Posts

These days the field of classical music is crowded with prodigies whose careers seem to have been cemented before puberty, so it’s refreshing to discover that one of today’s most acclaimed younger pianists was a late bloomer. French pianist Lucas Debargue began studying music when he was 11, but his studies weren’t rigorous. By the time he was in high school he was more taken with literature than the piano, and it wasn’t until after he earned his bachelor’s degree that he pursued formal music studies....

By now it’s common knowledge that Randy Newman’s sweet, Pixar-accompanying musical style is a facade for lyrics infused with sardonic, acerbic social commentary—much in the same way that Steely Dan’s gleaming jazz-rock is a veneer for profiles of losers, outcasts, and hucksters. In fact, in his use of American tropes for populist purposes that both celebrate and criticize American life, Newman’s work is more like Mark Twain’s than that of virtually any other modern songwriter....

When the British drama Victim was released in 1961, homosexual acts between consenting adults were still illegal in England, and though police had grown tired of prosecuting these victimless crimes, the British tabloids pounced on any sort of sex scandal, creating a rich market for blackmailers. Four years earlier, an influential government report had rejected the notion of homosexuality as a mental illness and recommended that it be legalized. Into this climate the Rank Organisation, a giant in British entertainment, cast Dirk Bogarde, the UK’s most popular matinee idol, as Melville Farr, a married, middle-aged barrister who’s being blackmailed for his romantic attachment to a young construction worker....

Misery Rites, the newest album from Canadian grindsters Wake, opens with a slow dirge that’s anchored by melancholic howls and oceanic riffs. It’s a fitting introduction to an album on which the band expand their palette beyond the straight-ahead blistering grindcore (complete with buzzsaw guitars) of its predecessor, 2016’s Sowing the Seeds of a Worthless Tomorrow, to incorporate elements of sludge and technical death metal. And where Sowing the Seeds was full of nihilistically political songs, on this go-round vocalist Kyle Ball plumbs his internal landscape for lyrical inspiration, focusing most of his ire on his personal experiences with the cyclical nature of depression, addiction, and isolation....

Rivet Radio has won a national Edward R. Murrow Award for achievement in electronic media, a sweet honor for an innovative operation that was a gleam in Charlie Meyerson’s eye just two and a half years ago. Rivet was singled out for top investigative reporting in the Small Online News Organization division for “Our Glass Desk Exploded. Yours Could, Too.” If ever a title tells the story, that one does. The office manager’s desk blew up one night, sending Rivet off in pursuit of the story behind “spontaneously exploding desks”—which if not a national menace turned out to be something that happens more than you’d think....

About three and a half years ago I inventoried the many crimes against makimono, sashimi, and nigiri committed at River North’s Union Sushi + Barbeque Bar, an ostentatious River North restaurant that confuses disrespect for inventiveness when it comes to raw fish and other familiar Japanese foods. Now the principals behind that operation have returned with the Franklin Room, a whiskey-focused subterranean den trafficking in relatively American, pub-style food with an occasional Asian touch....

Choreographer Alejandro Cerrudo thrives in darkness. On a creative level, he starts each new project in the dark, abandoning what he discovered with his previous work to move down a fresh path. “When you try to reinvent yourself, when you try to push each work to be different, that creates a thrill, but it can be scary as well,” says Cerrudo. “You find each work with nothing in front of you because you start from zero....

Street View is a fashion series in which Isa Giallorenzo spotlights some of the coolest styles seen in Chicago. “I was making a smoothie, and the banana I used was sooo yellow,” says Nadha Vikitsreth, who was spotted on a recent Sunday strolling the Logan Square Farmers Market. “So I wanted to dress like a banana, but with a twist. I added my favorite Judith Leiber belt, from Store B in Wicker Park, to jazz it up, and slipped on my fluffy sneakers from Felt in Logan Square....

Chicago’s Like Rats have been at it for more than a decade. Consisting of current and former members of earth-shaking metal and hardcore acts such as Weekend Nachos, Hate Force, and High Priest, the band started as a brutal, tough-guy hardcore act. But by their second full-length, 2016’s II, they’d begun to incorporate overtly heavy tones and death-grunt vocals into their powerviolence-leaning punk. And the brand-new Death Monolith (Hibernation Release) feels like the band just threw up their hands and said, “Fuck it, we’re a death-metal band now!...

Rappers Klevah Knox and TRUTH, known collectively as Mother Nature, have worked tirelessly to ascend through the Chicago scene over the past few years. COVID-19 threw a gigantic roadblock in their path—the same way it did for almost anyone who isn’t a billionaire using a society-shifting pandemic to get billions of dollars richer—but the duo’s labor has continued to bear fruit. Last year Mother Nature worked for the first time with venerated local hip-hop label Closed Sessions, releasing an EP called Portalz....

Wilmette native Kristine Flaherty, aka rapper K. Flay, had to leave home to find inspiration in another onetime local: Liz Phair. Last year Flaherty told Billboard that when she discovered Exile in Guyville in the late 2000s, it introduced her to a universe of alternative rock acts fronted by women “who are such bad asses—and not being bad asses for the sake of it, just being themselves and saying something and standing behind something....

It’s month eight of the pandemic, and while some might be wishfully thinking about enjoying a drink from their favorite bar or ordering their favorite meal in person in the hopefully not-too-distant future, others are waiting for when they can indulge in pleasures that are harder to order to-go. “Yes, they’re about sex,” says Gary Wasdin, executive director of the Leather Archives & Museum. “We don’t run from that, we don’t hide from that because, you know, sex is awesome....

Nobody liked Eris, the Greek goddess of strife. That’s why, when her invitation to Peleus and Thetis’s wedding on Mount Olympus got lost in the mail, she crashed it and threw the Golden Apple of Discord into the mix, a present for the hottest goddess at the party. This led to a contest, judged by Paris, to determine the fairest of them all, resulting in—long story short—Aphrodite bribing the lad with the gift of the mortal Helen, queen of Sparta, which of course was the infamous case of human trafficking that started the Trojan War....

On February 14, 2018, Katrina Jabbi and her husband Buba needed a distraction. Buba had a meeting with Immigration and Customs Enforcement, or ICE, the next day. A few months earlier Buba received notice that ICE had bumped his appointment date up by six months, from June 2018 to December 2017. He had to work on the new date, so he contacted the agency to reschedule. They moved his appointment to February 2018....

The word batu in the title of Hannah Ii-Epstein’s powerful play is a slang term in Hawaiian drug culture for methamphetamine (it comes from the Tagalog word for “rock” or “stone”). The title also is a nonsexual double entendre—meaning both giving up meth entirely and indulging in two hits of meth (not one, but two)—that connects to the show’s central conflict: Honey Girl, a former meth addict trying to keep clean in a subculture where everyone she knows is a user (even her mother) so she can keep custody of her kid, continues to deal meth to supplement her meager income....

With all the faith I have in the sophistication of Chicago voters, I’m confident no one will be fooled by the phony-baloney “feud” that has supposedly erupted between Mayor Rahm and Governor Rauner over Father Michael Pfleger’s great Dan Ryan protest. And 2007. And they’re ideological soul mates when it comes to the destruction of the Chicago Teachers Union and the privatization of Chicago Public Schools. Rauner cheered Rahm on, urging him to close more union schools, cut taxes on the rich, and do other diabolical things near and dear to the governor’s gumball-size heart....

I had a chance to see Roberto Fonseca play at the 2015 Fes Festival of World Sacred Music in Morocco, in a duo collaboration with Malian singer Fatoumata Diawara. In his thrilling, visceral performance, the Havana-born musician, composer, and bandleader embodied the multifarious musicality of Cuba’s best jazz pianists. Blessed with access to the island’s customary classical music training, which often begins in elementary school, Fonseca began playing jazz festivals at age 15 and later obtained a master’s in composition from Havana’s prestigious Instituto Superior de Arte....

When Save Money rapper Brian Fresco premiered his single “Higher” in the Fader last week, he told the site, “I wanted to try something musically I’ve never done before with my homie Trevor, and despite one of my friends telling me my heart wasn’t in it, I still knew this song was a hit.” With its neon dancehall beat and vocal contributions from Montreal electronic duo Blue Hawaii and Chance the Rapper, “Higher” has gained traction quickly—it’s already accumulated almost 200,000 plays on Soundcloud....

Upon my first listen to St. Vincent’s newest album, October’s Masseducation, I experienced disappointment. Produced largely by hit machine Jack Antonoff, it’s a massive step away from the knotty, topsy-turvy prog-funk of Annie Clark’s brilliant 2014 self-titled LP, instead jumping into straightforward electro-pop. But a few spins later, it became clear that Masseducation is another step in evolution for Clark’s genius. Sure, the beats snap rather than throb, and there’s significantly less of her insane guitar shredding, but the comparative simplicity of the music sets a perfect backdrop for her beautiful voice and off-kilter melodies....

Before Adidas opened its flagship Wicker Park store in 2017, Saint Alfred was the only shop along Milwaukee Avenue you’d be guaranteed to find sneakerheads lined up at the crack of dawn waiting to cop the hottest new shoe. The streetwear shop doesn’t just cater to people who pack their closets with more footwear than clothes, and I’ve enjoyed the process of finding the right fit for my flat feet more there than anywhere else I’ve gone....