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Chicago emo acts helped raise the national profile of the fourth-wave scene in the early 2010s, but most of them had gone on hiatus or broken up by the time Retirement Party dropped their debut EP, 2017’s Strictly Speaking. Retirement Party not only filled a void in the city but also manifested new energy with subtly retooled combinations of familiar emo, pop-punk, and indie-rock tropes—on their 2018 full-length debut, Somewhat Literate, their workmanlike rhythm section heats up the languid guitars till they smolder....

As I get older, I warm up more and more to laid-back Americana, delving far beyond the tunes of Gram Parsons, Gene Clark, and Townes Van Zandt that I revered as a wee lad. I’ve sought out vintage practitioners of acoustic twang such as Country Funk, Uncle Jim’s Music, and Hearts & Flowers, who are just as good but a bit more obscure—though of course, each band imploded after an album or two....

In this Black Panther moment, which has tapped into and expanded the recent interest in Afro-Futurism, and inspired by the screening of Haile Gerima’s 1993 film Sankofa on Monday by Doc Films and by last week’s passing of acclaimed Burkinabe director Idrissa Ouédraogo, we are focusing this week on five key African films from Senegal, Mali, Mauritania, and Burkina Faso. Yaaba Idrissa Ouedraogo’s second feature (1989), from Burkina Faso, focuses on a young boy (Noufou Ouedraogo) and his female cousin (Roukietou Barry) as they befriend an old woman in their village (Fatimata Sanga) who’s treated as an outcast and accused of being a witch....

Welcome to the Reader’s new cannabis column To Be Blunt. We’re here to answer your canna questions with the help of budtenders, attorneys, medical practitioners, chefs, researchers, legislators, and patient care advocates. Send your queries to tobeblunt@chicagoreader.com. We’ve enlisted Larry Mishkin, a local attorney who specializes in cannabis law, to tackle this one for us. His response, which has been edited for length and clarity, is provided for informational purposes only, and should not be construed as legal advice....

When rappers began to gravitate towards singing at the beginning of this decade, Kirk Randle, better known as Kirko Bangz, infused his vocals with the spirit of his hometown, Houston, and the city’s influence is all over his breakout 2011 single, “Drank in My Cup.” The song’s title is an obvious reference to the recreational abuse of cough syrup popularized in Houston hip-hop, and its glacial pace and resonant melody are steeped in the southern swang of H-Town rap....

All her life, DePaul professor Kathleen Rooney was a fan of Belgian painter René Magritte. A writer herself, Rooney describes Magritte as “a writer’s painter. His work is very literary and poetic.” In July 2014, her friend and fellow faculty member Eric Plattner suggested they go see “Magritte: The Mystery of the Ordinary, 1926-1938,” an exhibit at the Art Institute of Chicago. Little did she know that this trip to the museum was the beginning of a project that would consume the next two years of her life....

Ever since guitarist Sandy Ewen moved from Texas to New York City in 2017, she’s been a prolific performer, both at conventional venues (Bushwick Public House, Downtown Music Gallery) and at house shows. Sometimes she’ll gig more than once a day, improvising with the likes of Stephen Gauci, Daniel Carter, Maria Chavez, and Michael Vatcher. Ewen eschews traditional playing methods and technological enhancements, including effect pedals, in favor of a tactile, action-oriented approach to the electric guitar....

Through the Elevated Line honors Tennessee Williams and A Streetcar Named Desire,” writes Silk Road Rising artistic director Jamil Khoury in a program note, “yet it was never intended to be an adaptation.” Well, intended or not, an adaptation is what the thing’s turned out to be—to its great detriment. Novid Parsi’s new play so slavishly mimics each plot point and set piece in Streetcar that if you’re at all familiar with Williams’s 1947 masterwork you find yourself spending its 135-minute running time just counting up the equivalences....

Agnes of God Played with depth, nuance, and a whole lot of heart by Lisa McConnell, Dr. Martha Livingstone, the central storyteller in this brilliantly acted two-hour drama from Aleatoric Theatre Company, says, “I believe in the existence of an alternate last reel.” But a happy ending never materializes. The same holds true of her encounters with Sister Agnes (Courtney Stennett) and the Mother Superior (Joette Waters). Agnes is accused of killing her newborn child, whose father remains the ultimate mystery, and Dr....

For more than four decades, Hiromi Moritani has been making music by her own rules. She’s largely known for the short-lived art-rock band Aunt Sally, which she started as a teenager in late-70s Osaka, and for her 1981 self-titled solo album under the name Phew. Since then she’s continually honed her craft as Phew, expanding beyond her postpunk beginnings into straight-ahead rock, otherworldly pop songs, and avant-garde experimental pieces built around her voice....

In June, Chicago rapper Chris Crack self-released Cute Boys (The Rise of Lil Delicious) on Bandcamp roughly two months after dropping White People Love Algorithms. Most artists releasing 36 songs in a couple months would qualify as prolific, but Chris Crack isn’t most artists; last year, he’d put out four albums by July. All of which is to say we could very well be at the beginning of a new deluge from one of the country’s most prodigious underground MCs....

Veteran Bay Area reedist Larry Ochs has often worked within meticulously arranged compositional vehicles—in his pioneering saxophone quartet ROVA, high-flying improvisation is rigorously woven into the fabric of each piece. In recent years he’s increasingly spent time in looser, more spontaneous configurations where written material plays a less prominent role, but he continues to see composition as a crucial tool. In a short liner-note essay from his group Fictive Five’s eponymous 2015 debut album (released on Tzadik Records), he describes the music as “pieces that invite musicians in, even as they’re being pushed out and into the wild....

As the Boredoms have repeatedly proved, you can’t have too many drummers. If anything, the lineup of Portland-based instrumental collective Secret Drum Band needs more—on their recent second album, Chuva (Moon Glyph), they’ve usually got two or three at a time. I have irrationally strong feelings about Crash Worship, but I won’t dispute the comparison beyond saying that SDB sound way less evil. I like the rough-and-ready feel of Chuva: the unfussy, energetic drumming centers acoustic rather than electronic sounds, and the elements that might read as “new age” (heavily reverbed chants, drifty synths, wilderness ambience) stick to supporting roles, inflecting the percussion with extra color and texture....

Norwegian singer Susanne Sundfør found international success with her 2015 album Ten Love Songs (Sonnet Sounds), a slick recording that situated her opulent folk-derived melodies within fizzy arrangements propelled by EDM-style production. Her soaring vocals shine in such jacked-up surroundings, but the album’s treacly synthesizers and four-on-the-floor grooves tended to flatten the refined beauty of her tunes into lowest-common-denominator pop. Still, that formula led to heavy international touring and a growing profile, which makes it remarkable that on her recent follow-up, Music for People in Trouble (Bella Union), Sundfør utterly turns the table in favor of delicate intimacy....

The nondescript brick building along an industrial stretch of Elston Avenue seems just the sort of unremarkable spot where a group of privacy advocates would congregate. Inside Pumping Station: One, an Avondale “hackerspace” where about 200 tech-obsessed tinkerers pool money to share tools and work space, the 50 seats in a second-floor room are filling fast. Surrounded by wall shelving brimming with parts for computers and various other electronic doodads, most in the crowd stare into the screens of bestickered laptops as they wait for a presentation to begin....

This week’s most prominent new release is Paul Thomas Anderson’s Phantom Thread, featuring what actor Daniel Day-Lewis claims will be his final performance. Day-Lewis is famous for an approach to role-playing so immersive that it blurs the line between art and athletics: he might prepare for a part by experiencing his subject’s living conditions (he “learned to live off the land” to play a Native American tribesman in The Last of the Mohicans) or stay in character between takes (during production of My Left Foot, for which he won an Oscar, he insisted on remaining in his character’s wheelchair and being spoon-fed by the crew)....

A stone’s throw from the kitsch and luxe of the Magnificent Mile, in a north-facing window on Ontario, the Indian god Ganesh merges with the figure of a child impaled through the frontal lobe with a martial pole. Beyond them, a tapestry hangs, where the silhouette of a lynched woman forms a dark blot against a wall of flames, rioters running beneath her feet. To the right, a shirtless boy with tattoos and scraped knees sits astride a bison with a child in his arms and a dusty American flag slung over one shoulder, while a few yards away fringed Vodou flags beaded by Haitian weavers glitter boldly on the wall....

Based on the early returns, we’re projecting the White Sox and Cubs to both win the World Series this year (somehow). They’re on pace to finish the regular season 162-0. In between pitches, I was checking Baseball Almanac‘s historical website on my phone. I knew that the Sox and Cubs had often struggled out of the gate, so I thought it might have been ten years, maybe even 20, since both clubs had gone 2-0 in the same year....

The X-Files reunion during Wizard World Chicago last Saturday opened on a cringe-inducing note. Moments after the quartet of cast members, including stars David Duchovny and Gillian Anderson, strolled onto the stage and sat down for a 45-minute Q&A session, a young spiky-haired panel moderator kicked things off with an utterly vacuous question: “So . . . what’s your favorite pizza?” One model of success at comic conventions is B-movie idol Bruce Campbell, who wears the events like a second skin....

I’ve liked rapper Aesop Rock, aka Ian Bavitz, for a long time, but for the most part I got lost in the sound and feeling of his performances and didn’t pay a ton of attention to what he was talking about. He helped create the acrid flavor of early-2000s underground hip-hop, seemingly searching for the darkest, most claustrophobic corners he could find. But his distinctive flow also has a playful energy that can make unwieldy words pliable and infuse intimidating blocks of text with a lively, almost bouncy momentum....