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MUNA find compassion and hope in conflict
Something strange happened to the idea of “the 80s” over the last decade. After years of mockery and pastiche, a new crop of artists like Carly Rae Jepsen, M83, and the 1975, along with producers such...
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Antietam’s powerful new album essays life’s travails, and seems to find the...
People tend to talk about long-lived rock bands as though it’s surprising or admirable that a group of folks can stick together for so many years. But I think belonging to a band can be the thing that...
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Lavender Country come to town more than four decades after releasing the...
Lavender Country front man Patrick Haggerty is a true American rebel. Raised on a tenant dairy farm in Washington State, Haggerty grew up knee-deep in 40s and 50s country music—he spent his childhood...
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Open Mike Eagle revisits the traumatic destruction of the Robert Taylor Homes...
Atop a low-groaning guitar that lumbers through “My Auntie’s Building,” Hyde Park native Open Mike Eagle raps, “They blew up my auntie’s building / Put out her great-grandchildren / Who else in...
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Kansas City three-piece Giants Chair show how some 90s emo bands went hard
In this, the decade of emo’s revival, with young bands refashioning the sound as a vital component of contemporary indie-rock and the 90s bands that inspired them playing reunion shows to larger...
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Gordon Grdina, Kenton Loewen, and François Houle build improvised sound...
The Vancouver duo of guitarist Gordon Grdina and drummer Kenton Loewen have formed a serious bond over two decades of collaboration, shifting the tone of their partnership depending on context or the...
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On its new George Lewis portrait album, Chicago’s Ensemble dal Niente vividly...
George Lewis initially made his mark as one of the greatest trombonists in the history of jazz, but as he gravitated toward more compositional work, his use of improvisation grew more abstract and...
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The strengths of the annual Hyde Park Jazz Festival are highlighted by two...
One feature of the Hyde Park Jazz Fest that has quietly distinguished it over the last few years is the prevalence of dynamic duos, whether the pairings are new or seasoned, improvised or driven by...
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Wovenhand’s swaggering celestial explorations revitalize Americana rock
Much of the country’s Americana, roots rock, and alt-country may exist in living homage to what Greil Marcus famously called the “old, weird America” (as if America had somehow ceased to be weird)—but...
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Three former Chicagoans—baritone saxophonist Josh Sinton, drummer Chad...
Baritone saxophonist Josh Sinton first played with bassist Jason Ajemian and drummer Chad Taylor in the 90s when they lived in Chicago, but they never formed a combo until recently, when they...
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Tales of seduction and betrayal light up Reeling: The Chicago LGBTQ+...
Hello Again, a musical reimagining of Arthur Schnitzler’s La Ronde, opens the fest’s 35th edition. In French, la petite mort—"the little death"—refers to orgasm and its aftermath. There are lots of...
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Chicago Renaissance celebrates the people who built the city’s cultural scene
A new book examines the local art and literature milieu in the early 20th century. Anyone who lives in Chicago who has any artistic ambition whatsoever has seriously considered, at least once, moving...
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Brennen Reeves can laugh about his double lung transplant
The comedian’s one-man show, Breathe, is full of life. When I interviewed him over the phone last week, comedian Brennen Reeves was huffing and puffing while taking a walk on a hot day in Savannah,...
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Blvd aims to conjure the glamour of 1950s Hollywood
But it’s chef Johnny Besch’s food that transcends the postwar Sunset Strip cliches. Sooo, it's been a long, hard week, and you want to go out and be treated like a dead movie star. That's the kind of...
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Love is the drug in Andrzej Żuławski’s L’Important C’Est D’Aimer
Romantic passion consumes everything in this 1975 drama from the director of Possession. Polish-born director Andrzej Żuławski was a master at depicting worlds divorced from traditional moral order,...
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California bands Wand and Peacers transmit wonderfully disparate strains of...
Three years ago, Cory Hanson’s LA band Wand released three albums of melodically rich psych-rock in 13 months. The group then fell silent, but Hanson didn’t slow down: last year he dropped his first...
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Ka Baird of Spires wrangles sonic spirit shapes on her new solo album
Ka (née Kathleen) Baird is half of Spires That in the Sunset Rise. While the ensemble has been based in Decatur, Chicago, and Madison, and its recent LP title Illinois Glossolalia (Feeding Tube)...
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Unequaled excitement hits the windy city as Derv Gordon of cult UK band the...
Very few bands can claim to be equally revered by lovers of psych, mod, ska, punk, funk, R&B, disco, glam, and bubblegum pop, and had a racially integrated lineup in the turbulent 60s—and had...
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Japanese Breakfast get expansive on Soft Sounds From Another Planet
Michelle Zauner launched Japanese Breakfast as a solo project amid massive life changes. In 2014, while fronting her Philly emo band Little Big League, her mother was diagnosed with Stage IV cancer,...
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Canadian indie supergroup Broken Social Scene are the same as they ever were...
You can’t talk about Canadian indie rock in the 2000s without Broken Social Scene, in part because the group is a community unto itself. This small musical army’s ranks include members of Metric,...
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