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Multidisciplinary Chicago artist Mykele Deville brings hip-hop history to the...
On “Unqualified” Chicagoan Mykele Deville takes breaks from rapping about code-switching and cultural colonization to drop in skits that show the peculiar challenges he’s faced as a black person in a...
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New Zealand singer-songwriter Aldous Harding opens up her voice into dazzling...
On her remarkable new album Party (4AD), New Zealand singer-songwriter Aldous Harding manages to further strip down an already minimal sound while dramatically extending her range. There are a few...
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Saxophonist Nick Mazzarella changes gears within jazz tradition on the...
Alto saxophonist Nick Mazzarella is one the city’s most focused improvisers, a fervent student of jazz history and a staunch adherent of avant-garde tradition. He’s not a conceptualist.…
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On Harvester of Bongloads Goya pile on the sludge
Supersludgy Arizona three-piece Goya open their third full-length, Harvester of Bongloads (Opoponax), with the 20-minute, three-part gauntlet drop “Omen: I. Strange Geometry. II.…
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Twin Peaks: The Return is a bizarre and brilliant retrospective
It's not so much a TV show as an oblique survey of Mark Frost and David Lynch's careers. One problem for anyone trying to write about Twin Peaks: The Return, of which four episodes have already aired...
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The lines of Saul Steinberg’s mind
A new exhibit at the Art Institute exemplifies the genius of the 20th-century artist. Saul Steinberg liked to call himself "a writer who draws," but during the 20th century few draftsmen could...
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The gripping Bright Half Life shows small choices with cataclysmic consequences
Tanya Barfield’s clear-eyed play follows two women over the course of their five-decade-long lesbian relationship. One of the blessings of the human brain is just how much merciful work it does to...
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The new Wonder Woman is OK with men
A blockbuster vehicle for the venerable superhero plays down her radical feminist roots. In the marketing blitz leading up to Wonder Woman, the first big-screen feature to focus on the Amazonian...
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Garland Jeffreys stays in tune with NYC on his latest, 14 Steps to Harlem
Singer-songwriter Garland Jeffreys has had a bit of a resurgence over the past four years after subtly refining the style he originally crafted on his seminal 1973 self-titled solo debut and 1977’s...
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Local jazz trio Hanging Hearts walk the line between manic extroversion and...
On their sturdy second album Into a Myth (Shifting Paradigm), Chicago-Milwaukee trio Hanging Hearts deliriously teeter between mayhem and ecstasy, exploring the collision of the spiritual and the...
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Austin’s the Well serve a giant slab of stoner-doom with Pagan Science
This Austin trio unleashed its second full-length, Pagan Science (RidingEasy Records), last fall to accolades from aficionados of heavy stoner-doom: it’s a solid 40 minutes of slightly hooky riffing...
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Willie Nelson is still very much alive on his new God’s Problem Child
If Willie Nelson is approaching death, he sure isn’t acting the way you’d expect someone to behave when afterlife is imminent. At 84 years old, he’s still releasing an album a year (sometimes two, as...
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Experimental trio Haptic prepare for an impending separation with their...
Local experimental trio Haptic adhere to two constants. One is the involvement of Adam Sonderberg, Joseph Clayton Mills, and Steven Hess, who formed the group in 2005.…
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Bay Area pianist and composer Chris Brown turns his attention to just...
Pianist and composer Chris Brown, who spent his high school years living in Hyde Park, possesses one of new music’s most curious, restless minds. He’s an inveterate explorer who veers from the...
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New York bassist Linda May Han Oh achieves a new level of confidence with...
Also known as Linda Oh, bassist Linda May Han Oh chose to use her full name with the release of her strong new album Walk Against Wind (Biophilia). (The New York-based musician was born in Malaysia...
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The darkness surrounding the music of Nick Cave turns personal on his latest...
Nick Cave began making last year’s quietly intense Skeleton Tree (Bad Seed Ltd.) well before his son Arthur’s tragic fall from a cliff in July 2015, but its brooding tone and crushing, inescapable...
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Local punk-rock legends the Mushuganas abuse the stage one final time once again
For Chicago the reckless mid- to late-90s Crypt Records-style punk rock—with a bit of playful bounce and a lot of fuck-it rock ’n’ roll greaser attitude—was best embodied by its heroes in the...
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Mary Timony revisits her early years to wade into the heady repertoire of Helium
In the last five years or so, guitarist-singer Mary Timony has enjoyed a level of success with Wild Flag and Ex Hex that largely eluded her during her first two decades of making music—but that’s not...
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Brooklyn dance-punk survivors !!! still find life in the genre
In a thoughtful A.V. Club retrospective of early 2000s dance-punk, Reader associate editor Kevin Warwick traced the genre’s flash on the dance floor via the era’s seminal records. “Flash” is an apt...
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Pennsylvania’s Tigers Jaw have figured out the shape of emo to come
For a moment back in 2013 it looked like fourth-wave emo was going to lose one of its brightest lights after Tigers Jaw’s label Run for Cover issued a statement announcing that the Scranton group were...
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