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Few contemporary indie-rock bands deliver as consistently as Boston’s Pile. Roughly every other year since 2007, they’ve dropped a collection of pummeling, direct songs executed with posthardcore aggression and postrock grandeur, their lyrics carrying a twinge of subversive indignation. Their seventh studio album, May’s Green and Gray (Exploding in Sound), arrives following a time of transition. Guitarist Matt Becker and bassist Matt Connery left the band after 2017’s A Hairshirt of Purpose, and front man Rick Maguire moved to Nashville, where he was joined by two new members, former touring guitarist Chappy Hull and bassist Alex Molini....

The downsides of ride-hailing services like Lyft and Uber are well-documented. Studies show that in addition to decimating the taxi industry, they’ve increased traffic congestion and cannibalized transit use. The City Council was wise when it voted last November to pass a new fee on ride-hailing trips, with the additional money going to fund CTA infrastructure. Old-school car share can be handy for stocking up on groceries or picking up furniture from Craigslist, or as a convenient way to rent a vehicle for a day trip....

In fall 1999, NYU freshman Tim Sweeney launched a late-night dance show called Beats in Space on the college’s radio station. The show attracted fans from throughout the city’s dance community, and Sweeney became enmeshed in the scene, interning for DFA and occasionally DJing the city’s infamously wild Motherfucker party. He still hosts Beats in Space on WNYU today, and since 2011 he’s run a label with the same name. In February the Beats in Space label ushered in its new mix series with Powder in Space by Japanese DJ Momoko Goto, who produces and performs as Powder....

Early in my tenure at this paper, a coworker told me, “Reader readers are seldom breeders.” Like the opening words of a nursery rhyme, this dictum has stuck with me over the years, and it partly explains why we devote so little of our resources to reviewing children’s films. With adult-minded movies ever harder to find in theaters, surely movies for kids can take care of themselves, driven as they are by epic marketing campaigns and the awesome peer pressure of schoolyard buzz....

“I lost my song. I lost it because I didn’t know what it was worth,” laments a young bluesman freshly returned to Memphis from an abortive attempt at making it in Chicago. Ace of Spades (Matthew James Elam) is speaking literally—like many Black songwriter-musicians before and after him, he got scammed out of the rights for a song—but the line has metaphorical heft in Katori Hall’s 2007 play Hoodoo Love, now at Raven Theatre under Wardell Julius Clark’s warm direction....

When I asked my girlfriend recently to pick up lemons for making cocktails and she brought me Meyer lemons, I was a little dismayed at first. The Meyer lemon, a cross between a lemon and a mandarin orange, is sweeter, less acidic, and more aromatic than its conventional cousin (most lemons sold in supermarkets are Eureka or Lisbon lemons). I wasn’t sure how it would work in the cocktails I was planning to make....

Last year, Gossip Wolf was stoked to report that one-man electro army Jim Magas was launching a label called Midwich—and this week the Bleader premieres tracks from new Midwich releases by Hide and Alex Barnett! Reader music editor Philip Montoro compares Hide’s “muscular, minimalist tracks” to “something you’d hear at a gas-powered vampire disco in a Mad Max movie”—check out the local industrial duo’s Flesh for the Living 12-inch and tell us they don’t run Barter­town!...

Dee Rees’s period drama Mudbound, which is now available to watch on Netflix, opens with a scene that sets the tone for everything that follows. In the Mississippi Delta during the mid-1940s, two white brothers struggle to dig a plot on the family farm where they can bury their father’s corpse. Excavating the earth, they uncover the skull of someone who’d been buried in this location some time before. The skeleton belongs to a former slave, one of the brothers declares, because it contains a bullet hole in the skull—the person must have been shot while trying to run away....

Looking stylish when faced with extreme heat and thunderstorms is tough. These Pitchfork festivalgoers share how they rose to the challenge. DW: “I wanted to be kinda trendy for the festival, but I also wanted to be very breezy, so I went with the oversize tee with the shorts underneath. The T-shirt has little holes in it, so I put a bikini top underneath, which also gives it a pop of color....

Architecture biennials are created to take the pulse of the profession, to display what architects are making, thinking about, and valuing. If a pulse is what we were looking for, I would have put the Chicago Architecture Biennial in an ambulance years ago. Past editions were missing the critical, complicated histories of segregation and redlining; the grand, hopeful construction and spectacular destruction of large-scale public housing were glossed over; the seemingly unfixable disrepair that blight clearance brought was barely addressed....

It’s no secret that all cultural institutions are taking a hit amid our current crisis. But things got personal for the Chicago film community when last week Kartemquin Films cofounder Gordon Quinn was diagnosed with COVID-19. It was a reminder not only of all the essential work he personally produced—Hoop Dreams and Minding the Gap among them—but a chance to reflect on how meaningful every aspect of the Chicago film community is to capturing these moments in time, broadening our horizons, and bringing people together even when we’re apart....

Pamplona, Spain, is probably best known for the festival of San Fermín, when thrill seekers run with bulls through the streets—which usually ends much worse for the animals than the humans. The four women in Melenas may not pull as big a crowd as that globally famous event, but on their new second album, Dias Raros (Trouble in Mind), they offer 11 better reasons to remember their hometown’s name. The band’s sound adheres to a template established by garage-rock combos in the 1960s and productively renewed by acts such as Yo La Tengo, Stereolab, and the late, very great New Zealand group Look Blue, Go Purple....

I’ve been a big fan of Swedish trumpeter Goran Kajfes for quite a few years, and my admiration for his work keeps growing. Last summer I finally had a chance to see him live, giving a fluid, muscular, and lyrical performance in the groove-heavy Swedish quartet Nacka Forum. No single band captures his broad range, but he displays a portion of it on two recent records: the debut of a new quartet and the third album by his entertaining Subtropic Arkestra....

October ended with a flurry of engrossing Chicago rap releases, in some cases separated by just a few hours. Last Wednesday night, Saba dropped Bucket List Project, which makes Chicago’s neglected west side feel as big as the rest of the city, and by the middle of Thursday it had landed in the top spot of the iTunes Store’s Hip-Hop/Rap chart. At midnight last Thursday, Air Credits (aka rapper ShowYouSuck and mashup mavens the Hood Internet) released the dystopian sci-fi opus Broadcasted....

The Hideout is holding a reunion celebration this Saturday, but you won’t need to trim your hair or suck in your gut to impress people you haven’t seen in decades—the party promises to be a laid-back affair, fit for friends and families. This anniversary marks 20 years that the Hideout, tucked away just off Clybourn on Wabansia by a Department of Streets & Sanitation fueling station, has been owned by brothers Jim and Mike Hinchsliff and married couple Tim and Katie Tuten....

For the past decade, local trio Bitchin Bajas have exemplified the virtues of patience and versatility. All three members play synthesizers, Cooper Crain and Daniel Quinlivan play organ, and Rob Frye plays woodwinds and percussion. They create plush, pulsing instrumentals with melodies that evolve at such a leisurely pace that you might not notice the changes as they occur—though you’ll definitely feel like you’ve been taken somewhere by the time the tune ends....

As any memoirist knows, the past can grow sweeter over time, but it can also turn bitter. And so it is with the gratitude former NASA engineer and author Homer H. Hickam Jr. expressed for his agent in the acknowledgments that preface Rocket Boys, his richly recalled account of a mid-20th century boyhood in a West Virginia mining town. But in a civil lawsuit filed in June in Los Angeles, Hickam charges that Freiberg, who died in 2012, breached his “fiduciary duties” to the author by conspiring with the film’s producer, acting on behalf of Universal, to offer the story only to them, when Freiberg was supposed to be shopping it around competitively....

At 10 PM Chicago time on October 28, Los Angeles experimental rock trio Autolux closed the anti-Trump design contest they’d launched two days earlier. Late that afternoon, local artist Tom Feltenberger (aka Creative Space Cadet) had started sketching his submission while still at work— he ran home and finished it minutes before the deadline. “I was inspired, more than anything else, by the power of femininity,” says Feltenberger. “The movement supporting Trump has been that of a hypermasculine culture, and I felt the best way to deconstruct that was to make Trump visually submissive to the power of this woman....

Best known for the cult psychodrama Possession (1981), writer-director Andrzej Żuławski made his feature debut ten years earlier with The Third Part of the Night, and it shows him already at the height of his powers. A sustained nightmare about societal and personal breakdown, it presents one man’s descent into madness during the Nazi occupation of Poland, though the story is hard to follow (perhaps by design). Żuławski divulges important information about the characters in short, unexpected bursts, and the plot moves sinuously between the hero’s present, past, and dream life....

Last August alderman Ed Burke (14th) and northwest-side alderman Gilbert Villegas (36th) said they planned to push for removing the Balbo tributes, and a month later they were ready to introduce an ordinance to City Council. But there was stiff opposition from some local Italian-American civic leaders and history buffs, who view the landmarks as a source of ethnic pride, and the proposal seemed to stall. More than 30 civic groups, including the League of Women Voters, the South Side branch of the NAACP, and Women’s March Chicago have endorsed the change....