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Drummer Chad Taylor, a quintessential ensemble player, creates atmosphere and...
Over the past couple years, drummer Chad Taylor has been on fire, contributing to some of my favorite recordings, among them albums by trumpeter Jaimie Branch, bassist Eric Revis, and pianist Mara...
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On the weird, gorgeous All Nerve, the Breeders sound better than they have in...
Revisiting the two albums the Breeders made with drummer Jose Medeles and bassist Mando Lopez, 2002’s Title TK and 2008’s Mountain Battles, I realized I desperately wanted them to be better than they...
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Frankie Cosmos delivers another aching, poignant record of two-minute...
And just like that, Frankie Cosmos—otherwise known as Greta Kline, and otherwise tied to an obligatory footnote, given that her parents are Phoebe Cates and Kevin Kline—released her third studio...
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Dael Orlandersmith channels the voices of Ferguson in Until the Flood
Derived from dozens of interviews, a series of eight monologues shows a wide range of perspectives. There's been no respite in the American crisis of police officers fatally shooting civilians at a...
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Lyric’s Jesus Christ is, indeed, a superstar
He causeth the amplifiers to thunder and glitter to rain down upon the stage. This year, Lyric Opera has broken with its mission of presenting a classic of American musical theater as a sort of...
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Chicago MC HeffyRaps finesses his sound at just the right moment on the EP...
On a March episode of Roy French’s Chicago rap YouTube series 106 & Clark (a riff on defunct BET show 106 & Park), HeffyRaps talked about focusing on a specific sound on his latest...
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Loma, a collaboration between Cross Record and Jonathan Meiburg of...
Although I’ve tried often in the past, I’ve never been particularly moved by the music made by either Shearwater or former Chicagoans Cross Record, but there’s something about Loma, the new project...
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Japanese percussionist Midori Takada basks in rediscovery with hypnotic and...
A little over a year ago, New York label Palto Flats collaborated with Swiss imprint WRWTFWW to reissue Midori Takada’s beautifully meditative 1983 solo album Through the Looking Glass, galvanizing an...
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Now a quartet, Swiss pianist Nik Bartsch’s Ronin’s remains undiminished in...
After Ronin, the long-running band of Swiss pianist and composer Nik Bartsch, dropped its 2010 studio album, Llyria (ECM), the group experienced some major personnel shifts. In 2011 six-string bassist...
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Spacey metal trio Mutoid Man shreds a little less and leans into pop in its...
When Mutoid Man formed in 2012 it seemed its goal was simply to shred; and shred it did. Originally conceived as the two-piece of Stephen Brodsky of prog-rock-space-metal act Cave In on guitar and...
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Exploratory guitarist Yontan Gat finds inspiration across the world on his...
Israel-born, New York-based guitarist Yonatan Gat is still best known for his stint in Tel Aviv trio Monotonix, who made a lasting impression on rock audiences last decade with their maniacal...
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Pianist and composer Vijay Iyer demonstrates his elasticity and imagination...
Composer and pianist Vijay Iyer has taken advantage of his heightened visibility as a Harvard professor, MacArthur fellow, and ECM Records artist to pursue multiple projects, a puzzle of disparate...
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Former Chicago guitarist Andrew Trim reunites with locals to tackle the...
The longer jazz exists, the more it broadens and splinters into new directions—a situation that in recent decades has not only made it harder to define but also to determine its high-water marks....
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Instrumental duo Sun Speak gets a voice through a crystalline collaboration...
The first time I heard “Bogalusa,” the soulfully grooving jam that closes Sun Speak’s new album, Sun Speak With Sara Serpa (Flood Music), I had to double-check to make sure it wasn’t a cover. It has a...
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As Rival Consoles, London electronic producer Ryan Lee West explores subtlety
Last month London DJ and producer Ryan Lee West (aka Rival Consoles) told PopMatters that his latest LP, April’s Persona (Erased Tapes), has “lots of subtlety across the record that excites me more...
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Seattle hip-hop duo Shabazz Palaces create their own norms on their two...
Last June, when Rolling Stone contributor Andrew Matson asked Shabazz Palaces’ Ishmael Butler about the negative critiques of social media he’d gleaned from the songs on the Seattle duo’s 2017 albums,...
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Radio Anago is Brendan Sodikoff’s sushi cave under the deep dark sea . . .
Hogsalt Hospitality takes a pure, respectful approach to fish amid River North’s culinary cliches. A young woman arrived late to join two friends at Radio Anago, a new Japanese restaurant in River...
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Reality Is an Activity imagines a new, poeticized world order
The spirit of Wallace Stevens animates Barrie Cole's whimsical new play. Atop an imaginary Tennessee hill, poet Wallace Stevens famously placed an imaginary jar, which "took dominion everywhere" and...
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Julia Sweeney is done making terrible movies
The former SNL cast member, now Older and Wider, looks back on life post-Pat. Former Saturday Night Live cast member Julia Sweeney considers herself "the Al Jolson of androgyny." She's best remembered...
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Columbinus looks back on April 20, 1999
It’s impossible to ignore the fact that the young ensemble have grown up in a new century of seemingly endless escalating gun violence in America. The Yard, a professional company of teenage actors,...
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