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With The Official Body (FatCat), the third album of tuneful, wiry, and crudely funky postpunk from British trio Shopping, the group have maintained their foothold on a sound that’s nearly four decades old while sounding more contemporary than on past material. Producer Edwyn Collins—who once covered vaguely similar terrain in his Scottish pop band Orange Juice—expertly accentuates the rudimentary postdisco grooves of drummer Andrew Milk, the rude yet propulsive bass lines of Billy Easter, and the scratchy guitar licks of front woman Rachel Aggs with a straightforwardness that lends the music extra frantic urgency....

It’s balmy in the Children’s Garden of the Garfield Park Conservatory, a welcome respite from the blustery chill of winter. It’s Sweet Saturday, so visitors can sample coffee beans, lemon, papaya, and prickly pear, among other edible treats, and there’s the tumult of children playing. There’s yelling and the clanging of the metal grating where children play above us and wait for a twisted slide that empties right by the poets’ table....

Editorial cartoonist Bill Mauldin, whose bedraggled “Willie and Joe” characters famously represented the lowly “dogface” foot soldiers of World War II, won two Pulitzer Prizes, the first when he was only 23. For those who actually don’t know, the show will be a strong introduction. And for those who only remember him for Willie and Joe, it’ll be a reminder that he went on to have a near 50-year, nationally syndicated career that spoke truth to power and championed every kind of “little guy” in the face of injustice....

Antonin Scalia was still alive and Barack Obama was president when John Strand’s fine play about the famously combative conservative Supreme Court justice—known for his vociferous opposition to affirmative action, Roe v. Wade, and all other elements of the progressive agenda and his devotion to preserving the supposed original intent of the framers of the Constitution—was first produced at the Arena Stage in Washington, D.C., in 2015. In the play, Strand takes pains to show us the man behind “the monster” (as Scalia calls himself)....

Q: I like water sports, and I heard about a guy in a rural area who holds piss parties in his backyard. I found a mailing list for those interested in piss play, and it wasn’t long before he posted about one of these parties. People on the list talk a big game, but no one else has stepped up to host something, including me. (I would, but four neighbors look onto my backyard....

John Corbett describes the artwork on display at “Monster Roster: Existentialist Art in Postwar Chicago”—an exhibit he cocurated that opens this weekend at the Smart Museum—as “a howling, terrified, introspective whorl of penetrating angst and disoriented subjectivity.” Elsewhere in his essay Corbett proposes Thelonious Monk’s “Ugly Beauty” as the theme music for the show, and that song title is as apt a description as it gets. Most of the members of the Monster Roster studied at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and were profoundly influenced by Kathleen Blackshear, who told them to go to the Field Museum and draw Oceanic and Native American artifacts....

In early December, the home practice organ owned by beloved former White Sox organist Nancy Faust was auctioned off to benefit Chicago White Sox Charities. The Hammond Elegante Model 340100—complete with original bench and owner’s manual—sold for $1,400 to one of the biggest champions of both Faust and baseball organ music: Josh Kantor, who’s been the Boston Red Sox organist since 2003. Hogan knew Dowd and Crawford already, and she’d met Kantor last year while she was on tour with the Decemberists....

“Nie dla psa kiełbasa,” is a sardonic thing you can say in Polish when something is (or should be) unattainable for someone who desires it. It means “the sausage is not for dogs.” Not speaking Polish, it’s precisely the way I feel when I get a craving for kielbasa and find myself in one of the city’s wondrous Polish delis, such as Rich’s, Dunajec, or Kurowski’s. These places all smell bewitchingly of smoke, pork, garlic, and spice, and all feature long rows of dangling meat, hung far out of reach behind the counter....

The Harper Court Summer Music Series in Hyde Park, organized by the Silver Room’s Eric Williams in conjunction with the University of Chicago, has consisted of four free open-air concerts between May and August—and the last, on Wednesday, August 31, is a world-music house party reuniting the creators of Africa Hi-Fi, a beloved Sonotheque residency that ran from 2004 through 2009. Ron Trent and Joseph Bryl will DJ, Sonia Hassan will host, and trumpeter and singer-songwriter Sam Trump will perform live....

Bassist Stephan Crump has established himself as a magnificent team player. He provides muscle and bone in the limber trio led by pianist Vijay Iyer, and lets his fluency with tender melody sparkle in intimate groupings including his duo with guitarist Mary Halvorson and the Rosetta Trio, with guitarists Liberty Ellman and Jamie Fox. Crump shows off a different side of his personality with his agile quartet Rhombal, which formed as a response to the death of his brother, Patrick, from an aggressive sarcoma....

We’re not quite halfway through 2016, but our previous list of books we were looking forward to peters out just around now. Plus, Book Expo America blew through town a few weeks ago, leaving heaps of publisher catalogs and free galleys in its wake. Winter—or, rather The Winds of Winter—may not be coming anytime soon, but summer is definitely here. And you’re going to want something to read besides that new Harry Potter book....

One of the greatest joys of pressing play on a new Boris record is the excitement of hearing which direction they take each time around. Formed in 1992, the Japanese trio have dabbled in—and mostly perfected—the entire spectrum of heavy and heady music. They kicked off their career tipping their collective hat to the doom of 90s Earth and the sludge of the Melvins (the band’s name is a homage to the opening track of the Melvins’ Bullhead LP), and went on to master dizzying thrash, eerie psychedelia, glacial doom, and gorgeous shoegaze—they even toyed with J-pop on 2011’s New Album (Sargent House)....

One thing’s for sure—you can’t pin Martin Arnold down. On The Split Veleta, his volume in Another Timbre Records’ recent five-album survey of Canadian composers, the pensive violin and piano melodies wind and wander but never quite resolve. Abberare, a collection of his work performed by the Montreal-based Bozzini String Quartet, is split between Renaissance-vintage sonorities, gentle dissonances, and cheerily meandering airs. Arnold, who lives in Toronto, holds down a monthly gig contributing subtly off-kilter guitar accompaniment to the smooth lounge pop of pianist Ryan Driver, with whom he has also recorded entropic treatments of English folk tunes in the alt-folk band Mermaids....

Over the past decade or so, whenever a garage band has played a Chicago show, you’ll have likely found James Swanberg somewhere on the premises, in the crowd or hawking merch or even onstage. For most of that time he’s operated under the name Today’s Hits, which began as a vehicle for the perfectly sloppy, lo-fi solo songs that he’d record and release by the hundreds, usually uploading them to Tumblr and Bandcamp....

Every beautiful day last summer was like torture to me—a reminder that the pandemic had closed off almost everything I love about the season. Thankfully I could still get a taste of that old summertime feeling from the video for “Mmhmm,” by teenage west-side rap duo DCG Brothers. Chicago video collective No More Heroes brought Shun and Bsavv and regular collaborator Msavv to a Los Angeles golf course, where they worked with director Josh Jones to create a visual analogy for the joy bursting from DCG’s minimalist drill-pop favorite....

Don’t miss the newest Chicago Reader “Best of” book, a collection of pieces from more than two decades of work by senior writer Mike Sula: An Invasion of Gastronomic Proportions: My Adventures With Chicago Animals, Human and Otherwise. I’ve written for the Chicago Reader for 25 years, mostly about animals and food. My favorite stories were about the people on the edges of the city’s food system; the oddballs, the uncelebrated, the immigrants cooking for their own—and especially the people willing to break the law to put food on the table....

One of Chicago’s biggest hip-hop releases this month comes from rapper-singer Seandrea Sledge, better known as Dreezy, a south-side native who now lives in LA—last Friday, Interscope released her full-length studio debut, No Hard Feelings. In an XXL interview in June, Dreezy said Interscope has helped her develop as an artist: “I think before I got signed I didn’t realize how big my sound was or how far I can take it....

Of all the Chicago musicians who’ve packed their bags to live, well, anywhere but here, Emily Cross is among those I miss the most. I fell in love with her group Cross Record shortly before she and her husband, Dan Duszynski (who’s also in the band), took off for Austin in 2013. That year’s full-length, Be Good, remains a go-to when I need a calming fix to guide me through piles of work that make me tense or when I just need to feel less glum—or even when I want to cozy up to unpleasant emotions and experience them to the fullest....

Samantha Irby, former Chicagoan, animal lover, and all around hilarious human being, has just signed a deal to develop a half-hour series for FX based on her blog Bitches Gotta Eat and essay collection Meaty. She’ll be working with two other hilarious humans, Abbi Jacobson of Broad City and Jessi Klein, head writer of Inside Amy Schumer and author of the memoir You’ll Get Over It. According to Deadline, the series will follow Irby through “failed relationships, taco feasts, her struggles with Crohn’s disease, poverty, blackness, and body image....

Luxury apartment buildings in Chicago are built typically in neighborhoods with no shortage of well-to-do renters or in working-class parts of town where they serve as a vehicle for gentrification. Though the city’s Affordable Requirements Ordinance is meant to stem the drain of reasonably priced rental housing, developers have all too often elected to pay a fee in place of setting aside 10 percent of their units as affordable for people making 60 percent or less of the area median income....