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Before Tyler Odom moved to Chicago this year, he had the wild idea to take bedroom pop’s fragile instrumentation and whispered vocals and mash them together with screamo’s bleating hollers and grenades of frisson. On his recent self-titled solo debut as Your Arms Are My Cocoon, Odom fuses those incongruous styles with pluck, charm, and irrepressible energy—it feels like he succeeds simply because he’s so sure he can. He made most of the album in his bedroom in Katy, Texas, and certain elements sound like they were recorded in a blanket fort; the busy patter of electronic percussion that races through “Clifford the Big Red Stab Wound” could be coming from a speaker buried under a pile of pillows....

Hybrid events are becoming de rigueur in 2020, and this week’s gig poster presents an option for fans of techno and dance music. DJ M. Sylvia designed this poster in two color schemes, integrating a version of the Eye of Providence created by Andrew Panahon with other visual elements by DJ Tima Fei of NORdjs. It promotes an in-store set that she’ll play at Lakeview’s legendary Gramaphone Records this weekend. She’ll be spinning in the DJ booth for socially distanced shoppers, and the store will livestream the afternoon via its Twitch channel for those who need to be elsewhere....

Brotherhood, meet sisterhood. Those who know clarinetist, composer, and self-described “sonic archaeologist” Angel Bat Dawid from the incisive October release LIVE likely associate her with her stalwart seven-piece band, Tha Brotherhood, which backs her on that album. It was recorded during a fraught, frustrating 2019 European tour, but when the pandemic shuttered venues and stilled plane engines, Dawid turned her sights to more intimate musical ventures. So far they’ve included a duo act with galaxy-brained synth wizard Oui Ennui (cleverly christened Daoui), a one-shot spring 2021 release on Australian label Longform Editions, and, on Juneteenth, the astonishing Hush Harbor Mixtape Vol....

It’s been nearly 20 years since Bat Boy: The Musical had its world premiere on Halloween night in 1997 at the Actors’ Gang, the California theater company led by actor Tim Robbins. And it’s been a little more than 15 years since the show had a high-profile off-Broadway run in 2001, winning the Lucille Lortel Award for Outstanding Musical and the Outer Critics Circle Award for Outstanding Off-Broadway Musical. Yet as his intellect and language skills develop, Edgar becomes more and more unhappily aware of his animal nature....

The most incisive—or dare I say best—analysis I’ve heard of contemporary culture’s preoccupation with getting the best of anything and everything comes from Aziz Ansari: “We always want the best. Whatever we’re doing, we want to do the best, funnest thing. Whatever we’re buying, we want the best,” the comedian says in his latest stand-up special, Live at Madison Square Garden. “The other day I had to get a toothbrush, and before even thinking about it, I googled ‘best toothbrush....

Self-loathing men occupy the center of Conor McPherson’s world—and he gives them plenty to hate about themselves. That’s particularly true for the unnamed narrator in McPherson’s 1997 solo play, in which a jaded and repulsive theater critic abandons his life in Dublin and falls in with a gang of vampires in suburban London. They bestow upon him the effortless charm he’s never had, and in return he uses his newfound power to ensnare young victims for his hosts....

No other series has done as much to demonstrate the breadth and depth of contemporary Chicago hip-hop as All Smiles. Launched seven years ago by rapper-singer Rich Jones, the intergenerational monthly showcase says goodbye tonight with a lineup that speaks to its long history of bringing together locals from different cliques and eras. Jones began All Smiles as a vehicle for his rap trio, SCC, which is now mostly defunct but makes a rare reunion appearance to open this show....

At least one thing became clear last year during the trial of the so-called NATO Three: the Chicago Police Department spied on citizens exercising their First Amendment right to free speech. We acquired the records from the department through a Freedom of Information Act request made last November. Specifically, we asked for copies of the paperwork required when police open what they call “First Amendment-related investigations,” which are “prompted by or based upon a person’s speech or other expression,” according to department rules....

Last year an independent Chicago rapper who found success while making bold, insightful tracks about black life on the city’s south side appeared onstage at Lollapalooza. I could be describing Chance the Rapper, but I’m actually talking about Elizabeth Harris, better known as Cupcakke. Sure, technically Lolla didn’t list her as one of the festival’s acts, but she showed up for Charli XCX’s performance, and according to Tribune critic Jessi Roti, Cupcakke turned out to be the “set savior....

Courtesy of Father John Misty’s Facebook page Father John Misty Father John Misty, the nom de troll of Joshua Tillman (formerly of Fleet Foxes), has streamed his new album I Love You, Honeybear a full two weeks ahead of its scheduled release. Sort of. The songwriter announced a “new music platform” called SAP that’s all about hearing music on demand at no cost to either the listener or the artist....

Sun-Times Mayor Harold Washington, shown here in 1986, dropped out of DuSable high school, then earned his degree in an unusual way. I’m sure Mayor Emanuel cares about Chicago’s children and wants them to have the best schooling possible. But maybe his interest in the city’s schools would be keener if he had a personal history with them—if he himself was a Chicago public school alum. That, however, hasn’t been true of many Chicago mayors....

In Illinois, 76,000 people are behind bars and roughly 42 percent of Illinois’ population has a criminal or arrest record. With the exception of people in prison, all citizens in Illinois have the right to vote. However, barriers to participation in our democracy for people impacted by the American legal system extend far beyond felony disenfranchisement. The jail serving as a polling location, allowing for voting machines to be brought into the facility, protects the enfranchisement of those who rely on same day voter registration–the majority of people in the jail....

I remember a time in the 90s when certain critics just didn’t believe that Jon Spencer’s impassioned retro-rock stage presence wasn’t some sort of ridiculous gimmick. Though some derided his band the Blues Explosion as a second-rate mimic of Canned Heat fronted by a white guy with Mr. Dynamite-era James Brown aspirations, for others his combination of dirty swagger and bluesman showmanship was a revelation. If you weren’t on board for Spencer during this era, it’s probably because you didn’t appreciate (or didn’t know about) the crazy damaged garage rock of Spencer’s previous band, Pussy Galore—which walked the line between audacious and disastrous, notably on a skull-rattling 1986 reimagining of the entirety of the Rolling Stones’ Exile on Main St....

It’s easy to lose track of the restaurants Dudley Nieto has had a hand in over the decades. Adobo Grill, Zapatista, Xel-Ha, Zocalo, New Rebozo, Chapulin, Chapultepec, La Canasta, Eivissa, Mezcalina, Barbakoa—to name a few. There are so many that it’s almost easy to look right past Rojo Gusano, the latest, a taco-focused Albany Park joint with a somewhat labored Sammy-Hagar-staggering-around-on-the-beach-vibe. But after Ixcateco Grill, it’s the second midscale Mexican joint with a pedigreed chef to open in the neighborhood, and as such it deserves a look....

There’s a white Michigan rapper with a whiplash-inducing staccato flow who shocked the pop music world when he topped the Billboard 200 last year. No, it isn’t Eminem. The real shocker came in October, when the number one album on Billboard belonged to Nathan John Feuerstein, aka Christian rapper NF. His third album, Perception (Capitol CMG/NF Real Music), is “Christian” in the sense that it’s obscenely polite and lightly peppered with references to religious ideology....

When I wrote a few months ago that I intended to continue writing after I began my new career as a special education teacher, I was grossly underestimating how much time outside the classroom I’d have to devote to teaching. I’ve spent much of the last two months planning lessons and completing sundry other paperwork. I find all this fascinating, though time-consuming. (There’s also the Chicago teachers’ strike, which is still going on as I write this and which has proved almost as time-consuming as teaching....

Chicago composer and musician Joshua Abrams likes to compare the guimbri (aka gimbri, guembri, or sintir), a traditional three-string bass lute associated with Morocco’s Gnawa people, to the Roland TR-808, an early-80s drum machine that became foundational to hip-hop, Chicago house, and a long list of other genres. “Sometimes I’ll joke that it’s the original 808, because it has a percussive skin mixed with a bass tone,” Abrams says. “It has a strong sub-bass too....

Q: My husband and I got married in August of 2019 and we were together for over five years before getting married. I’m very happy and love him with all my heart. We don’t fight, we just have some tiffs here and there. The kicker is that I have a tough time feeling him during sex and he doesn’t last as long as I would like him to. We’re adventurous enough to try different things, but I find myself sexually unfulfilled....

Over the last few weeks I’ve seen something heretofore unimaginable—people eagerly volunteering to pay property taxes that aren’t due for another three or four months. As of this past weekend, the treasurer’s office had received about 113,400 prepayments, up from just 1,775 last year. That means taxpayers have paid more than $692.3 million in property taxes, which Pappas’s office will distribute to the city, the county, the schools, and other taxing bodies....

This past Sunday night was the first really frigid night of the year, a night with the kind of weather that left the streets barren and delayed flights at O’Hare. But folks of all sorts, many even in costume—including a guy in a full-on purple-velvet Mad Hatter suit and top hat—crammed into Emporium Arcade Bar in Wicker Park to witness the return of Robot Riot, an event that its organizers describe as “the backyard wrestling of robot fighting....