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The new third full-length from Canadian doom duo Vile Creature, Glory, Glory! Apathy Took Helm!, is everything I hoped it would be. The queer vegan band, formed in 2014, draw their fierce, efficient, and elegant rage from their experiences of oppression and resistance, and they use it to build strong support structures for their bursts and blasts of raw power. The tolling, far-off twangs of guitarist and vocalist KW on the elegiac intro to “When the Path Is Unclear” set the stage for an impassioned monologue that begins as the song opens up into raw, churning fury: “You’d do well to take heed of the subtlety of the winding stream, the spider of subversion....

Judging from contemporary accounts, Chicago founder Jean Baptiste Point du Sable, the Black trading post proprietor for whom local African American leaders propose renaming Lake Shore Drive, was a virtuous, cultured, likable, and good-looking man. A 1790 account by trader Hugh Heward is the earliest record of DuSable’s trading post on the north bank of the Chicago River, just east of the present-day Michigan Avenue bridge, making him the first non-Native permanent settler of the area....

The Chicago high school students enrolled in 826CHI’s Teen Writers Studio aren’t afraid to learn from each other. “Everyone is welcoming and willing to help each other grow and learn,” says 11th-grader Stephanie R. of her experience in the program. For fellow 11th-grader Kara K., being a part of the encouraging environment at the Writers Studio has helped her become more confident in her skills and given her a community to engage in discussions over difficult, but relevant topics, like gun violence....

Ne-Hi @nehi_band OK, maybe not so much “primed” as “teetering on the edge of.” Indie-rock four-piece Ne-Hi dropped their raw self-titled debut a little over a year ago via local label Manic Static (which has since issued a second pressing), so by now its wistful, reverb-washed melodies, perfectly simple guitar leads, and swooshing, all-for-one choruses have had plenty of time to pinball around the collective brain space of concertgoers at Lincoln Hall, the Empty Bottle, Animal Kingdom, the Hideout, and the like....

While putting the finishing touches on this year’s Best of Chicago issue, I had one of the most oft-cited lines about our fair city running through my mind. You know the one. Nelson Algren in City on the Make, remarking about Chicago’s rough-edged charm: “Like loving a woman with a broken nose, you may well find lovelier lovelies, but never a lovely so real.” In the 65 years since Algren made the observation, it’s become, in my estimation, the most nauseating of Chicago cliches....

Everyone has a podcast. Even your dog has a podcast. But when it comes to diversity, it’s no surprise that white people dominate the platform. According to 2018 data from Edison Research, 59 percent of U.S. podcast listeners were white—only 12 percent were Black and 11 percent were Latinx. While podcasting continues to rapidly grow, its diversity and accessibility are slowly catching up. “[Being Latinx] doesn’t mean that you need to be fluent....

Michael Gebert Sushi takes the cake this year on Chicago‘s list. In a food-media world where 90 percent of what’s written are listicles and the remaining ten percent seems to be Dennis Lee making us sorry we asked, there’s one list that still has the solemnity of tradition to lend it a certain amount of gravitas. Of course I mean Eater’s “The 21 Hottest Burgers in Chicago 2015”! Alas, the article wasn’t quite what I expected (“With a surface temperature of ten million degrees and the gravitational pull of Saturn, Oxheart & Truncheon’s Plasma State burger is capable of reversing the flow of time and proving that P ≠ NP”)....

Rapper-producer Ill Legit belongs to a class of locals who are more seasoned than most rappers grabbing headlines and who are underground by choice. They’ve got an affection for samples that impart a sense of history into their music, and for retro sounds and beats that have the kind of heft weightlifters aspire to handle. Ill Legit’s latest project is a collaboration with Awdazcate, a linchpin of that same underground Chicago hip-hop circle....

Let’s get right to the important stuff: the hot fashion tip from EXPO Chicago 2019, the big international modern and contemporary art fair underway this weekend at Navy Pier, is knee-highs. Acquiring the Souliers piece would set you back a cool $22,000. But ten bucks will get you another Edelman offering, a big, bright, tissue paper blossom pulled from Borderlines, a wall of blooms mounted by CASE Art Fund, a nonprofit founded by Edelman and Anette Skuggeda last year....

Last weekend, Judy and Liza—Once in a Lifetime: The London Palladium Concert—A Tribute became the first indoor theater production in Chicago to open in phase four (or reopen, more accurately, since it originally ran for one weekend in March before the COVID-19 shutdown). That experiment in bringing back live indoor theater backfired in the light of widespread criticism on social media even before the first performance, including a very public resignation from Greenhouse Theater Center general manager Derek Rienzi Van Tassel on July 18....

Perfume have been at the top of the Japanese pop scene for more than a decade, so it’s easy to forget that the trio, which formed in Hiroshima in 2000, had been on the verge of quitting after a number of their mid-aughts singles didn’t perform up to the expectations of their record label. But in 2007, they caught a lucky break when they were selected by Japan’s public broadcasting network (NHK) to perform in a high-profile public service announcement for a national recycling campaign....

Second City e.t.c.’s 43rd revue begins with the cast paddling through the audience in a faux water ballet. It spends the next hour trying to find its footing. Written and performed by Atra Asdou, E.J. Cameron, Mark Campbell, Andrew Knox, Laurel Krabacher, and Chuck Norment and directed by Anneliese Toft, the two-hour production finishes strong, but is hobbled by too many tired jokes and sketches that trail off when they should end with a comic kapow....

The question was inevitable. For the purposes of Guns N’ Roses on Friday evening, “the jungle” was a football stadium filled to capacity with middle-aged suburbanites in conspicuously crisp Appetite for Destruction T-shirts whose appetite for GNR hits was eclipsed only by their thirst for domestic beer. This was just the fourth date of the much-anticipated Not in This Lifetime . . . tour, which represents a hard rock hell-freezes-over moment: the classic GNR lineup reunited....

In the relationship between musician and listener, seduction is an overrated quality; isn’t the idea that an artist has to woo their audience to welcome them and create a sense of intimacy kind of degrading? On her 2018 album, Working Class Woman (Ninja Tune), Canadian electronic producer and singer Marie Davidson seems to suggest that a far better option is to foreground a shared, deeply felt sense of disgust. The record’s opening triptych—“Your Biggest Fan,” “Work It,” and “The Psychologist”—pairs modular synth workouts with arrhythmic, sneering rambles about the high-pressure insanities experienced by touring electronic musicians....

On January 22, the City Council’s public safety committee held a five-and-a-half hour Zoom hearing on carjackings, a crime that has surged across the country since the beginning of the coronavirus pandemic. Last year Chicago had more than 1,400 carjackings—800 more than in 2019, and the highest it’s been in two decades. News about these attacks were on TV and in the papers nearly every day. “Three CPD Officers Wounded In Shootout With Carjacking Suspect,” CBS2 reported in July....

Local label Badluck Records is celebrating its first birthday with a showcase at a Logan Square DIY venue. (Direct message @badluck_records on Instagram for the address.) Badluck, whose garish yet artful sound takes Warped Tour to grad school, has invited the bands Nightfreak, Rapscallion, and Deep Crush to share the bill with Badluck rappers Chuck Trash and Saint Icky. Icky has hit his stride since joining the Badluck roster, releasing Saintiva Mixtape in July and Heavy Metal for Meditation, Vol....

The cover article of last week’s Reader, “Chicago’s Fraternal Order of Propaganda,” tells a story Chicago’s heard before—how the police version of a police encounter in which officers shot someone dead turns out to bear little or no resemblance to the truth. Most famously, there was the night in 1969 when Fred Hampton, leader of Chicago’s Black Panthers, supposedly died in a gun battle with police. In reality, the police broke in and shot him dead in bed....

US Marshals Service/AP Pedro and Margarito Flores This post has been updated with additional information. For their help, the twins received 14 year prison sentences Tuesday from federal judge Ruben Castillo, far less than the life terms they faced for the scale of their drug trafficking. Officials have not revealed where the brothers have been detained, where they’ll serve the rest of their sentences, or what steps will be taken to protect them when they’re released....

Forgive Heroes on Deck: World War II on Lake Michigan—an hourlong documentary that will premiere Thursday—for the melodramatic note on which it begins: narrator Bill Kurtis intones that “this film contains rare footage of a U.S. Navy operation, just off Chicago’s shoreline, that changed the course of World War II.” No, it was war. “More than 100 World War II aircraft rest on the bottom of Lake Michigan,” reports Heroes on Deck....

Sun-Times Media Rauner, Rahm, or Madigan—who’s lyin’ when he oughta be truthin’? If we ever get around to having mandatory civics classes in public schools—and there’s a bill to that effect in the statehouse—I feel for any teacher who has to give a lesson on the recent CPS pension extension bill. With extra time, the mayor said, he’d have enough property taxes on hand to pay the pension bill and still have money for basics, like regular janitorial service....