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The music of math-rock bands such as the Ruins, Tricot, Lightning Bolt, and Don Caballero is often loud, swaggering, and aggressive, and at the very least angular and spiky. But California three-piece Covet manage to make the rapid time-signature changes and arpeggiated figures that seem intrinsic to the style sound laid-back. The band’s music has some parallels with the classical-jazz fusion of Japanese pianist Hiromi, but because front woman and guitarist Yvette Young provides its foundation with her intricate, liquid strings of notes, it has a welcome rock edge....

On Wednesday at this time, I posted a message on Facebook I called “an open letter to Cubs fans from a St. Louis fan.” A lot of people liked it, and I think that’s because my message, boiled down to its essence, was I feel your pain. It’s just as likely they won’t be. But the air of relief and celebration wafting from Wednesday’s Facebook conversations makes me think of towel-snapping horseplay among Royal Air Force pilots between missions during the Battle of Britain....

A Reader staffer shares three musical obsessions, then asks someone (who asks someone else) to take a turn. Negro Leo, Água Batizada The underground sound of Rio de Janeiro reaches a new apotheosis with this album from the prolific Negro Leo (aka Leonardo Campelo Gonçalves), which collides the idiosyncratic psych of Syd Barrett with noisy art-rock and the gnarled Brazilian roots of tropicalia. I haven’t been paying close attention to Brazilian music of late—it’s time for me to wake up....

Atsushi Nishijima Was Selma unfair to LBJ? Does it matter? Talking back to the Sunday paper . . . An unnamed Saudi official told the Post that the brother, blogger Raif Badawi, “insulted Islam.” He was sentenced to ten years in prison and 1,000 lashes. But the snow is falling harder and the Super Bowl is still a couple of hours away and I probably won’t be able to watch it anyway because it’s storming and we’ve got a dish....

For this critic, there are few things more stimulating to unpack than a movie that has all the elements to succeed and balks. After the Wedding, a well-equipped redo of the 2006 Danish melodrama from director Susanne Bier, is one such curious dud. It places two outstanding actors, Michelle Williams and Julianne Moore, in sparring roles previously occupied by men: Mads Mikkelsen and Rolf Lassgård, respectively. Billy Crudup plays the sweetheart at the point of their triangle, a woman (Sidse Babett Knudsen) in the original....

One important measure of any musical scene is whether it sustains its energy and depth. The Chicago jazz and improvised music scene has endured plenty of defections in recent years, such as guitarist Jeff Parker decamping to Los Angeles or cornetist Rob Mazurek relocating to Marfa, Texas—serious blows to the community here—but things keep rolling on even as tastes shift. A steady stream of new players has long been crucial to giving Chicago its artistic potency, and the best of those players inject enough personality and creativity to push things in new directions....

It all began in 2015, when Olivia Lilley made a deal with the devil. So she persisted. In fact, Lilley could play the avant-garde game so well that three years later Brün offered her the position of artistic director at Prop. She and I met there one night to talk shop. “Five or six years into it, the lady punks began doing their stuff in the space,” Lilley continues. “I wish I was there to see it, but it sounded very sexual and incisive and ritualistic....

Bex Chilcott, aka Ruby Boots, left her mother’s home in Perth, Australia, as a teenager in the mid-90s, and by age 20 she was working on a pearl-fishing boat on the northwest coast—a job that let her develop her singing voice. After getting fired from a short-lived job on chartered yachts in the south of France and busking in England to make enough money to get home, she set about establishing herself as one of her homeland’s most promising country talents: she was named Best Country Act by the Western Australian Music Industry Awards each year from 2011 till 2015....

The idea for Snubfest originated like so many others: over cocktails. Comedian Angie McMahon, her husband, Tom, and Robert Bouwman, the cofounder of improv theater the Cornservatory, were a few drinks deep at a Christmas party in 2005 when they drunkenly joked about starting a “fuck you for not picking me” event for comics who’d been rejected by stand-up, improv, or sketch festivals. But unlike most booze-fueled notions, this concept hit the ground running....

For over a year, the Harris Theater has loomed like an abyss in the center of the Loop, darker and more cavernous than it’s ever been: no drinks in the lobbies, no coats in the checkroom, no tickets ripped, no programs leafed and loosed on the floor. No hum of human gathering, no line out the restroom door, no echo of exhaust in the parking structure, no us. Though it has opened its rehearsal studio and its stage for artists to create digital works and hosted a steady stream of virtual content, its 1,525 seats will remain empty until (according to the latest calendar) October....

You can say this for director Mary Zimmerman’s staging of Meredith Willson’s multiple Tony winner, The Music Man: like the titular con man in the 1957 musical, she sure knows the territory. From the corrupting influence of the bawdy humor magazine Captain Billy’s Whiz Bang to the Isadora Duncan-inspired modern-dance ode to a Grecian urn, Zimmerman packs the story (by Willson and Franklin Lacey) with as much charm as you’d expect from the tale of a flimflammer colliding with truculent Iowans in 1912....

After stripping off my blazer and picking up the same sweats and oversized T-shirt I’d slept in the night before, I crawled back into bed and queued up Netflix. A COVID exposure scare had kept me home from work, so I propped my laptop on my spare pillow and pressed play on the Chicago-based Holidate. Less than 20 minutes into Netflix’s holiday rom-com original, our female lead, Sloane (Emma Roberts), bares her trope:...

Nicole Wiesner directs Karel Čapek’s 1937 parable (translated by Peter Majer and Cathy Porter) about the clash between fascism and pacifism. In an unnamed country the citizenry is stricken with an illness which manifests in white spots on the skin and fells anyone over 45. As panic takes over, a young doctor appears to have found a cure, but he will only treat the poor; his condition for treating the rich is that they renounce war (which the government is fomenting)....

In the late 90s and early 00s, a wave of indie reissues brought 70s psychedelic music that had been made all over the world to new generations of American fans. In Turkey, for instance, a regional style called “Anatolian rock” emerged in the late 60s when mind-blowing artists such as Erkin Koray, 3 Hürel, and Bunalım mixed traditional folk with full-tilt, electrified acid rock. The 1999 compilation Love, Peace & Poetry: Asian Psychedelic Music introduced me to one of the other wellsprings of this sound, the band Moğollar....

[content-1] It’s become a Reader tradition for illustrator Jason Wyatt Frederick to draw detailed, immersive, and wonderfully punny cartoon overviews of the Pitchfork Music Festival for the cover of our fest-week issue. This year his illustration reflects more of the weekend’s cultural offerings: not just Pitchfork but also ComplexCon Chicago and the Silver Room Block Party. Every year I look forward to identifying the festival performers and famous Chicagoans in Frederick’s exuberant drawing almost as much as I look forward to actually attending Pitchfork....

Dennis Kelly and Tim Minchin’s musical adaptation of Roald Dahl’s 1988 novel about a precocious five-year-old (she reads difficult books, understands grown-ups at a deep level, and has telekinetic powers a la Stephen King’s Carrie) is a dark, troubling work. Matilda is a profoundly lonely child living in a cruel world and surrounded by addled adults, notably her shallow and materialistic parents and a school headmistress so selfish and sadistic she makes Miss Hannigan from the musical Annie seem kind....

Poster by Tvordis Veeler Each year, as summer approaches, University of Chicago’s WHPK hosts its Summer Breeze festival in the quad of the school’s Eckhart Hall. Steering away from the usual party-friendly sounds of typical outdoor college music festival, the acts booked for Summer Breeze are always a little weird, loud, and heavy; past performers have included Austin acid punks Spray Paint and noisy psych freaks Bunnybrains. This year’s Summer Breeze takes place on Saturday 5/16, from 11 AM until 5 PM, and is headlined by local art-rock collective Ono....

Every few years, the always-active, always-killing-it Wu-Tang Clan explode out of the trenches and back onto the front page of the zeitgeist. In 2015, they released the one-copy-only double LP Once Upon a Time in Shaolin, which was infamously bought for $2 million by pharma douche Martin Shkreli (and later seized by a federal court). Over the past year or so, the Clan have been thrust back into the spotlight for a far better reason: 2018 was the 25th anniversary of their debut record, Enter the Wu-Tang (36 Chambers)....

Rachel Cassels Cairo Gang’s Emmett Kelly Singer, songwriter, and guitarist Emmett Kelly has always been the sole constant of the Cairo Gang. He usually plays everything on the project’s recordings, but surrounds himself with a strong Chicago-based band for live shows—guitarist Sam Wagster, bassist Ryan Weinstein, and, lately, drummer Marc Riordan. Kelly (who might be best known as a crucial foil for Will Oldman’s Bonnie “Prince” Billy) has spent many years in Chicago, but he generally ends up returning to Los Angeles, where he was born and raised—indeed, that’s where he is now....

Fatimah Asghar (poet and filmmaker): Pet by Akwaeke Emezi, Odes to Lithium by Shira Erlichman, 1919 by Eve L. Ewing, On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous by Ocean Vuong John Corbett (writer, record producer, and gallery owner): Tell Them of Battles, Kings, & Elephants by Mathias Énard, Keith Rowe: The Room Extended by Brian Olewnick, Ideal Suggestions: Essays on Divinatory Poetics by Selah Saterstrom, Astral Weeks: A Secret History of 1968 by Ryan H....