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I recently decided to listen to “Common Cold,” one of the singles off Tiny Moving Parts‘ recent Celebrate, partly because I’ve come down with a summertime cold. I don’t like to read too literally into song titles, but I wanted to see if the Minnesota emo band had replicated the frustration and exhaustion of battling a head full of mucus. The music of “Common Cold” feels strangely appropriate: it oscillates between fierce, soaring riffs and gentle, hushed melodies, which don’t take much of a stretch to map onto “frustration” and “exhaustion....

In 2017, several Chicago musician friends—Joe Carsello and Zaid Maxwell from Lasers and Fast and Shit, Steve Reidell from Air Credits and the Hood Internet, and Johnny Caluya, Rob Goerke, and TJ Tambellini from Verma—founded Volutus Records as a “common place for side projects and audio experiments” devoted to “forever searching for the vibe.” The label has apparently had a busy quarantine, and its recent releases include the exquisite ambience of Fruit Collection, which Maxwell made as Oscillator Bug; the drone-heavy sound art of Program One, by Goerke’s project Quiet Eye; and the chilly industrial tracks of the debut EP by Surgery Boys, aka the trio of Carsello, Caluya, and Reidell....

Since 1976, Chicago nonprofit Connections for Abused Women and Their Children (CAWC) has provided a wide range of assistance for victims of domestic abuse, including a 24-hour hotline, professional counseling, and emergency shelter. According to CAWC, hundreds of women and children are turned away from the organization’s Greenhouse Shelter each month due to a shortage of facilities. On Sunday, May 22, the Chicago chapter of Women in Music hosts a benefit for CAWC at the Empty Bottle that includes a raffle and performances from incorrigibly tuneful garage rockers Varsity, winsome power-pop band Bloom, shoe­gazy grunge outfit Colossal Woman, and singer-­songwriter Quinn Tsan....

Less than two weeks after the shooting in Orlando that left 49 people dead and 53 injured—with gay, bisexual, transgender, and queer Latinx people numbering disproportionately amongst the casualties—Chicago’s still-mourning LGBTQ community will kick off Pride Weekend festivities Saturday with the 20th annual Dyke March. Although once seen as a slur, many lesbians have reclaimed the word “dyke” and now embrace it as a positive term when used by members of their own communities....

Q: I recently stumbled on an Instagram account of a young woman who’s a “knife play” enthusiast. I consider myself sex positive, but I must say I was disturbed by the images. I was also shocked that I didn’t know this was a thing! But of course it’s a thing, ‘cuz everything is a thing, right? I don’t want to outlaw it, and everyone has a right to their kinks, I guess, but I’m so wigged out!...

What might have been the biggest drama of Chicago’s recent Pride Weekend played out at Theater Wit—but not onstage. #WalkAway is a mostly online, not-yet- nonprofit entity whose mission is to convince LGBT and other minority-group voters to give up their traditional loyalty to the Democrats. It was founded a little over a year ago by Straka, a hairstylist, actor, gay man, and reformed liberal who catapulted to conservative media fame after his six-minute Facebook video detailing his political conversion was retweeted by Donald Trump Jr....

Miami band Torche have always been like heavy metal’s cotton candy, and their recent fifth album, July’s Admission (Relapse), is their most delicious yet. Since rising from the ashes of stoner-rock group Floor in 2004, Torche have specialized in what they call “thunder pop”—a hard-hitting, wall-of-sound brand of sludgy doom metal that’s topped off with swing-for-the-cheap seats melodic hooks. It’s an infectious formula, and when they covered three classic Guided by Voices tunes on a 2011 split with Part Chimp, they further illustrated their knack for transplanting undeniable pop hooks into the context of a heavy metal song....

In April 2019, Paramore front woman Hayley Williams posted an Instagram story about Pool Kids, a largely unknown emo band from Tallahassee, Florida: “This is what Pmore WISHED we sounded like in the early 2000’s.” About two hours earlier, Bandcamp editor Zoe Camp had tweeted a link to Pool Kids’ 2018 self-released debut, Music to Practice Safe Sex To, writing that the album “sounds kinda like Hayley Williams fronting Cap’n Jazz....

It’s natural that stellar classical musicians are drawn to one another for collaboration; when virtuosity and sensitivity are common currency, the focus can be solely on playing the shit out of a chosen repertoire. The mutual admiration of pianist Emanuel Ax and cellist Yo-Yo Ma goes back nearly five decades, but while performing together at Tanglewood, the Boston Symphony Orchestra’s summer home in western Massachusetts, a few years ago, they invited a slightly junior colleague to join them....

Synth-driven Austin indie-pop group TC Superstar count eight people in their ranks, four of them dancers—and the dancers’ steps are just as important as the musicians’ notes. “The dancers are not ‘backup dancers,’” synth player and vocalist Aaron Chavez told The Daily Texan in April. “Dancing and the music are one thing.” TC Superstar’s lively performances and accessible choreographed routines (the latter by LB Flett) have attracted a cult following in their hometown, even catching the eye of Beto O’Rourke’s congressional team—it booked the group for an August 2018 outreach event and party called “Back to School with Beto....

On Saturday, September 17, local domestic-violence nonprofits Between Friends and Rape Victim Advocates present a panel on sexual harassment in the music scene called Our Music My Body. Organizers hope to encourage people in the scene to confront sexism and harassment on their own. The panelists are Sleater-Kinney singer-guitarist Corin Tucker, Bandcamp editor Jes Skolnik, For the People Artists Collective cofounder Monica Trinidad, and freelancer and Tribune columnist Britt Julious; Kate Grube of Kittyhawk moderates....

On a rainy Thursday afternoon, a late lunch rush is winding down at Birrieria Zaragoza, the nine-year-old Archer Heights restaurant that specializes in birria tatemada. That’s a very regionally specific variant of the slow-cooked goat dish from Jalisco, in which the caprid isn’t stewed as in most versions, but rather rubbed with mole and roasted slowly until the meat falls apart. Whenever anybody asks me the impossible question “What’s your favorite restaurant?...

The boy-band formula is as reliable as the quadratic equation: three to five cute young guys singing simple pop songs about love equals swooning fans. Variations on the formula involve the presence or absence of dancing (‘N Sync used choreography; One Direction, not so much) and live instruments (the Backstreet Boys just sang; onstage at least two of the Jonas Brothers usually played guitars). The origins of Boy Band Review go back about seven years, to when Bender was in a 90s-themed cover band called (in a nod to the Beastie Boys’ final album) the Hot Sauce Committee....

Chicago’s gun violence and racial tensions within its black and Latino communities attracted the national spotlight in 2016. Addressing the root causes of these problems will require a nuanced approach—and considerable investments of time and money. Now, one local organization is in the national spotlight for being part of the solution. He grew up frustrated with the situation, along with the lack of resources and opportunities around him. “They may say, ‘Mom taught me how to be a man,’ or ‘The streets taught me how to be a man,'” Smith says....

Q: Background: I, a 21-year-old male, enjoy receptive fisting. I’ve also had constipation problems all my life. Question: I saw my doctor recently, and he tried to link my enjoyment of anal sex to my constipation. (Granted, I didn’t tell him EVERYTHING I do down there.) My understanding was that there was no causal relationship, assuming no serious injuries occur. Is there something I don’t know? Was my doctor just trying to be helpful?...

Commissioner Richard Boykin’s resolution requesting the U.S. Department of Justice investigate Homan Square, an alleged off-the-books detention center operated by the Chicago Police Department, sailed unanimously through the Cook County Board meeting Wednesday. Boykin plans to hand deliver a copy of the resolution to Lynch, along with Illinois U.S. representative Danny Davis. Both Boykin and Davis asked for the feds to probe the facility when the Guardian broke the story in February 2015....

Welcome to the Reader‘s morning briefing for Wednesday, November 8, 2017. Emanuel slams Trump for “pointing fingers” at Chicago again Mayor Rahm Emanuel slammed President Donald Trump for “pointing fingers” at Chicago’s gun violence issues again instead of focusing on gun control measures after a devastating massacre at a church in Sutherland Springs, Texas, left 26 people dead. Trump used Chicago’s gun laws as an example of why he refuses to support stronger gun control legislation....

Last month I saw Chicago footwork producer DJ Taye perform in the middle of the afternoon in 38-degree weather on a stubby stage set up in the street next to the Empty Bottle. His set was part of the club’s annual daylong outdoor festival, Music Frozen Dancing, which historically favors rock—every headliner has been a rock band, and this year psych-rock rebels Oh Sees topped the five-act bill. Taye was the only performer to use a DJ rig, and I had to wonder how many people in the crowd knew what to expect when he powered it up....

This summer in Gravy, the journal of the Southern Foodways Alliance, John Kessler, a former restaurant critic for the Atlanta Journal- Constitution, published a bemused and amusing essay about the Chicago restaurant community’s current obsession with southern cliches and its penchant for clumsy cultural misappropriation. Before McKenna opened his barbecue joint he was also a veteran of fine-dining restaurants such as Avenues and Tru, and at Dixie he seems to be celebrating the slaves’ food through that lens, taking elements, or in some cases just the ingredients, of classic southern dishes and placing them in new, sometimes dissonant contexts—on small, shared plates....

In early January, I contracted COVID-19 on an international flight home to the United States. It started with the symptoms of a simple cold, then within a couple of weeks, chest pain, abdominal pain, and shortness of breath. That was followed by unrelenting fevers starting in early March and exhaustion even with the most basic tasks like talking or taking a shower, as I moved into the basement to isolate myself from my wife and nine-year-old child....