidery, and clothing. Mrinalini Mukherjee’s monumental draped fabric […]

The post Subverting the dominant paradigm, one stitch at a time appeared first on Chicago Reader.

Africa’s metal scene has been quiet compared to its counterparts on other continents. Duma rectify that, and loudly. Vocalist Martin Khanja (aka Lord Spike Heart) and guitarist and producer Sam Karugu hail from Kenya, and they relocated to Uganda to release their self-titled 2020 debut album on Kampala’s Nyege Nyege Tapes. That label is known […]

The post Duma show that the future of metal is in eastern Africa appeared first on Chicago Reader.

Fans of the eclectic sprawl of Nilüfer Yanya’s 2019 debut album, Miss Universe, may be a little disappointed in her more conventional follow-up; there are no satirical parodies of wellness culture on Painless, and no surprising jazzy sax solos. But if the new record isn’t an advance over its predecessor, its consistency suggests that the […]

The post With <i>Painless</i>, Nilüfer Yanya presents a quietly perfect pop album appeared first on Chicago Reader.

When the world, or the country, wants you dead and forgotten, making unforgettable living music is a kind of defiance. Every performer in Summer of Soul knows that. But no one puts it over with more force than Chicago’s Mahalia. 

The post Best Chicago representation in a groundbreaking music documentary appeared first on Chicago Reader.

Ellis has made it very clear that the emotional core of the film is the suffering of marginalized, displaced, and slaughtered people. Why then are we spending the bulk of the run time supposedly rooting for those who benefit from that slaughter?

The post The Cursed appeared first on Chicago Reader.

Alto saxophonist Alison Shearer had nearly completed her debut solo album when her father, acclaimed photojournalist John Shearer, died in 2019. In the aftermath, the Brooklyn-based musician, who cofounded the ten-piece hip hop group Pitchblak Brass Band and currently plays with eclectic party band Red Baraat, decided to start from scratch. Her new View From […]

The post Alison Shearer debuts with a fusion of grief, joy, and jazz appeared first on Chicago Reader.

This is for people who want to see landscapes blow up and large things dropped onto other large things. Those are the only pleasures on offer.

The post Moonfall appeared first on Chicago Reader.

“Walk around, walk around, walk around, walk around,” the background singers chant, their a cappella harmonies chugging fire like a train bound for glory. Then the clouds open and a high tenor floats out of the sky. “I want,” it says, before swooping up into a falsetto yodel that seems to reach beyond heaven itself: […]

The post How a gospel vocal style walked into Chicago and out to the world appeared first on Chicago Reader.

Disney used to be best known for its children’s animation. But over the last decade the House of Mouse has become the House of Hulk. Princesses and neotenous animal companions haven’t vanished. In terms of market share and screen dominance, they’ve been shouldered aside by the thundering pectorals and power beams of the Marvel Cinematic […]

The post No superman is an island appeared first on Chicago Reader.

Update 12/27: All three of Boy Harsher’s shows at the Empty Bottle have been postponed due to the ongoing COVID-19 surge. New dates have not yet been announced. Founded in Savannah, Georgia, in 2013, Boy Harsher have grown a cult following for their crypt-meets-dance-floor throb and coldly seductive, echoing vocals, notably on the 2014 favorite […]

The post Boy Harsher take darkwave from the dance floor to horror movies appeared first on Chicago Reader.

Chicago group Courtesy have always staggered and glitched across the line between experimental and pop electronics. Their first album, 2011’s Idmatic (Tape Deco), recorded by members Drew Ryan and Kirk Rawlings in Memphis and Chicago, is filled with ambient drone and feedback noise but also illustrates their pop sensibilities; on “Sisters,” for instance, percussive clang […]

The post Chicago electronic group Courtesy go pop but stay weird appeared first on Chicago Reader.

Chicago band Miirrors have cultivated an aura of mystery. Photos of them are hard to come by, and they’ve been reticent even about confirming their personnel. Still, some info has percolated out since they began releasing singles a couple years ago, and we now know the band’s core is multi-instrumentalist Brian McSweeney and drummer Shawn […]

The post Chicago band Miirrors make anthemic alt-rock with glitter and promise appeared first on Chicago Reader.

“A home is a place that’s full of people,” says Chicago guitarist, composer, and improviser Daniel Wyche. “I’ve been inspired by my grandparents’ hospitality. They had this need to welcome tons of people into their home. That’s cultivating what family means.” The first track on Earthwork, Wyche’s new album on local label American Dreams Records, […]

The post Daniel Wyche makes guitar ambience you can feel at home in appeared first on Chicago Reader.

From its first reverb-laden guitar notes, Bnny’s new Everything (Fire Talk) makes me wonder whether the Chicago band have logged some hours watching Twin Peaks. The hushed, ethereal whisper of vocalist and songwriter Jess Viscius channels dream-pop singer Julee Cruise (who sings on the show’s soundtrack), while guitarists Adam Schubert and Timothy Makowski lean into […]

The post Bnny make David Lynch-ian pop music for mourning appeared first on Chicago Reader.

Camilo Lara, who makes music as Mexican Institute of Sound, is hardly the only Latinx artist to meld traditional rhythms with contemporary electronic dance genres (Colombian group Bomba Estéreo, Ecuador-based producer Nicola Cruz, and fellow Ruido Festers Los Amigos Invisibles immediately come to mind). Lara is one of the most high-profile, though; he’s done production […]

The post Mexican Institute of Sound electrifies traditional Latin rhythms appeared first on Chicago Reader.

Brooklyn singer-songwriter Mackenzie Scott, aka Torres, is a master of insular, languid indie pop. But after making it through lockdown and finding inspiration in her partner, visual artist Jenna Gribbon, Scott is in an expansive mood. Her new album, Thirstier (Merge), graced with a glam cock-rock cover painted by Gribbon, features a big, snarling, exuberant […]

The post Torres writes big happy rock love songs for the end of lockdown appeared first on Chicago Reader.

Scott Cortez and Melissa Arpin Duimstra have built a cult audience in their 30 years as Lovesliescrushing—and new music and vinyl reissues are on the way.

The post Lovesliescrushing make shoegaze for a parallel universe appeared first on Chicago Reader.

Brooklyn composer and multi-instrumentalist Taja Cheek, aka L’Rain, has titled her sophomore album Fatigue (Mexican Summer), but she doesn’t sound tired. Her aesthetic is languidly manic, with an eclectic mix of genres and moods bobbing in and out of her layered, psychedelic orchestral pop. Opener “Fly, Die,” kicks off with washes of voices and instrumental […]

The post L’Rain creates glittering, warped pop collages on <i>Fatigue</i> appeared first on Chicago Reader.

“If we stay silent, it will be the end of us,” Mdou Moctar sings in French on the title track of his new album, Afrique Victime (Matador). If there’s one thing you can say for sure about Moctar, it’s that he’s not silent. The Nigerien guitarist keeps one hand on the tradition of Saharan Tuareg […]

The post Mdou Moctar plays the world’s greatest anti-imperialist desert psychedelic guitar appeared first on Chicago Reader.

Last July, local arts and music nonprofit Quiet Pterodactyl put together a sprawling compilation called Situation Chicago to support local music venues struggling during the pandemic. Almost a year later, with another few hundred thousand Americans dead and live music as we once knew it still mostly impossible, the organization has put together a sequel—this […]

The post Chicago comp says we’re still in the same Situation, still caring for one another appeared first on Chicago Reader.

The Jefferson Park EXP concert series brings a wild diversity of sounds to a neighborhood library—and to the Internet.

The post ‘It opened my mind to the possibilities of what music could be’ appeared first on Chicago Reader.

Valerie June’s best-known album, 2013’s Dan Auerbach-produced Pushin’ Against a Stone (Sunday Best), is a raw, playful mix of blues and country. Eclectic and ambitious as that effort is, though, it doesn’t capture June’s full range. On the cover of her new fifth album, The Moon and Stars: Prescriptions for Dreamers (Fantasy), June wears a […]

The post Valerie June leaves her roots for the stars appeared first on Chicago Reader.

When used in the improvisatory style pioneered by performers such as Lionel Hampton, the vibraphone is traditionally a clanging, percussive, hard-charging instrument. The marimba is arguably best known for providing the hip-shaking backbone for many traditional Latin musics. New York composer Patricia Brennan takes both instruments in more delicate and less sweaty directions. Her debut […]

The post Patricia Brennan makes delicate music for mallets appeared first on Chicago Reader.

Though it came out in mid-December, too late to make most “best of 2020” lists, Megalophobe’s Music for Resistance Fantasies (Nefarious Industries) deserves to be remembered as one of the most iconic and painfully lovely summations of the year. Megalophobe is the New York-based solo project of Benjamin Levitt, and he recorded the album to […]

The post Megalophobe offers drones for mourning on Music for Resistance Fantasies appeared first on Chicago Reader.

When it comes to music, Sweden is perhaps most famous for sweetly catchy pop and brutal death metal. Five-piece Electric Hydra finds the spiritual midpoint between those genres on its self-titled debut album by leaning into another Swedish tradition—retro hard-rock revivalism. The record’s cover art brackets the band’s name with two gaping snake maws that […]

The post Electric Hydra blasts the pop metal stoner rock appeared first on Chicago Reader.

UK guitarist and composer Justin Broadrick is best known as a founding member of the industrial metal assault that is Godflesh. But capturing purely annihilatory noise in that pounding maelstrom is not his only musical interest. He formed Jesu in 2003 to focus on postpunk, goth, and the bleaker, lonelier shores of shoegaze, and characteristically, […]

The post Jesu seduces you with melodic bleakness appeared first on Chicago Reader.

Songs don’t so much rise out of Yves Jarvis’s Sundry Rock Song Stock (Anti-) as they swim around, fray, and dissolve. In that sense, the most characteristic track on the Canadian producer and multi-instrumentalist’s new album, the woozily liquid “Ambrosia,” is one of the oddest. Anxiously percolating keyboard and an echoing, violinlike noise wander past […]

The post Yves Jarvis creates gently disintegrating folk music appeared first on Chicago Reader.

As a genre designation, “folk music” can mean a wide variety of things, including early rural Americana, politicized revival strumming, and weird psychedelia. Alexandra Drewchin, who makes music as Eartheater, doesn’t really fit in any of those categories. Instead she approaches folk as chthonic, atavistic druid witchery, making gentle music for sacrificing goats—complete with buzzing […]

The post Eartheater creates fey folk for lush and terrifying rituals appeared first on Chicago Reader.

Inspired by comic books and science fiction, the new Annihilus album Ghanima proves that negative emotions can draw people together, not just drive wedges between them.

The post Annihilus uses black metal’s powers for good appeared first on Chicago Reader.

Guitarist Li Jianhong is fairly unknown in the U.S., but he’s one of the most important experimental musicians in China. Like Sonic Youth and Japanese rock collective Ghost, he straddles and/or blasts his way across the line between psychedelic rock and exploratory noise; he also frequently incorporates a spiritual component inspired by Buddhism and traditional […]

The post Chinese guitarist Li Jianhong takes spiritual psychedelic noise to Europe appeared first on Chicago Reader.

Giuseppe Capotondi’s latest looks at the dark inauthenticity of the art world.

The post The Burnt Orange Heresy critiques the art critic appeared first on Chicago Reader.

Mary Chapin Carpenter’s twangy, peppy hits bounced up the country charts in the 90s, but their cowboy boots always seemed like they pinched a bit. Twenty-some years later, Carpenter’s records have eased into a more comfortable idiom, scuffing up their coffeehouse folk with a bit of rock. On The Dirt and the Stars (Lambent Light), […]

The post Mary Chapin Carpenter finds her folk-pop heart on The Dirt and the Stars appeared first on Chicago Reader.

The spiky, new wavy, herky-jerky pop rock of Mente, the new album from Brazilian singer-songwriter Thiago Nassif, may remind you of Talking Heads. But the link between them arises more from shared influence than from direct inspiration: like David Byrne, Nassif is in love with the fractured tropicalia of Tom Zé, a tripped-out Brazilian genius […]

The post Brazilian singer-songwriter Thiago Nassif pulls off a bizarre tropicalia triumph on Mente appeared first on Chicago Reader.

Kolkata blackened death-metal band Heathen Beast are atheist, antifascist, and pointedly anonymous, and their self-released album The Revolution Will Not Be Televised but It Will Be Heard is 35 minutes of vitriol aimed at the anti-Muslim bigotry of India’s prime minister, Narendra Modi, and the Indian government’s turn toward authoritarianism and hate. The song titles […]

The post Indian death-metal band Heathen Beast tell fascists to fuck off appeared first on Chicago Reader.

Chicago experimentalist Angel Marcloid tries to contain the fractured emotional spectrum of loss with an album for her dead cat.

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Trump hates China in order to better hate the United States; by blaming the Chinese for the virus, he can pretend he’s not at fault for our own dead and our own misery. In that poisoned atmosphere, the new self-titled album by Wu Fei and Abigail Washburn isn’t just a relief but a call to […]

The post Wu Fei and Abigail Washburn bring China and Appalachia together appeared first on Chicago Reader.

Drummer Gerald Cleaver has explored the edges of jazz in a career that’s already stretched over more than four decades. On last year’s What Is to Be Done (Clean Feed) he joined saxophonist Larry Ochs and Wilco guitarist Nels Cline for a set that swayed and jerked about in the space between free playing, ambience, […]

The post Jazz drummer Gerald Cleaver explores electronica on Signs appeared first on Chicago Reader.

If you’re looking for an album to give you courage as you peer out at the apocalypse from behind your living-room blinds, you could do worse than Sampa the Great’s The Return (Ninja Tune). The Zambia-born, Australia-based artist released this sprawling, languid record last September, and it’s full of 90s beats, heart-on-the-dashiki rapping, and such […]

The post Sampa the Great makes uplifting spiritual soul on The Return appeared first on Chicago Reader.

For 19 years, the Chicago Underground Quartet’s first album was their only album—but now longtime collaborators Rob Mazurek, Jeff Parker, and Chad Taylor have recaptured the group’s freewheeling jazz spirit.

The post The Chicago Underground Quartet bottle their lightning again appeared first on Chicago Reader.

Update: To help slow the spread of COVID-19, this show has been postponed until a date to be determined in the future. Contact point of purchase for refund or exchange information. Are Possessed a band or a hive of slavering meat puppets inhabited by time-traveling demons from the future? The case for the latter is […]

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