Posts

Over the past few years, Chicago multi-instrumentalist Alex Cowling has released several solo albums that combine weather-beaten indie rock, spacious jazz, and easygoing folk, and he’s done it to little or no fanfare. When I ask him about the new Antarctica, he tells me that one of the few people who’s listened to it is his aunt. I was hooked by the album’s lush ensemble recordings while trawling Bandcamp late one night, and I haven’t been able to shake them since....

March is certainly coming in like a lion with a king’s share of events (see what I did there? Somehow I feel the need to apologize to Nathan Lane and Nathan Lane only. Anyhow). While some of our venues are slowly opening up, there are still some online shows that deserve your attention. Be safe out there whatever you choose to do and please don’t pop a capillary if you need to be reminded to wear a mask....

This year Michigan-born, New York-raised record label Ghostly International celebrates two decades of releasing cutting-edge electronic sounds. As part of the festivities it’s throwing a party called Ghostly 20 in its own honor at Metro this week. The label was founded in Ann Arbor in 1999 by Sam Valenti IV, who was inspired by the sound and culture of the Detroit techno movement. Ghostly’s first release was Matthew Dear’s debut single, “Hands Up for Detroit,” and before long the label had expanded beyond dance music into a wide variety of electronic genres; over the years it’s put out releases by chillwave artist Com Truise, trip-hoppy dream pop duo Phantogram, and minimal gloom band HTRK....

It wasn’t just the elotes or the enticing smell of fried peppers and onions that got me. It was the diverse crowd of fans wholly intent on the ballgame. It was the summer of 2000 and I’d just moved to Chicago. I was at my first game on the south side, there to see the great pitcher Pedro Martinez (then with the Red Sox), but also to see the scrappy White Sox team that would make it to the playoffs that year, albeit briefly....

What would you do if you and your partner could share every thought and every feeling you had with one another? What if this process required you two to be microchipped with a tracking device? In HBO Max’s Made for Love, based on Alissa Nutting’s 2017 novel, there is no question that this is bonkers to Hazel Green (Cristin Milioti). But for her tech mogul husband Byron Gogol (Billy Magnussen), things are not quite as clear....

For many people Labor Day has become a marker for the end of summer, but let’s take a moment to remember its original purpose: to celebrate the hard work that people perform year-round. The movies have long been treated as an escape from the working world, which makes the subject of work something of a taboo in entertainment. Yet many films and television programs have still tackled the subject, often for humor—indeed, the workplace comedy constitutes its own subgenre....

On her latest self-released EP, April’s Blood Sisters, Chicago synth-pop artist Justina Kairyte, aka Fee Lion, threads together the sinister and the seductive with razor wire. In the spring, she told Paper magazine that writing the chorus for the slow-burning “My Man” crystallized for her what became the EP’s theme: “a mysterious murderess slaughtering her lover in order to step back into her own light.” Kairyte understands the magnetic rhythmic pull that makes industrial music and the harder strains of dance so powerful, and Blood Sisters demonstrates it throughout....

At a Christmas party several years ago, Steve Crews sat down beside me and asked me what I thought about Tajikistan. I had no thoughts (I bet you don’t either). It’s one of the Soviet Socialist Republics that got away from Moscow, Crews explained, and it’s one of the poorest, most backward, and repressive places on earth. Crews had been a Tribune reporter before joining the dark side—PR—and he was the poet laureate of these annual Christmas parties, where reporters abounded....

Yesterday Lost in Translation-ending Scottish noise-pop band Jesus and Mary Chain announced that they’ll be celebrating the 30th anniversary of their canonical debut Psychocandy by going out on tour. Their trek includes North American dates, one of which is a stop in Chicago on May 5 at the Riviera. Psychocandy is an album I love more for its sound than its songs—but it’s quite a sound, a thicket of hisses, squeals, and clangs with trash-lid drumming by Bobby Gillespie (who eventually became the mastermind of Primal Scream) and major-key melodies delivered in a slack-jawed drawl....

K ay Stepkin’s path to opening the National Vegetarian Museum, the first vegetarian museum in the country, began with James Bond. Stepkin brought her vegetarianism back to Chicago. In 1971—the year the Union Stockyards closed, she points out—she opened up a bakery, the Bread Shop, in Lakeview, near the corner of Halsted and Roscoe. She used only organic whole-grain flour, which she purchased from a health food store on the far south side....

This year’s Chicago Jazz Festival includes a few themed or celebratory events, but the primary mission of its lineup is to capture the sprawling variety of jazz in all its ever-­fragmenting manifestations. (Full disclosure: I volunteer on the committee that programs the fest.) Thursday evening‘s headlining set by Chicago trumpeter Orbert Davis is a commission marking the centennial of the Great Migration, and on Friday night pianist and arranger Carla Bley leads the magnificent Liberation Music Orchestra in a performance that pays homage to bassist Charlie Haden, a fellow founder of the ensemble, who died in 2014....

Between Donald Trump’s Republican Party coup, racial tension and protests, and unstable international politics, are we—as more than one recent headline suggests—reliving the dark days of 1968 all over again? It’s tempting to draw a line between Chicago’s past and Cleveland’s present, but the lead-up to the ’68 convention were some of the most tumultuous in American history: The Vietnam war was increasingly looking unwinnable, and young men were resisting the draft in growing numbers....

Let’s get one thing straight: It’s not the long sit I mind. One of my favorite sitting experiences ever was the English Shakespeare Company’s Wars of the Roses heptalogy, which played the International Theatre Festival of Chicago (what an idea, huh?) and literally took days to watch. By comparison, the six-hour running time of Chicago Shakespeare Theater’s Tug of War: Foreign Fire should be an easy stretch to handle. I can understand why Gaines might be attracted to Edward III, aside from the coolness factor of its obscurity: The tale of an English king’s 1346 campaign to assert his sovereignty over France, it takes us back to the beginnings of the grotesque slog known as the Hundred Years War....

It feels like it was yesterday when dance-punk top dog James Murphy bid adieu to LCD Soundsystem, his often cheeky—but also often pensive—mutating hit machine of the 2000s. Maybe that’s because 2011, the year the band split, doesn’t seem too far gone, and 2015 (when they officially reunited) feels like last week—or maybe we pray that it does? The new LCD album, American Dream (Columbia), affirms that even though it’s the band’s second round, Murphy still hasn’t shaken his desire to reflect on his own coolness while standing behind a microphone....

UPDATE: as of Wednesday, July 28 at 9 AM, both Wynonna Judd & Cactus Moser concerts have been canceled. Ticketholders should contact their point of purchase for refund or exchange information. Wynonna Judd’s voice is like chugging diet pop. Her raw, forceful alto sometimes burns a little going down, but the addictive sweetness keeps you coming back for more. Judd has been performing since she was a teenager in the Bay Area in the late 70s, singing occasional backup vocals with her mother, Naomi Judd, for a local country band called the Cowpokes....

Figuring out what to put on the cover of each Reader issue is one of the most rewarding and at times most stressful aspects of my job. When a cover really comes together, it’s a beautiful thing: I rush into the office on Wednesday morning to see the newly printed copies, basking in the glow of the final product. There’s been no office to rush into for the past month—the entire Reader editorial process, from pitches to proofs, happens remotely....

During his own migration season—roughly every Yuletide season—Los Angeles resident Andrew Bird brings his whistling songs and violin back to the city where he first took flight. He always seems to shine for the hometown crowd, and his four-night residency at downtown’s beautiful Fourth Presbyterian Church provides a large number of local fans the chance to see him in an intimate setting. The theme of the shows is “Gezelligheid,” a Dutch word that has no precise English equivalent, but means both fellowship and reunion with old friends....

In 2017, when choreographer and former Merce Cunningham dancer Kimberly Bartosik began working on I Hunger for You, her evening-length work on faith inspired by early personal experiences with charismatic spirituality, the country’s deep division following the most recent presidential election was a fresh wound in her mind. “I was, like many people in this country, in a state of distress about how we had gotten to a place where we couldn’t speak to somebody who did not share our values—our life values, not just our religious values....

Chicago Design Week—a partnership between AIGA Chicago, the Chicago Design Museum, and the Society of Typographic Arts—is a chance for designers to converse, collaborate, and learn about new developments in the industry. This year’s theme is Intersections, with a week of programming offering “a deep examination of the various intersections impacting the design world and our broader communities.” The full schedule of events spanning October 20-27 can be found at chicagodesignweek....

“Condos are killing my country / my city gets nothing / burning like a rash from my undies / my city gets nothing,” Erin Delaney warbles before unleashing her full-throttle yowl on “Condos,” the anti-gentrification single Chicago’s Daymaker’s released in June. The band comes staggering in, sloshing loose feedback wails around the song’s can’t-get-it-out-of-your-head indie-pop hook. Daymaker’s a bit of a mess and a bit of a known quantity—snotty punk rawk bands are scattered across the midwest as liberally as abandoned industrial plants—but Delaney’s pissed-off charisma oozes from the recording, and the band embraces its underdog status with winningly mean-spirited resolve....