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Tennyson's mellow electronica flows on Different Water
Five years ago, Canadian brother-sister duo Tennyson were often seen as a prodigy act. Keyboardist and producer Luke Pretty was 17 when the group began to tour and record; drummer Tess Pretty was only...
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Futuristic J-pop trio Perfume brings a breath of fresh air to the US tour...
Perfume has been at the top of the Japanese pop scene for more than a decade, so it’s easy to forget that the trio, which formed in Hiroshima in 2000, had once been on the verge of quitting, after a...
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Ex Hex's glammy power-pop smolders on It's Real
On Ex Hex’s 2014 debut, Rips, guitarist-vocalist Mary Timony of Washington, D.C., post-punk royalty Helium and Autoclave went pop in a new trio. On the brand-new It’s Real, Timony and Co. reign it in...
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Mdou Moctar is ready to rock
The story of Mdou Moctar’s early years reads like show business boilerplate. Growing up in a conservative rural town in central Niger, he had neither the money nor parental permission to buy a guitar,...
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Chicago workhorse drummer Tommy Carroll moves towards pop on Listening
Chicago drummer Tommy Carroll first came to prominence as a skateboarder. Blind since he was two years old, he picked up the sport in third grade, and by age 15 his skills and dedication caught the...
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Lola's Coney Island stands for Detroit
There's a dog in the fight in Humboldt Park. Chicago has enough hang-ups about hot dogs. The last thing our homegrown dog Nazis need to do is get into Detroit's business.…
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Chicago rappers Jed Sed and Walter J. Liveharder transcend the Wes Anderson...
Hip-hop has a great way of encouraging nerdiness. By that I don’t mean nerdcore, a rap subgenre so focused on geek culture that it reeks like a Trekkie who’s stayed at C2E2 too long to shower between...
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Exploratory east-coast guitar duo Elkhorn play their first Chicago show
John Fahey first incorporated psychedelia into his American Primitive approach to acoustic guitar in 1966, when he ran the tape backward on “Knott’s Berry Farm Molly.” Cosmic-minded pickers have been...
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Led by original drummer Bobby Caldwell, 70s cosmic rockers Captain Beyond...
As much as I love the music of eras past, I’m pretty skeptical of band reunions—especially when the number of founding or classic-era members begins to dwindle. Case in point: 1970s cosmic rockers...
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Thee Casual Hex prove that the Beatles aren't dead yet
Nothing has made me feel quite as old and irrelevant as my 15-year-old son telling me he hates the Beatles. He insists that their music is simplistic, boring, and unlistenable; he'd rather listen to...
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Experimental synth duo Xeno & Oaklander go pop on Hypno
Brooklyn duo Xeno & Oaklander (aka Sean McBride and Liz Wendelbo) have been blending electronic experimentation with pop music for five full-length albums and more than a decade, layering strange...
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The Squirrel Nut Zippers are still giving ’em hell on Beasts of Burgundy
You wouldn’t be alone if your first response to a Squirrel Nut Zippers concert listing was to wonder, “Are they still around?” Ardent fans excepted, listeners mostly lost track of the Zippers after...
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Chicago trio Pixel Grip twist indie-pop and dance into sultry sounds
Local multimedia collective and label Feeltrip has carved out a niche releasing music by outre indie-pop bands and far-out dance artists, including one group who do a great job bridging those worlds:...
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Soul balladeer Lee Fields strikes the perfect balance on It Rains Love
The recording career of Lee Fields extends at least as far back as 1969, but he was considered little more than a footnote in R&B history until the late 1990s and early 2000s, when he emerged as a...
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Chicago indie rocker J. Fernandez strikes mellow gold on Occasional Din
In our new era of mellow Chicago indie rock, when Whitney’s gentle “country soul” has earned praise from Elton John and Paul Cherry’s incandescent yacht rock rakes in Spotify streams by the millions,...
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The Portland Cello Project juxtaposes Radiohead, Coltrane, and Bach on an...
The Portland Cello Project was created in 2006 to bring the cello into new spaces and pair it with unlikely source material, and it’s since juxtaposed a wide variety of reconfigured pop, rock, and rap...
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Doom pioneers Electric Wizard worship at the altar of horror films, stoner...
You can’t accuse British doom pioneers Electric Wizard of forgetting their roots—after 25 years and eight full-lengths, their Black Sabbath worship shows no signs of abating. They even titled their...
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Oakland’s Ulthar sharpen their voracious appetite for death metal on Cosmovore
The cover art for Cosmovore, the latest album from Oakland metal trio Ulthar, is immediately arresting: it’s an illustration of a group of plantlike monstrosities that each appear to be vomiting...
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Angela James makes gentle music for children—and their parents too
For most parents, the phrase "children's music" triggers terrifying flashbacks to annoying sing-alongs—Raffi’s "Baby Beluga," for instance, or anything by that purple monstrosity, Barney. Fear not,...
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Chicago singer-songwriter Tatiana Hazel builds toward her pop future one song...
Tatiana Hazel’s musical career put down its first root a decade ago, when the Chicago Latinx artist taught herself to play guitar at age 11. Two years later, she started uploading acoustic,...
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