Author Archives: Monica Kendrick

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

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” […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 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 […]