Update: November 20, 2023. 6:55 PM. The family of Mars Williams announced that he had succumbed to cancer. The concert will continue as a celebration of life. Rest in peace. For more than four decades, saxophonist Mars Williams has been a cornerstone of the Chicago jazz scene. In his youth, he studied with the Association […]
Author Archives: Monica Kendrick
Cosmic Country celebrates five years of inclusive, trippy country music
Five years ago, the Hideout’s talent booker at the time, Sullivan Davis, teamed up with producer and musician Dorian Gehrig to start the Cosmic Country Showcase. Their dream was to bring to life Gram Parsons’s philosophy of a welcoming, expansive, and absolutely trippy form of country music, freed of its hidebound and less imaginative old […]
Thantifaxath and Sunless explore two different realms of metal
Toronto-based black-metal trio Thantifaxath (whose members are deliberately anonymous) released a startling, unusual debut album, Sacred White Noise, in 2014. Since then, though, their recorded output has been tantalizingly sparse: just one EP in 2017. So their second full-length, Hive Mind Narcosis, which they released in June on Dark Descent, had plenty of time to […]
The Scorched Tundra festival hits its lucky 13th year with a diverse battery of heavy sounds
This summer marks lucky 13 for Scorched Tundra, the smartly curated metal festival that Alexi Front launched in 2011 in Gothenburg, Sweden, and in 2016 began running in parallel in Chicago, which he considers Gothenburg’s metal-and-beer sister city. Though the pandemic clipped Scorched Tundra’s wings, it returned last year with a spectacular three-day lineup, and […]
Detroit garage-rock legends the Gories return to the Empty Bottle
When the Gories emerged in Detroit in 1986, on the tail end of the decade’s garage-rock revival, they seemed to have learned from every mistake made by other bands. They produced a sort of platonic ideal of the form: wild, messy, uninhibited, and fortified with the survival instincts of an alley cat. The trio’s swagger […]
Iowa stoner duo Telekinetic Yeti and Philly power trio Stinking Lizaveta bring eclectic, ambitious metal to Chicago
Telekinetic Yeti’s 2017 debut album, Abominable, hit like a fat slab of bloody blubber dropped hard enough on a snow-covered mountainside to cause an avalanche. The Iowa duo’s music stood out for its superheavy stoner-doom riffs as well as for the whimsy and tongue-in-cheek humor in its lyrics (on tracks such as “Stoned and Feathered” […]
Algeria’s Imarhan celebrate resilience and tradition through globally informed desert rock
Imarhan emerged from southern Algeria’s close-knit Tuareg community in 2006. Fans of Tuareg rock greats Tinariwen will already be familiar with the quintet; Imarhan front man Iyad Moussa Ben Abderahmane (aka Sadam) is a cousin of Tinariwen bassist Eyadou Ag Leche, and he’s toured with the band to fill in for members who couldn’t go […]
Futuristic indie-rock juggernaut Brainiac celebrate their legacy with two Chicago reunion shows
The story of Brainiac still haunts Ohio indie-rock fans and appreciators of deliriously weird electronic rock and pop. This Dayton band—who loved to annoy zine editors by styling their name 3RA1N1AC—formed in 1992 and released three brilliant, ever-surprising albums that made them feel like a harbinger of subversive, futuristic rock to come. By the time […]
Chicago metal explorers Yakuza return with Sutra, their first album in more than a decade
Has it really been more than a decade since Yakuza released an album? Yes it has, and I’m probably not the only Chicago metal fan who feels old about it. When the avant-garde metal outfit first sidled onto the local scene in 1999, they threw down a gauntlet: clarinet and saxophone weren’t often thought of […]
Dorthia Cottrell explores the horror and comfort of death on Death Folk Country
Singer-songwriter Dorthia Cottrell hails from King George, Virginia, a rural town about an hour and a half from Washington, D.C. Best known as front woman of underrated Richmond doom-metal band Windhand, Cottrell also makes solo recordings that recall the beauty and terror of the music of her youth—the folk songs she heard with family as […]
Acid King return to form with the powerful Beyond Vision
Acid King’s new full-length, Beyond Vision (Blues Funeral), wasn’t originally intended to be an Acid King record at all. As lead guitarist, front woman, and sole permanent member Lori S. (aka Lori Joseph) told Guitar World magazine in a February interview, she meant to make an experimental collaborative album with guitarist Jason Landrian of Black […]
Kora master Sona Jobarteh channels traditional Gambian music through a modern mindset
Sona Jobarteh was born in London to a family of Gambian griots, musicians and storytellers who maintain the oral tradition that keeps the histories of their people alive. Jobarteh’s family is one of five in West Africa associated with the kora, an instrument that combines features of a harp and a lute, with a large […]
Chicago metal explorers Arriver get personal on Azimuth
Genre-bending Chicago metal quartet Arriver formed in 2006 with a lineup that had plenty of experience with a varied tonal palette: Dan Sullivan and Rob Sullivan contributed to Songs: Ohia and Magnolia Electric Co., while Dan McAdam and Joe Kaplan had played in Viza-Noir. The group are known for concept albums with historical subjects; 2012’s […]
Chicago band Anatomy of Habit explore dark moods on Black Openings
UPDATE as of Sat 2/11/2023, 5:00 PM: Anatomy of Habit had to drop off the bill for tonight’s Cobra Lounge show due to illness, but will reschedule sometime in the future. Kill Scenes and Twice Dark will still be performing. Refunds are available at point of purchase. Chicago band Anatomy of Habit have been around […]
Alash bring traditional Tuvan throat singing to the Old Town School
Alash are a Tuvan trio of singers and multi-instrumentalists Bady-Dorzhu Ondar, Ayan-ool Sam, and Ayan Shirizhik. Founded in 2005, the group perform khoomei, also known as Tuvan throat singing, a traditional vocal style practiced in Tuva, Mongolia, and Siberia, in which singers manipulate their mouths and throats to layer overtones over a fundamental pitch, often […]