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Now streaming on Netflix, Errol Morris’s Wormwood might have made a superb two-hour feature—but as it stands, the series (which unfolds in six parts) runs twice that length. It’s still an engaging and sometimes enthralling work, raising provocative questions about CIA conspiracies and how individuals reconcile with national history. Yet it’s also repetitive and padded out, stuffed with stylistic flourishes that add little to the material. Wormwood continues Morris’s investigation into dark corners of modern American history, making it of a piece with The Fog of War, Standard Operating Procedure, and The Unknown Known....

Longtime friends make the best bandmates. Case in point: Floatie. From 2017 into 2019, Floatie operated as a trio. They landed some plum opening slots, including a Subterranean show in October 2018 with Pile and the Spirit of the Beehive. Still, they thought something was missing, and eventually they brought Wisniewski aboard in summer 2019. Floatie’s finally finished full-length debut, Voyage Out, comes out March 26 through Brooklyn-based indie label Exploding in Sound....

Laura Kelton (Sportsman’s Club) and Carley Gaskin, who co-owns a cocktail catering business called Hospitality 201, are known for their love of snacks and for always carrying some in their purses. A couple years ago they were driving back from a bachelorette party in Nashville, “feeling not so great,” Gaskin says. “We stopped at a gas station and got two huge bags of pork rinds. Before we even got back on the interstate, both bags were gone....

Now that the Lollapasnooza lineup has dropped, more summer festivals are due to make their big announcements—including Riot Fest, which returns to a still-battered Douglas Park from September 16 through 18. Gossip Wolf has a few ideas about who might be on that bill, and at the top of the list are nu-metal survivors Deftones, whose upcoming tour is conspicuously missing an Illinois date. Other possibilities include reunited screamo poster boys Thursday, 311 acolytes Turnstile, friendly MC Biz Markie, and the Velvet Underground of second-wave emo, American Football....

Demo by High Priests Ian’s Party is upon us. The four-day, four-venue punk-rock festival kicked off last night and swings into full gear this evening with stacked lineups at Quenchers, Cole’s, and the Mutiny. There are more than 50 bands playing the party this year, and today’s 12 O’Clock Track, “What It Was,” comes from one of my favorites of the bunch, newcomers High Priests—they’re set to play the Mutiny on Sun 1/4....

Buffalo Grove’s inaugural LGBTQ pride parade and festival are Sunday, June 2 along a residential route that’s likely to attract throngs of people sporting rainbow-hued feather boas, beads, and maybe even a tutu or two. Just be sure to keep it all family-friendly, suggests Molly Pinta, the 13-year-old student at Twin Groves Middle School who organized the parade along with her mom Carolyn, a Spanish teacher at the school. Once Pinta Pride Project Inc....

A little bit of ika shiokara goes a long way. At Izakaya Mita in Bucktown, the little strips of cold squid flesh, marinated in salted, fermented squid guts, come in a dainty dish. But with the outsize intensity of their briny funkiness and their slippery and wormy texture, they seem to come alive in your mouth—and really can’t be washed down with anything less potent than whiskey. This is drinking food, every bit as challenging as balut or hakarl....

You don’t get a MacArthur “genius” grant just for thinking big; you get one because your big ideas work extraordinarily well. Mary Halvorson, who was awarded the grant last year, has earned hers by moving from strength to strength. Ever since she began recording in the mid-2000s, she’s projected a strikingly personal voice on the electric guitar; you only need to hear a few seconds of her fastidious fingering and extravagant pitch bends to know it’s her....

Nick Cave has taken many twists and turns during his decades-long career. Though the iconic singer-songwriter is first and foremost known for his music, he’s also delved into acting, theater, novels, poetry, and film scores. His latest venture is possibly his most startling and profound deviation yet: ol’ Nick the Stripper now runs a blog called the Red Hand Files where he publicly answers fan mail. He might discuss the sound of God’s voice, field requests from blocked-up songwriters for “spare lyrics lying around,” or reply to heartfelt questions about sexuality, addiction, and the creative process....

Norwegian noise-rock band Årabrot have undergone many personnel changes over their two-decade career, and front man, composer, and sole constant member Kjetil Nernes has brought forth a different phase in the group’s sound with every one. In recent years, his main collaborator has been Swedish-Norwegian electronic producer and singer Karin Park; they’re also a married couple, and live in an old church in Park’s home village in Sweden that doubles as their studio (though they’ve also made several recordings at Electrical Audio, including 2011’s Solar Anus, which won them a Spellemann Prize for best metal record)....

Q: As a 36-year-old straight woman with autism, I am often misidentified as lesbian because my social signaling must read as masculine. I am not bothered by this. However, it is annoying when someone who should know better thinks I would hide it if I were LGBTQ. I’m very direct and honest—sometimes to my detriment—and the idea that I would hide something so fundamental about myself is abhorrent to me. I don’t consider myself disabled; I am different than most people but not broken....

Philadelphia duo 700 Bliss is a perfect example of the kind of supergroup that can emerge from a combination of globally engaged conversation and access to affordable practice spaces. Camae Ayewa, aka Moor Mother, and Zubeyda Muzeyyen, aka DJ Haram, are a part of a smart, active community of artists of color in Philadelphia that nurtures cross-collaboration, and on last year’s Spa 700 (Halcyon Veil/Don Giovanni), they bring beats to the forefront of their noise-informed, rhythm-heavy music and channel the type of spiritual energy that can call up the dead....

It seems crazy to me that the new Love Goes is only Sam Smith’s third album. The UK singer-songwriter made their debut in 2014 with the international breakout In the Lonely Hour, but it feels like they’ve been a go-to modern torch singer for much longer. Perhaps that’s partly due to the strange passage of time during quarantine, where a month can simultaneously feel like a decade and like five minutes....

The annual Chicago International Movies & Music Festival has moved from April to November for its ninth iteration—though this week’s big event shares a calendar year with an abbreviated April program called “CIMMFest Spring Fling Thing.” CIMMFest proper opens Thursday, November 9, and closes Sunday, November 12, and in those four days will screen almost three dozen feature films (plus a generous selection of music videos and shorts), including a wide-ranging retrospective devoted to director Penelope Spheeris....

Warning: This post contains spoilers. There are some nice interactions here and there. Ezra Miller, playing Barry Allen (aka the Flash), expresses some juvenile anxiety toward his superpowers, and he bonds with Cyborg (Ray Fisher) over their mutual feeling of being outsiders. Batman (Ben Affleck) has a nice rapport with his butler, Alfred (Jeremy Irons), who assists with his crime-fighting from a top-secret lair. Wonder Woman (Gal Gadot) and Aquaman (Jason Momoa) seem to have little to do but bask in their godlike powers, yet they establish a certain chemistry with each other and the other stars....

In a development you’d have to describe as only in Chicago, it’s taken a Chinese-American candidate for state representative to bring the city’s two best-known Latino politicians back together again. At this point, I’m feeling the urge to indulge in one of my favorite pastimes: offering history lessons on Chicago politics. So he cultivated a slate of young Latino politicians, many of whom he hired to work in his administration, including Rudy Lozano, Gloria Chevere, Juan Soliz, Juan Velazquez and, of course, Garcia and Gutierrez....

In a January interview with GQ, ASAP Ferg talked about hip-hop’s emergence as pop’s lingua franca and the genre’s musical plateau. “All you hear on radio right now is trap music,” he said. “It’s starting to sound like one big reggaeton song to me. All the songs sound the same. We’re not pushing the culture forward with new sonics.” The collective Ferg belongs to, ASAP Mob, is as guilty of contributing to the homogeneity as any other mainstream rap act—their worst material is instantly forgotten amid the Soundcloud playlists swelling with new rap tracks....

“I don’t want to be myself / Around anybody else,” Matthew Lee Cothran mutters mournfully as he strums his guitar. Behind him and keyboardist Delaney Mills, his bandmate in North Carolina duo Elvis Depressedly, a bank of washing machines looks on bleakly. They’re playing their lo-fi, depressive indie pop in the low-budget, depressive setting of a Laundromat, and the combination works. Far Out videos grew more elaborate over the course of 2017, but the basic concept remains the same: record a band in an unexpected spot that nonetheless complements its music perfectly....

For those who frequent the spaces where Chicago’s hip-hop, indie-pop, and dance scenes converge, the title of Victor Internet’s latest release, last month’s EP Victor’s Debut, will seem like a misnomer. Known to his family as Victor Cervantes, he launched his grassroots music career a little more than two years ago, uploading romantic bedroom-pop songs to Soundcloud. In early 2017, when he was just 17, he sold out of the first run of a self-released CD-only EP called Glitter98....

The Wicker Man Last week, Sir Christopher Lee, the remarkably prolific actor best known for his run of films with Hammer Pictures and for playing Saruman in Peter Jackson’s Lord of the Rings trilogy, died at the age of 93. Lee starred in more than 200 films, and he worked right up until his death, having most recently appeared in The Hobbit: The Battle of the Five Armies, part of Jackson’s gluttonous attempt at reeling in more Tolkien dollars....