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On Thx, indie-rock act Lomelda builds entire worlds with just a few musical...
Hannah Read—the twentysomething Texan who records and performs wistful, intimate indie rock under the name Lomelda—isn’t the first and won’t be the last person to write a song about the long stretches...
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LA singer-songwriter Bedouine crafts weightless songs of grace, optimism, and...
Bedouine is the moniker of singer-songwriter Azniv Korkejian, a woman of Armenian descent born in Syria and raised in Saudi Arabia before her family won a green-card lottery and moved to the U.S. The...
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Nashville protopunk Ron Gallo is ready to give you an earful about the...
Ron Gallo channels his contempt for the world into the songs that fill last year’s Heavy Meta (New West), a snarling assault on selfishness and phoniness set to sharp, ringing 70s protopunk. The...
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Country singer Lee Ann Womack paints a bracing portrait of life’s...
On her latest album, The Lonely, the Lonesome & the Gone (ATO), country singer Lee Ann Womack brings nuance, depth, and emotional range that comes with age, dispatching the sort of bromides...
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New York School composer Christian Wolff shares his open-ended conceptions of...
Christian Wolff is the only living member of the New York School, the coterie of composers that revolved around John Cage during the 1950s and included Morton Feldman, Earle Brown, and David Tudor....
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Chicago rapper Phil G studied rap’s past to build a better future on PEACE
Chicago rapper Phil G clearly loves hip-hop’s golden age; his proclivity for skeletal percussion that bisects the air every time a drum beat kicks in and the stylistic elements that have flavored his...
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Cam’ron continues his reign as the weirdo rap king
Harlem’s Cam’ron is the undisputed king of out-there, freaky rappers, having paved the way for weirdo individualism in hip-hop with his wardrobe of ankle-length mink coats and head-to-toe, bright-pink...
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LA underground punks No Age return from a five-year absence with a punishing...
Five years can be a lifetime in the career of a postpunk band, but that’s how long it’s been since the LA duo No Age dropped a new record. Singer and guitarist Randy Randall and drummer Dean Spunt...
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The saxophonist and percussionist come together for their first local duo...
Before he moved to Amsterdam in 2016, percussionist Frank Rosaly was an integral part of Chicago’s improvised music scene, and his departure left many of his musical partnerships hanging. Rosaly’s...
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Destroyer’s Ken simplifies symbolism with similes and simpering
Dan Bejar, aka Destroyer, is well-known for being a “literary” act. The description is fitting: front man Dan Bejar’s lyrics feel like symbolist poetry, with lines of varying lengths crammed with...
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Quin Kirchner makes a stunning debut as leader of a dynamic quintet rooted in...
Drummer Quin Kirchner has quietly made himself an indispensable presence in Chicago’s music scene since Hurricane Katrina drove the Oak Park native to return from New Orleans in 2005. He’s now a...
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New York synth merchants Forma push into more meditative terrain on Physicalist
New York trio Forma promised some changes with Physicalist, their 2016 debut for Kranky Records, but while it's a retreat from the techno flirtations they served up on their 2014 EP Cool Haptics (The...
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Bedroom cloud rapper Kitty reinvents herself on her first proper full-length,...
In 2012, a teenage Claire’s employee from Daytona Beach, Florida, going by the X-Men-inspired alias Kitty Pryde released “Okay Cupid,” a dreamy and dreary cloud-rap track that quickly went viral. Just...
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Classical violin star Jennifer Koh uses her rising fame to advocate for new...
Violinist Jennifer Koh, who was born and raised in the Chicago area, is that rare rising star in classical music with a fluency in both standard repertoire and new music. Her most recent album,...
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Virtuosic Russian pianist Alexander Melnikov makes his solo debut in Chicago...
In 2016 the prolific Russian pianist Alexander Melnikov made his overdue Chicago debut with his frequent collaborator, the great German violinist Isabelle Faust. Now he’s back for a solo performance...
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Shred-pop pioneers Sleigh Bells learn to thread the past with the present
After building a reputation as the world’s first great shred-pop standard-bearers—bolstered by hardcore-breakdown guitar riffs that sonically resemble something close to a New Year’s Eve glitter...
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Drummer Tom Rainey’s trio with guitarist Mary Halvorson and saxophonist...
I had listened to Hotel Grief (Intakt) several times before I noticed that leader and drummer Tom Rainey, guitarist Mary Halvorson, and saxophonist Ingrid Laubrock were credited for improvising all...
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Samantha Fish turns from blues to roots rock, and vice versa
In the past, eclectic roots exploration with a beat was the purview of rootsy rock acts like Rod Stewart or the Band. More recently, the torch has been picked up by blues acts.…
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Partner make massive power-pop celebrating queer Canadian life for all its...
On the Bandcamp biography for Partner, a Canadian rock group led by guitarists and singers Josée Caron and Lucy Niles, the duo say they’re best friends. From the sound of their debut, September’s In...
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Swedish rapper Yung Lean makes his strongest contributions to global hip-hop...
In the early 2010s, Yung Lean arrived as an oddity: a white Swedish rapper who blurred together a clutch of hip-hop sounds made by black musicians from the U.S. As with any case of an artist taking...
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