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With Marisol inside the MCA, Jason Hammel paints a new canvas
The Lula Cafe chef’s menu is its own form of contemporary art. I 've been obliged to review an excess of high-profile hotel restaurants in 2017, and it's been making me grouchy all year. Even the good...
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Murder metal ushers in holiday cheer at Macabre’s 20th annual Holiday of Horror
What better way to celebrate the joys of the holiday season than by listening to a bizarre, hyper death-metal track titled “What the Heck, Richard Speck?” Local trio Macabre—whose mashup of death...
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The Arkestra lands at Constellation on New Year’s Eve
Afrofuturist big-band leader Sun Ra left the planet 24 years ago, but his legacy has never been in better shape. Many of his classic sides have been remastered and reissued on vinyl, CD, and file...
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Chicago rap prodigy Taylor Bennett comes into his own on Restoration of an...
Few local hip-hop artists have been as interesting to watch grow in the spotlight as Taylor Bennett. Part of the buzz that’s come to surround him is due to his family name: Chancellor Bennett, better...
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Guided by Voices say good-bye to another prolific year while ringing in a new...
In August, Guided by Voices, who re-formed again last year after a sudden breakup in 2014, released their 24th long-player, How Do You Spell Heaven. Even more impressively, the album is the 101st...
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Experimental-metal mainstays Yakuza brings the gang together for a hometown show
Chicago has always been a good town when it comes to producing homegrown metal bands—the south side rocked heavy in the 80s with the likes of Trouble, Cianide, and Macabre—but it didn’t develop the...
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Cloud Rat’s grind punk is versatile, pissed-off, and heavy
Michigan’s Cloud Rat bill themselves as grind punk, but the truth is that they tear, slouch, and ooze across multiple genres of pissed-off and heavy music. Their 2015 full-length Qliphoth (Halo of...
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Russian techno artist Nina Kraviz shows why she’s become known as one of the...
Russian techno producer and DJ Nina Kraviz abandoned a future in dentistry as her international music career started to take shape. Bouncing from one gig locale to the next, she lived out of suitcases...
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Garage punks the Dishes are still a dish best served hot
I take great pleasure in finally writing a preview blurb for Chicago’s great, all-woman (or mostly all-woman, depending on the lineup) garage strutters the Dishes. I could never do it back in their...
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Hip-hop alien Kool Keith again invades Logan Arcade for his annual X-mas...
Who knew that flanking a mutative hip-hop personality with old-school Ghostbusters, Batman, and Wrestlemania pinball machines would feel so right? For the fourth year in a row, Kool Keith—who has also...
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Chicago institution DKV Trio reconvenes for some holiday concerts with...
The holiday season in Chicago often means great things for the city’s musical institutions, as local musicians who spend much of their time on the road coalesce in their hometown. Both reedist Ken...
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Chicago’s master percussionists greet the sun on the shortest day of the year
As befits a pair of master percussionists at the height of their powers, Hamid Drake and Michael Zerang often play abroad. In recent months Drake has toured Europe with Joe McPhee and the DKV Trio,...
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The lineup of the holiday version of annual local hip-hop party Waffle Fest...
This holiday season may God (or whatever you believe in, higher power or otherwise) bless us, everyone, but especially Shawn Childress (aka rapper-producer Awdazcate), who in 2011 brilliantly created...
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Chicago instrumental spellcasters Cave play New Year’s Eve for its first...
A couple of years ago the excellent, trance-inducing Chicago instrumental-rock band Cave quietly vanished. Drummer Rex McMurry moved to North Carolina in November 2015, while Cooper Crain and Rob Frye...
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Luke Skywalker still has lessons to learn in Star Wars: The Last Jedi
Writer-director Rian Johnson honors the franchise’s long history of pedagogy. This review contains spoilers. In 1997, when I was eight years old, my father took me and my sisters to see the first...
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Philadelphia dance wonder DJ Haram balances the nuances of identity in her...
In a 2015 interview with the blog Electric Llama, Zubeyda Muzeyyen, aka DJ Haram, explains the significance of her taking as a stage name a word that refers to things forbidden by Islamic law. Haram,...
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Comedic punk-metal band Green Jellÿ are still looking for new ways to be the...
Since 1981, Green Jellÿ (yes, styled with an umlaut over the y) have doggedly pursued one goal: to be the world’s worst band. And by some indications, that title’s not unfounded.…
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As Black Asteroid, electronic veteran Bryan Black finds the meeting point...
Minneapolis native Bryan Black was fronting an industrial band called Haloblack when Prince invited him to work as an engineer at Paisley Park, a position he held for only six months. Later, he told...
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Xiu Xiu reimagine the eerie, gorgeous soundtrack of Twin Peaks
As groundbreaking and fascinating as the television show Twin Peaks was when it ran in the 90s (and was again during its recent resurrection), it’s doubtful that the David Lynch-directed surrealistic...
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Buddy Guy and his buddies return for a one-month stand
Ever since B.B. King died, there’s been a lot of unnecessary talk about Buddy Guy being the Last Bluesman Standing From the Golden Era. This isn’t strictly true, but among that generation of blues...
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