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A refreshing take on the coming-of-age story, Brett Haley’s Hearts Beat Loud follows the lives of Frank Fisher (Nick Offerman), a middle-aged rock musician preparing to close his record store in Red Hook, Brooklyn, after 17 years, and his daughter, Sam (Kiersey Clemons), who’s about to move to California to begin college. Music is a shared passion of theirs and the glue that holds their relationship together. In fact, music is so central to Hearts Beat Loud that it’s connected to everything, from the characters’ emotions to important events taking place in the story....

Chicago would have been a much more mundane place over the last two decades without the tireless efforts of musician, artist, promoter, historian (and Reader contributor) Plastic Crimewave, aka Steve Krakow. Sometimes his music can seem overshadowed by his work organizing and promoting shows of great psychedelic trip-meisters from all over the world, but a new Plastic Crimewave Syndicate album is always a cosmic event. The power trio—currently includes Anjru Kieterang on bass and Jose Bernal on drums—is about to drop Thunderbolt of Flaming Wisdom on EyeVybe (run by erstwhile drummer Karissa Talanian)....

Twenty-two-year-old Atlanta singer and multi-instrumentalist Sequoyah Murray grew up in a musical family, and you can tell. He makes music the way a dolphin swims—effortlessly, playfully, and with supreme confidence. Murray’s remarkable debut full-length, Before You Begin (Thrill Jockey), recalls Prince not so much in its approach or themes as in its ambitiously openhearted eclecticism. The short opening track, “Here We Go,” suggests a deeper-voiced Marvin Gaye running jazzy phrases beside an opera singer while blips of electroacoustic noise wander through the background....

As Chicagoans grapple with the new reality of the COVID-19 pandemic and the radical restrictions which public health requirements have put on the places in which we live, work, and play, it makes sense to step back and ponder some aspects of what makes the situation such an emotional and psychological challenge. My mantra for analyzing place comes from Yi-Fu Tuan, a geographer/philosopher, who wrote: “What begins as undifferentiated space becomes place as we get to know it better and endow it with values....

The Synthesizer Chili Cook-Off started as a lark in 2011 but has grown into a reliably fun (and bizarre) annual event. There’s something satisfying and lighthearted about having four musicians cook up some chili and then perform original “sonic interpretations” of their culinary creations. The Synth-Chili Cook-Off celebrates its fifth year Sunday at the Empty Bottle. Defending champion Travis Thatcher takes on Wesley Groves, Tyson Torstensen, and Peter Speer. This unusual competition has become one of my favorite new wintertime activities, and I’m not alone in that sentiment....

When I contacted Jeff Lescher of legendary mod/glam/punk/power-pop band Green to find out what his set would be like for this special gig, he responded quickly and kindly, but added, “One ‘angle’ that I hope you’ll avoid in your reportage is the overworked and untrue ‘Green was a group that should have been big but never were.’” I’ve gotta admit it’s hard to not go there, as it’s a bit of a head-scratcher to me that Chicago bands such as Veruca Salt, Urge Overkill, and Local H got signed to major labels while the beloved Green didn’t (in 1991 the Reader’s Bill Wyman dubbed them “Chicago’s Great Green Hope”)....

Editor’s Note, July 20: After this column was published, it was called to our attention that the Random Acts of Theater show has the same title and imagery as an earlier piece by Stephanie Diaz. We regret not catching that similarity at the time and apologize to Diaz and the other creators involved with that work. We asked Jessica Thebus and Stephanie Diaz for comment. Thebus responded: “Random Acts of Theater would like to publicly apologize to Stephanie Diaz for the appropriation of the title and central image of her show Mariposa Nocturna: A Puppet Tryptich....

London-based Danish alto saxophonist Julie Kjær performed in Chicago last summer as a member of Paal Nilssen-Love’s sprawling Large Unit, a raucous, high-octane free-jazz orchestra. I’m embarrassed to admit I don’t remember her playing from the concert, but that’s actually the case with most of the individuals in the band—they’re all strong musicians, fueling the combo with extensive improvisation, but what I remember is the way the woolly, gut-punching sound of the ensemble as a whole....

Q: I’m committed to my male partner and he’s committed to me. (I’m a woman.) But we both understand we need to flirt and that we will both want to sleep with someone else at some point. We live together, we have a dog, and neither of us believes in marriage. We plan to purchase a house in the coming months. Here’s the issue: He met a woman at work. He’s not sexually attracted to her at all....

On Saturday the Inner-City Muslim Action Network hosts an event called “The Fiercest Urgency of Now” at the Harold Washington Cultural Center. The centerpiece of the evening is a concert featuring local hip-hop heavies Mick Jenkins and Rhymefest. Minneapolis rapper and Rhymesayers standard-bearer Brother Ali headlines, which is a pretty great excuse to revisit his most recent album, 2012’s Mourning in America and Dreaming in Color. “Just Fine,” today’s 12 O’Clock Track, appears only on the full-length’s deluxe edition, and its carefree air helps it end on an uplifting note....

—Legal scholar Guyora Binder On July 8, 2012, as the summer sun rose over the Auburn Gresham neighborhood on the south side of Chicago, police hauled a distraught 19-year-old named Tevin Louis away from a murder scene. The victim was Louis’s best friend, Marquise Sampson. The shooter was a veteran police officer, Antonio Dicarlo. For the previous five years, Louis and Sampson had been inseparable, drawn together by rough childhoods marked by foster care and poverty....

Multidisciplinary artist Andrew CS moved to Chicago from Rockton, Illinois, in the mid-2010s to study interaction design at Columbia College, and then began booking intimate Sunday DIY shows—but long before either of those things happened, he’d developed an interest in field recordings by playing indie video games. “The first mode of creation that I got into was game development—specifically indie game development,” Andrew told Darwin Grosse in a 2019 interview for the podcast Art + Music + Technology....

Gossip Wolf is convinced that psychedelic Chicago six-piece Diagonal would’ve been stars in the UK if they’d been around in the mid-90s. Fans of the Verve and Spiritualized might want to dig through their back issues of NME and Melody Maker to make sure these folks aren’t time travelers! Their debut album, Tomorrow, combines hazy waterfalls of shoegaze guitar, serious pop hooks, and “guy howling in an empty cave” vocals. It drops Monday, July 2, on local label Midwest Action, and that night Diagonal play a free show at the Empty Bottle with Plastic Crimewave Syndicate (led by Reader regular Steve Krakow), Texas psych-rockers Lake of Fire, and local stoner-doom unit Black Road....

Bless the weirdos in the Curls. Beginning about six years back, the local experimental indie-pop outfit figured out their sound at DIY spaces, most notably Young Camelot—but their ambitious, expansive new album, Bounce House (Diversion), makes that incubation period feel like a lifetime ago. The six-piece group meld funk, indie rock, synth-pop, doo-wop, and various fringier styles into a brazen style that’s almost too eclectic for its own good. More often than not, though, it works: I never realized I wanted to hear a band mix glimmering Prince funk with jittery Dirty Projectors indie rock, but “Bad Boi” makes me wish the Curls would do it again....

Brockhampton, Billie Eilish, Khalid, and scores of other musicians who’ve emerged in the past few years have taken a wrecking ball to genre divides and gotten hugely popular in the process. The genreless state of pop has also produced a lot of gray, emotionally static music, of course, just like happens within any genre, but it’s been a boon to artists such as Chicagoan Blake Saint David, giving them permission to be as flexible as their vision dictates....

Chicago band Lifeguard make the kind of noisy, brooding rock that’s been foundational to generations of punk and indie bands, all the way back to the dawn of hardcore and no wave. On their self-released debut album, Dive, Lifeguard dispense driving bass lines that could enliven even the dreariest postpunk tune, impassioned drumming that ratchets up tension to the boiling point, and feral guitars so saturated with distortion it’ll rub off all over your face....

Moving past the concrete barrier marked “CLOSED,” Patrick Leacock and I slipped and slided our way into the woods, quiet except for the hissing cars and occasional woodpecker. Species of maple, oak, poplar, elm, and wild cherry were present, as well as last year’s leaves in the duff below our feet. There were plenty of tree snags and fallen logs decomposing. It’s important to know species, as fungi have woody associates, meaning they identify and grow on or with particular trees, or “mothers” as I am wont to say....

courtesy of Fat Cat Records Tal National In January of 2014 Chicago recording engineer Jamie Carter took his third trip to Niamey, the capital of Niger, to record another new album by the high-energy guitar band Tal National. With each visit Carter has become more tightly enmeshed in the group’s orbit by helping to land them a Western record label and serving as the band’s US liaison on tours. The fruits of his most recent trip will finally be shared with the rest of the world on April 14 when Fat Cat Records releases the group’s fourth and most assured album, Zoy Zoy....

The Chicago Blues Festival has tried to expand its scope this year to include a wider spectrum of artists and genres—and I can say that with some confidence, since for the first time in decades I served on the volunteer committee that helps book the fest. The lineup includes several aggressively contemporary acts, including incendiary young guitarist-vocalist Melody Angel and southern soul-blues artists Karen Wolfe and O.B. Buchana. Guitarist Benny Turner makes his Blues Festival debut this year, building on the legacy of his brother, the late Freddie King; so does Nigerien singer-­songwriter and guitarist Bombino, who exemplifies the complex, long-standing cultural exchange between American blues and African music....

As craft beer has exploded in Chicago over the past ten years, so has coverage of the local craft beer scene. But despite hundreds of articles on the subject over the years, nobody has published a print guide dedicated entirely to breweries in Chicago and the suburbs. Now, suddenly, there are two. The Beermiscuous Field Guide, published in July by the self-described “coffee shop for beer” that loaned the book its name, is a pocket-size guide to Chicagoland taprooms and brewpubs, excluding breweries where you can’t drink onsite....