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Last summer Cheer-Accident dropped Putting Off Death, their first album in six years. And they’re definitely alive—last Friday the long-running local art-rock squad released another LP for fans to get weird to! Fades (Skin Graft) features guests such as Sleepytime Gorilla Museum veteran Carla Kihlstedt, bassoonist Katherine Young, and vocalist Sacha Mullin, who lend their eccentricities to the tunes. The proggy new wave of “Done” sparkles with brass—trumpet, trombone, and “mouthbone” (aka leader Thymme Jones making horn noises with his face)....

During the fading final notes of “Big Plans,” the cloudy closing track on Jayaire Woods’s August EP, Woodside Lane, a coterie of the rapper’s pals shouts the song’s succinct chorus a cappella. Woods is such a skilled songwriter his most potent verses beg to be shouted out loud even when you’re not listening to his music (thankfully I’m usually in the privacy of my own home when it happens to me)....

Before Black Lives Matter was a movement, Black lives mattered in the work of Dr. Charles Smith. A Vietnam vet and prodigious self-taught artist, he’s spent decades recreating the Black American experience in figurative sculpture, from the time of the slave ships to Harriet Tubman, MLK, and beyond. “God said, ‘Use art. I give you a weapon,’” Smith told me then. Granddaughter of the Kohler Company founder that the Art Center’s named for, and daughter of the former Chicago Tribune “women’s” editor that she was named for, Kohler II was the Art Center’s director from 1972 to 2016....

Since its founding in 2001, Steep Theatre has spent most of its institutional life in the shadow of the Red Line—from its first long-term venue by the Sheridan stop (where the honky-tonk music from the bar next door would bleed through the theater’s walls on the weekends) to its current home nestled next to the Berwyn station. For Steep’s artistic director Peter Moore and executive director Kate Piatt-Eckert, the announcement was not completely unexpected....

It’s been a year of surreal events. Nothing trumps Trump (or the Cubs), but as always, the cultural front offered its own oddities. You might think this could only happen in 17th-century Salem (or the 20th-century Soviet Union), but if you’re a tenured faculty member at NU unpopular with your colleagues, you could find yourself defending your sanity. After complaints from her department, political science professor and activist Jacqueline Stevens was banned from campus and sent to a shrink for assessment....

Last week, University of Illinois professor emeritus Cary Nelson was getting ready to travel to Washington for the annual meeting of the American Association of University Professors, where he expected to be a minority voice in support of the university’s decision to retract a job offer to professor Steven Salaita. According to Salaita’s contract, his appointment was contingent on approval by the university board of trustees. There wasn’t any specified date for that, and as it turned out, the board didn’t get around to voting on it until September 11, 2014—nearly a month after he was slated to report to campus....

If you just looked at the pedigree of Baltimore five-piece Angel Dust (often styled with a dollar sign in place of the S) you might think they were a hardcore group—Justice Tripp and Dan Fang also play in Trapped Under Ice and Turnstile, respectively, two of their city’s best-known contemporary hardcore bands. And they initially had a strong handle on the style, but they’ve since polished their rough, explosive punk sound to be almost unrecognizably sleek....

The Brehon Pub sits inconspicuously at the northeast corner of Wells and Superior. From the outside, its bold green signage, four-leaf clover decorations, and Gaelic logo make it hard to pin down as anything other than a traditional Irish pub. But from the inside its completely nontraditional roots are impossible to disguise. The Brehon has a history deeply tied to the corruption of Chicago: the establishment was formerly known as the Mirage Tavern....

The Minimal Beat began life as a music blog in 2011, and like many music blogs that came before it, it has branched out into other ventures, including a weekly radio show on Loyola’s WLUW. In 2014 it launched a label, TMB Limited, which boasts a small but varied catalog of releases, including slick contemporary yacht rock (Adam Ashbach’s “Street Lights” single), jangly garage-pop (Lucille Furs, who previously released a TMB Limited single as Shah Jahan), juiced-up electro-pop (Kaneholler), and far-out experimental recordings (Willis Earl Beal’s recent work under his own name and the pseudonym Nobody)....

On his 2016 EP Friends First, Chicago rapper-singer L.A. VanGogh drapes his silky voice over even his hardest bars, so that his rapping feels almost like sultry R&B. As part of the Private Stock collective, VanGogh benefits not just from its ace studios but also from its management team—when he dropped the Everything Is Subjective: Episode 1 EP in October, one of its singles topped Spotify’s “Fresh Finds” playlist. Playlists created by major streaming services have exploded in importance this year, sometimes rivaling Top 40 radio in influence: Spotify playlist Rap Caviar, for instance, has more than 7 million followers and a reputation for keeping up with what’s viral or about to blow up nationally....

The films I’m most excited about at this year’s Chicago International Film Festival—Federico Veiroj’s The Moneychanger and Pedro Costa’s Vitalina Varela—weren’t available for preview, but I’m fairly confident that I can recommend both sight unseen. Veiroj and Costa are two of the most innovative filmmakers working today, and it speaks well of the festival that the programmers would choose to present their work. Many of the other filmmakers showcased in the festival aren’t as accomplished; in characteristic fashion, the programmers have emphasized the work of first- or second-time directors....

Shane Parish’s guitar playing in the eclectic, energetic rock duo Ahleuchatistas encompasses rapid neck tapping, convoluted chord sequences, and intricate rhythmic shifts. He and fellow guitarist Wendy Eisenberg improvise dizzily complex configurations of starburst harmonics and frantically negotiated counterpoint on their brand-new LP of acoustic duets, Nervous Systems (Verses). A resident of Asheville, North Carolina, he makes his crust as a guitar instructor, but while his technique is prodigious, he’s a self-taught musician, and for his latest solo recording, Autodidact (Humanhood), he gleans creative inspiration from the state of not knowing....

Chicago rapper Joey Purp grew up all over town—Lincoln Park, Garfield Ridge, Humboldt Park—and it’s endowed the 22-year-old with a perspective that bridges many of the city’s racial and economic divides. “The thing that makes me stand out as a rapper is the same thing that makes me stand out as a person, and that’s the same thing that makes everybody stand out—no two of us have the same story,” he says....

PATRICIA DE MELO MOREIRA/AFP John Kass weighs in on the Charlie Hebdo massacre Catastrophes happen and journalists feel they must respond, but a sense of obligation by itself doesn’t make us profound. John Kass writes about the Charlie Hebdo massacre in the morning Tribune and I’m not sure what his point is, but I write about it too on the Bleader and I don’t have a lot of confidence in mine....

Boudoir photographer Samantha Eppel’s shoot this past October was an intimate affair: just her client, her client’s friend, and a dozen North Shore triathletes. Ez Powers, a queer photographer who specializes in boudoir for all bodies, races, and genders, has also taken to staging shoots outdoors near their home and studio in McHenry County, although they had to curb the practice when hunting season began this fall. While Hansen was ultimately able to secure a Paycheck Protection Program loan and has since reopened, she says she’s still only shooting one person per day to allow time for sanitizing and disinfecting....

What a difference a couple of days makes. On Tuesday, the League of Chicago Theatres issued a statement to “reassure our patrons that all of Chicago’s theatres remain open for business.” But two days later, after Governor Pritzker and Mayor Lightfoot urged the shutdown of all public and private events expected to attract 250 or more patrons, theaters and other venues around the Chicago area, large and small, announced that they were either canceling or postponing their planned performances and other public events, including fund-raising galas and panel discussions....

Welcome to the Reader‘s weekday news brief. Chris Kennedy leaves gubernatorial candidate forum after Jeanne Ives makes “ignorant” and “stupid” comments about gun violence Democratic gubernatorial candidate Chris Kennedy walked off the stage of a candidate forum Monday, “criticizing Republican candidate Jeanne Ives for what he called ‘ignorance and stupidity’ after she said Chicago’s gun violence could be solved if more fathers stayed in the home,” according to the Tribune....

In the face of uncertainty and fear, some people would rather climb back into the proverbial womb. For Shame vocalist Charlie Steen, “the womb” was a nickname for a tiny laundry space that had been converted into a bedroom in the apartment he shared with guitarist Sean Coyle-Smith. It proved itself the perfect place for him to draft lyrics for the UK postpunk band’s second album, Drunk Tank Pink, named for the supposedly calming shade of paint on the room’s walls....

One evening at Bascule Wine Bar, after happily working our way to the bottom of a dish piled with cheesy polenta and braised wild boar, my tablemates and I discovered a Twinkie-size cheesecloth-wrapped lump that had been camouflaged among the shredded meat. Though it appeared to be some variety of medical waste, we quickly realized it was the spice sachet employed in the braise. No big deal, we told our mortified server....

For the past 26 years, Public Narrative (previously known as the Community Media Workshop) has honored storytellers across the city who center the people of Chicago in the work with the Studs Terkel Awards, presented annually at the Community Media Awards. This year Reader copublisher and co-editor in chief Karen Hawkins was among the esteemed honorees, all of whom “exemplify the values of Studs Terkel’s journalism, by taking risks in covering social issues....