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Have you wanted to make a change in your life? Is there someone you’d like to love if they were a tick or a ton different from what they are? Are there goals you haven’t yet abandoned to a rational consideration of reality? Do you have heirlooms you haven’t dared to jettison from the sinking ship of your existence? Enter Cornerstone, where everyone is CACAPA (Currently Already Considering All Possibilities Anyway)....

Most of the music I share in my weekly 12 O’Clock Track posts has a certain poplike concision, even when it’s far from pop. I appreciate work that’s intensely focused, without wasted notes or gestures. But I also love music that’s wide open and takes its time getting to its destination—or in the case of today’s post, that never has a destination. Coils on Malbec (Shinkoyo) is a slow-moving experiment conducted by Argentine musician Alan Courtis (perhaps best known from his membership in the long-running Reynols) and Chicago-area native Cyrus Pireh (who lives in Duluth, Minnesota)....

It’s hard not to hear Real Enemies (New Amsterdam), the recent album by Darcy James Argue’s Secret Society, in a new light this week. The third album from the ambitious New York composer and bandleader uses the idea of conspiracy theories as a conceptual framework, examining the tendency of the postwar U.S. to embrace them to explain political, social, and economic conditions and movements. There’s been no shortage of fresh conspiracy theories during this election season, applied to both campaigns—the fanciful notion that the liberal media were colluding to cripple Trump, for instance, or the slightly more plausible claim that the DNC worked to discredit Bernie Sanders during the primaries....

Mama Bird Recordings in Portland, Oregon, has been positioning itself at the center of the transcendental hippie coffee shop scene by releasing album after album of dreamy, meditative folk. In early March they added a new highlight to their catalog with the debut album by Haley Heynderickx, I Need to Start a Garden. Heynderickx has a knack for hitting folksy cliches dead-on for true believers, then sliding off of them just enough to keep others interested....

I hadn’t known there was a courage award for journalists, though it’s an attractive idea—many journalists excel mostly because they’ve got plenty of it. But Jamie Kalven, founder and executive director of Chicago’s Invisible Institute, has just been named the winner of this year’s Ridenhour Courage Prize. He was cited for his “central role” in breaking the story of the death of Laquan McDonald at the hands of Chicago police. “In reporting that appeared ten months before the fateful release of the video footage,” says the citation, “he challenged the official account of the shooting by police, having secured the autopsy report that revealed the 17-year-old had been shot sixteen times and located a civilian eyewitness....

Bands hyped as “supergroups” usually sound cool in theory but often wind up less memorable than the better-known projects of their members. By contrast, the pop rock on Bachelor’s debut, Doomin’ Sun, will stick to your brain like bubblegum on the bottom of your sneaker. Bachelor is the duo of Melina Duterte, a Los Angeles-based songwriter and producer who makes bedroom pop as Jay Som, and Ellen Kempner, who fronts Brooklyn indie-pop trio Palehound....

Late in 2017, rapper Davis Blackwell had hit a creative block. Though he’d just earned a BFA in creative writing from Columbia College, even working for the school’s literary magazine, Hair Trigger (which also published some of his pieces), he’d all but stopped writing. “Around that time, I was really disillusioned with my prose shit,” he says. Why? Records showcase featuring Malci, Davis, Joshua Virtue, and Ruby Watson Sun 6/30, 8 PM, Hideout, 1354 W....

Remember the days of crashing an art gallery opening for free wine and a fat gourmet cheese spread? Now the thought of a crowd going open season on a platter of brie and sharp cheddar gives you the chills. Thankfully, galleries got savvy, hiring videographers to host virtual walk-throughs of shows with a voice-over from the showing artist, or in Gallery Guichard’s case, offering a virtual catalog loaded with past and current exhibitions....

Few Chicago bands have embodied the freewheeling spirit and omnidirectional potential of the city’s independent rock scene—whose many subsets include punk, postrock, no wave, and art-rock—as thoroughly as Joan of Arc. Since the group emerged in 1996 from the breakup of emo instigators Cap’n Jazz the previous year, they’ve been in constant flux, dipping into a confounding variety of genres with an intuitive illogic that’s both passionately earnest and playfully perverse....

Interrobang Theatre Project presents the midwest premiere of Emily Schwend’s low-key, but surprisingly substantial drama about a working-class woman fighting like hell just to keep the lights on. Amber (a seething, world-weary Brynne Barnard) lets her deadbeat wandering husband, Chris (Patrick TJ Kelly), back into her life, but can never decide whether his presence makes life easier or harder. Chris’s older brother, Jim (Kevin D’Ambrosio, carrying the emotional weight of the whole play), is always hovering around Amber’s house, going out of his way to do her favors....

In 2017, Reader music critic Peter Margasak called Kevin Drumm a “restless creator who’s seriously invested in trying new things within his abstract milieu.” The Chicago tabletop guitarist and electronic musician hasn’t slowed down since then—it seems like every time Gossip Wolf visits his Bandcamp page, there’s more sublime new experimental work to download. Drumm’s herculean output means that a subscription to his Bandcamp—for $28 per year you get access to his huge back catalog as well as new music as he releases it—is an incredible bargain for longtime fans and noise-curious folks alike....

R &B singer Bryan James Sledge, aka BJ the Chicago Kid, has the kind of commanding voice most rappers seek out when they’re looking for a guest artist to make a good song great—and to loosen their inhibitions in the process. On Sledge’s second album for Motown, July’s 1123, he turns the tables, showcasing guest verses from several big names in the rap game, including Offset and Rick Ross—but on nearly every track, his own performance is the most memorable....

Courtesy the artist A reasonably recent image of Revenge, who do not appear to care much about promo photos It’s hard to explain why I’m looking forward to Revenge, since I’ve never seen them before—the closest they’ve come to playing Chicago since forming 15 years ago was a gig in Aurora in 2003. But my most devoted metal-nerd friends—folks who’ve forgotten more about kvlt bands than I’ll ever know—all but hyperventilate with excitement at the prospect of a Revenge show....

The premise of the movie, based on Will Kern’s 1995 play Hellcab, is a day in the life of a Chicago cab driver (Paul Dillon). And not just any day, the shortest day of the year, December 21—which of course is only short on light. Throughout its 96 minutes we’re treated to a bevy of cameos from the likes of Julianne Moore, John C. Reilly, Gillian Anderson, John Cusack, Michael Shannon, Laurie Metcalf, and more than two dozen others portraying passengers of the cab from a few seconds to a few minutes at a time....

QI’m a straight 18-year-old girl in my first sexual relationship. Things are a little awkward, and I could chalk it up to inexperience, but here’s what I feel conflicted about: I have a vore fetish. It was a fascination for me as a young child and became a sexual thing around the time I hit puberty. I’m wondering now whether this is something I need to get off. It works well when I’m on my own, but I always thought “regular stuff” would work too once I was actually getting some....

Friends and family held a “March for Matt” and a candlelight vigil Tuesday for Matthew Williams, a 21-year-old Chicago activist who was shot and killed Friday night. Williams was playing Xbox with friends in a basement apartment in the city’s Park Manor neighborhood when a gunman fired into the window of the apartment, striking Williams in the back. His cousin cradled him in his arms until an ambulance arrived, according to several of Williams’s friends....

To get an idea of how wide the divide between Chicago’s urban denizens and suburbanites can be, just consider the tagline for the Berwyn Development Corporation’s current ad campaign: “Berwyn: Nothing like a suburb.” Really? Nothing? Methinks the west-of-Cicero community doth protest too much. Jeremy Wechsler‘s production showcases some honest, understated scene work between Tepeli and Laura T. Fisher, who plays the mother, and is particularly effective in its depiction of the way parents and their grown children can slip back into old personality patterns when reunited....

On the Atlas Moth’s brand-new Coma Noir, their fourth full-length and first for LA-based Prosthetic Records, the local heavy-metal monsters turn the focus back toward the earth-shaking sludge that defined their early work. In fact, they haven’t sounded this raw and gnarly since they self-released their debut seven-inch a decade ago. With their last record, 2014’s The Old Believer, they ran their tried-and-true stoner metal through the psychedelic ringer, padding songs with spacey synths and soundscapes and almost diluting their impact with ambience and stargazing....

After nearly a decade selling music in Logan Square, Logan Hardware quietly said good-bye last month. After a big sale the weekend of Record Store Day, according to owner John Ciba, “We didn’t open back up again.” Before abandoning its space on 2532 W. Fullerton, the store will host one final blowout sale on Sunday, May 20, followed by a pop-up sale at nearby Logan Arcade on Wednesday, May 30. When Ciba decribes his decision to close the store, he invokes Lee “Scratch” Perry, who burned his legendary Black Ark studio in 1979 because it had “bad energy....

“It’s so hard to read anything you’re expressing / it’s so vague / we need just a little clarity,” Mndsgn croons woozily on his 2016 album Body Wash (Stones Throw Records). The line is funny because it’s so baldly inapplicable; everything about hip-hop producer Mndsgn’s music, from his consonant-clotted name (pronounced “mind design”) to his bubbling lounge funk, is obscure and wavering. Each of his three albums finds a staggering, mellow groove and sticks with it—tossing in bass burps, easy-listening keyboard flourishes, and jazzy riffs that head for outer space before shrugging and curling up under the cocktail bar....