Posts

It’s been a while since I wrote about a band I got into decades ago that nobody else cares about now. I’ve done Gravitar, Star Pimp, Phleg Camp, Straitjacket Fits, and God Is My Co-Pilot, and today y’all get to hear about Steel Pole Bath Tub. “Tear It Apart” might also win some sort of prize for Most Gratuitous Springsteen Reference. After two more brilliant records, 1991’s Tulip and 1993’s The Miracle of Sound in Motion, Steel Pole Bath Tub signed to Slash (distributed by Warner and Reprise) during the post-Nirvana major-label feeding frenzy....

When Gossip Wolf covered Uptown experimental tape label Reserve Matinee last spring, it led to another discovery: Forest Management, the serene drone project of label cofounder John Daniel. Forest Management’s sprawling discography draws on a wide range of inspirations: one release manipulates recordings of church bells in the French Alps, while another uses glistening swells of synthesizer to recapture the feel of the Cleveland apartment house where Daniel grew up. On Friday, November 29, Forest Management drops a brand-new double LP, After Dark, on Jordan Reyes’s American Dreams imprint, and it’s easily the project’s most exquisite work yet—Reyes calls it a “turntable-sourced ambient record,” and it consists completely of sounds from a crackling vinyl copy of Claude Debussy’s La Mer....

I have a group text with my mom, my dad, and my sister. It’s mostly pictures of brisket, stories about how Liz’s dog has met a goat or a child. There’s a long stretch where I try to help them figure out how they can watch Lemonade. My mom often uses this forum to talk about what she’d do if she won the lottery, or as she calls it, “the big one....

On one level, it’s thrilling to see that several Chicago folks made it into this year’s Whitney Biennial. Among them are Brendan Fernandes, whose practice is comprised of graceful negotiations between sculpture, ballet, and black history, and Derrick Woods-Morrow, a multimedia artist who frequently combs through memory and queer narratives. TL;DR: A few of the city’s queer artists of color received some of the international recognition they so deserve, in a major show curated by two women....

When is a compilation of one-off tracks and previously unreleased material more than just bait for superfans and completists? When the artist releasing it is exceeding himself so consistently that he seems about to hit escape velocity, for one. That’s the case with Untitled Unmastered, which Kendrick Lamar dropped with no warning late Thursday night. As a comp, the new album predictably lacks the thoughtful cohesion of the seismic, sprawling full-lengths Good Kid, M....

For some filmmakers—Bernardo Bertolucci, Lina Wertmüller, Dušan Makavejev—sex and politics are inextricably linked. The ways their characters engage with each other sexually mirrors how they engage in the body politic, with individual sexual liberation representing the first step in larger social change. Canadian writer-director Bruce LaBruce (No Skin Off My Ass, The Raspberry Reich) is one such filmmaker. For three decades he’s made movies that combine explicit sex with radical political rhetoric, arguing that opposition to repressive social structures goes hand in hand with breaking sexual taboos....

It was a sad day last September when Jonathan Ory announced that he was closing up Bad Wolf Coffee, his Lakeview bakery that sold, among other things, the best kouign amann in Chicago, and moving to Charleston, South Carolina. Fortunately, Val Taylor, who worked with Ory during his last six months at Bad Wolf, has stepped in to fill the void. As its name implies, Loba Pastry + Coffee is not Bad Wolf Part II, but rather its own entity, with some of the same DNA....

Lizzo’s single “Truth Hurts” dropped in September 2017, but it didn’t hit number one on Billboard’s Hot 100 chart until this month. That sleeper-hit narrative fits her: ever since her first album, 2013’s Lizzobangers, the singer and rapper has been slowly but steadily growing her following thanks to her incredible bops, celebratory music videos, and high-energy live performances, where she sometimes incorporates her first instrument, the flute. Why did it take mainstream pop so long to catch on?...

Marcus “Mixx” Shannon has been making house music since the mid-80s, when the style was the beating heart of Chicago nightlife. In 1987, Farley “Jackmaster” Funk of the famous Hot Mix 5 played Shannon’s very first release, the 12-inch single “I Wanna House!,” on one of the crew’s hugely influential WBMX radio shows. Original copies of Shannon’s early records now provoke bitter squabbles among hard-core collectors—a compilation he made in 1989 has sold for as much as $500—but none of the money changing hands makes it to him....

As I wandered the aisles of the Chicago Independent Spirits Expo a couple weeks ago, I came across something unusual: two rums from North Shore Distillery, both aged between four and six years. Rum is still relatively rare among local distillers, who tend to focus on vodka, gin, and whiskey instead; if they branch out from there it’s likely to be into liqueur or brandy. CH Distillery makes an unaged rum, and Tailwinds Distilling Company in Plainfield has built its brand on Taildragger, a lineup that includes a white rum, an amber rum aged for at least two years, a coffee rum, and an overproof dark rum....

Q: I am a bi man in my late 20s in a poly relationship. My primary partner’s name is Erin. One of the rules she mandated is that I cannot date anyone else named Aaron or Erin. She thinks it would be confusing and awkward. Since those are fairly common names, I have had to reject other Aarons/Erins several times over the last couple of years. My name is very uncommon, so she doesn’t have to worry about this on her side....

Neeson and Ed Harris in Run All Night I’m glad to have caught Run All Night at Lincoln Square’s Davis Theater. No other movie house in Chicago is better suited for this unpretentious (but assured) genre item, the third collaboration in four years between Liam Neeson and Spanish director Jaume Collet-Serra. The film harkens back to the years before Redbox (which already feels like a distant era), when thoughtful genre movies for adults regularly got made on big budgets and opened in wide release....

Just a few hours after Mayor Rahm officially apologized for the sex predator scandal that’s hit Chicago Public Schools, three of the city’s leading school beat reporters joined for the monthly talk show Mick Dumke and I host at the Hideout. Karp is the reporter who broke the troubling story late last year about how CPS under Rahm had been shortchanging its special education program with a double-cross that was devious even for Chicago....

Imagine watching a class of preschoolers hopped up on cupcakes, acting out their dreams from the night before. This is the world of The Raveling, 60 minutes of utter self-indulgence that means absolutely nothing. Everyone onstage talks at once, so you can’t really hear any of them. Sometimes they whisper in unison, for no apparent reason. They also spend a lot of time rolling around on the floor, also for no apparent reason....

The Reader‘s archive is vast and varied, going back to 1971. Every day in Archive Dive, we’ll dig through and bring up some finds. The most-read Reader story of all time is a 2012 Savage Love column with the headline “My husband violated the ground rules I’d set for our threesome.” For some reason, this regularly pops up on the weekly list of top ten most-read posts. The husband promised his wife he would not stick his penis into the other woman, but he did it anyway....

This spring Berlin-based British bassist Hayden Prosser released his debut, a quartet album called Tether (Whirlwind), and its aesthetic is unmistakably European: though the record is modern jazz played on a high level, it dispenses with the tried-and-true “theme and string of solos” structure. Prosser’s compositions develop elegantly, but rarely in straight lines—instead they flow through the sort of amorphous forms that thrive in European jazz these days. One member or another might sideswipe a moody melodic passage with a new idea, creating a musical interrogation that reroutes the whole band....

Last November I wrote about the latest album from Ahleuchastistas, the terrific North Carolina duo of guitarist Shane Parrish and drummer Ryan Oslance. Arrebato, the group’s eight full-length (and first for Chicago imprint International Anthem), represents a new creative peak for Ahleuchatistas, transcending their beginnings in tricky math rock and arriving at something much more open, expansive, and elastic. The Reader is proud to present the premiere of the video for the album’s closing track, “Erosion,” whose stuttering abstraction flirts with danger and violence but always pulls back before things truly go haywire....

Crown Tap Room 2821 N. Milwaukee 773-252-9741 There are hundreds of ways to get fall-over hammered at a local drinking establishment. And so many of them involve a fiery-eyed yahoo—someone you likely met that same night—demanding “Shots!” A staggered line of shot glasses on top of a well-worn bar isn’t as much a slippery slope as it is a death knell—and if you’re going down, you might as well have fun....

Few artists want to be called “neosoul,” partly due to the perception that the genre is inauthentic or a short-lived trend. Singer Jaguar Wright was so forthright in her distaste for the term that she named her 2005 album Divorcing Neo 2 Marry Soul, which seemed to nod to fans who couldn’t deal with plasticky R&B sounds in the Top 40 but didn’t want their organic, 70s-influenced soul to sound like an out-and-out throwback....

Among many unfortunate truths about the pandemic currently ravaging us is this one: we don’t know jack about it. COVID-19 cases first showed up in Wuhan, China, mostly among people exposed to a live animal and seafood market there. When Donald Trump used the presidential podium to brand it “the Chinese virus,” he fed into fears already stoked by right-wing conspiracy theorists suggesting that the virus was a laboratory-created weapon of biological warfare....