Category: Music Review

Femi Adigun, aka Chicago rapper Femdot (styled as femdot.) delivers his quicksilver raps with a smooth confidence that draws me in like a giant horseshoe magnet in an old cartoon. Lately I’ve mostly thought about one particular track from his September release Free Samples Vol. 2 (Delacreme Music Group): “Missy Elliott,” which reminds me less […]

Pauli the PSM is saucy—and he knows it. He’s an influential figure in the British music industry and a professional hottie who’s consciously taken his sweet time building a solo career. He entered the field as Pauli Lovejoy after winning the UK’s Young Drummer of the Year award in 2005. He’s gone on to be […]

Anyone who’s ever told you to keep your eye on the ball has clearly never been hit by a bat. El Kempner, who makes music as Palehound, has learned the lesson instilled in me during a decade of midwestern softball: the importance of staying vigilant toward potential dangers and adversaries in your midst. “Suckers will […]

The influence that composer and musician La Monte Young has exerted far exceeds the size of his slender and erratically available discography. Born in 1935, he presented some of his early compositions at a concert series he programmed at Yoko Ono’s loft in 1960, and they helped shape minimalist composition and conceptual art. He accidentally […]

New York dance DJs and producers DJ Swisha and Kush Jones befriended each other through Soundcloud, but they soon became part of the same footwork-loving collective, the Juke Bounce Werk crew. Their collaborative tracks thrum with giddy looseness and always feel like they could change shape at a moment’s notice. In February, they self-released (Respectfully), […]

Slow Pulp have been through a lot. First, lyricist and lead vocalist Emily Massey was diagnosed with Lyme disease and chronic mononucleosis. Next, the pandemic hit. Then, as the four-piece band, which formed in Madison before moving to Chicago in 2018, worked on their debut LP, 2020’s Moveys, Massey’s parents were injured in a serious […]

Update Wed 11/8: New tickets have been released for all three shows. If you’re a Nine Inch Nails fan who has yet to heed the siren bark of Skinny Puppy, it’s not too late to fix your life. NIN came up in the scene opening for these Canadian industrial pioneers, and in a mid-90s interview with […]

During the great rock ’n’ roll explosion of the early 60s, American and British acts hogged much of the limelight, but people got together in their garages (or other informal spaces) and started bands around the world. Los Johnny Jets formed in 1964 in Tamaulipas, Mexico, and made sure that the “garage” sound took off […]

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 […]

Omaha five-piece Bib play hardcore like the last survivor in a horror film, army crawling through the mud to escape something so nasty they don’t dare look back. On the August release Live in Liverpool (Convulse), Bib make their case as skilled purveyors of filth: they can use their collective brawn to stir up a […]

Ana Everling channels a world of music through her singing. Born in Moldova, she studied voice, piano, composition, and music theory at a conservatory, then went on to study jazz performance. But when she moved to Chicago in 2010, she put her music career on the back burner for years as she settled into her […]

No one can accuse Awakebutstillinbed guitarist, vocalist, and bandleader Shannon Taylor of not knowing emo. Her fidelity to the genre’s traditional use of all-lowercase letters (she styles the band’s name and all its song and album titles that way, even though the Reader doesn’t) and her equally traditional omission of spaces between words ought to […]

It’s not difficult to find good live hip-hop in Chicago, but this headlining show by east-coast veteran Skyzoo, aka Gregory Skyler Taylor, isn’t merely good—it reads more like quintessential. The pedigreed Brooklyn-born rapper (he grew up a block away from the Notorious B.I.G.) has had a fruitful career. He’s dropped more than 20 albums and […]

When UK noise pioneers Throbbing Gristle filed their terminal report in the early 1980s, a legion of followers stood willing to continue the industrial collective’s research into humanity’s less comfortable impulses. Among those who took up the investigation was Elgin resident Dan Burke, who dubbed his own project Illusion of Safety. Early on, his combinations […]