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I just realized I’ve loved Pallbearer for eight whole years, starting the moment I first heard their debut album, Sorrow and Extinction. Since at least their third full-length, 2017’s Heartless, the best ever doom-metal band in Little Rock, Arkansas, have openly indulged their love of prog and classic rock, and I’ve stayed cool with that. Over the years they’ve also tamed a bit of their blown-out, barely-in-tune graveyard murk and adopted a relatively lucid approach to their vocal production, and I didn’t get off the bus on account of that either....

The Portland Cello Project was created in 2006 to bring the cello into new spaces and pair it with unlikely source material, and it’s since juxtaposed a wide variety of reconfigured pop, rock, and rap songs with Western classical arrangements—contrasting Kanye West with J.S. Bach, for instance, or Pantera with Arvo Pärt. The group tweaks its instrumentation from show to show, adding horns, guitar, bass, drums, vocals, and more, but whatever its lineup, it makes for a sight to behold and a sound to relish, often with more than ten cellists onstage together....

Fox Matt Dillon and Juliette Lewis in a strange land This second golden age of television we’re living in is cool and all, but I’m especially excited about the resurgence of the miniseries. As shows become more cinematic, it makes more sense for them to achieve an arc during the course of a single digestible season. Two of the best things on TV last year—the first season of True Detective and HBO’s four-parter Olive Kitteridge—were effectively miniseries....

The pandemic has kept many of us from leaving the house, but honestly, why would you want to? There is too much TV to watch to go outside. Outside doesn’t have Hulu or Netflix or HBO Max. To encourage you to stay home and stay safe, comedian/writer Rima Parikh and myself (two people who watched just as much TV in the before times) will be diving deep into the shows we’re loving or lovingly hate-watching, social-distance-style, over Google chat....

As groundbreaking and fascinating as the television show Twin Peaks was when it ran in the 90s (and was again during its recent resurrection), it’s doubtful that the David Lynch-directed surrealistic murder drama would have reached its iconic status without its drop-dead-gorgeous soundtrack. The sparse, mesmerizing opening sequence, a collaboration between the chilly cool compositions of Angelo Badalamenti and the breathy innocence of singer Julee Cruise, set the atmosphere of the sinister Washington logging town from the very beginning....

Brett Suzuki is a purist. He sells pasture-raised beef at Arigato Market but he will never serve you a carne asada taco. When you own the only Japanese taco stand/butcher shop in town—maybe in the world?—you have to take a stand on cultural appropriation. White flour tortillas, or something like them, the theories go, were possibly developed in northern Mexico by Spanish Jews (or Muslims) during the time of the Inquisition, adapting their own foods to the conditions of the colony they were lamming it in....

The Brokedowns have been a staple of Chicago punk for pretty much as long as I can remember. The first time they blew my mind was back in 2002, the year they formed, when my high school band played a show with them at an Elgin skate park that’s since been shuttered. Over the years, their musical peers have come and gone as the members of the Brokedowns entered adulthood, complete with families and careers, while somehow continuing to get better and better as a band....

The Chicago hip-hop community mourns musician, designer, and entrepreneur Quincy “Q” Easton Kelly, who died on Thursday, December 7, at age 25. No cause of death has been announced. “He was motivating people to do what they wanted to do,” says Kelly’s longtime girlfriend, Briana Smith. “He’s a person that pulled out the absolute best of anybody.” Raised by his grandparents in Gary, Indiana (Smith says he called his grandfather Alfred Kelly his “angel”), Kelly enrolled at DePaul at 16 and graduated last year....

Chicago rapper and librarian Roy Kinsey has drawn national attention for his remarkable concept albums and their sensitive, piercingly thoughtful lyrics. In 2018 he dropped Blackie: A Story by Roy Kinsey, a deeply personal and thoroughly researched record about race in America that’s informed by Kinsey’s family history and the Great Migration; last year he put out Kinsey: A Memoir, which makes equally nuanced and emotionally resonant observations about Black queerness....

If the current Jiri Trnka retrospective at Gene Siskel Film Center, highlighting the work of the famed Czech animator, has whetted your appetite for even more films featuring nontraditional animation techniques, we offer a selection by five great artists in the field, working in stop-motion, puppet, and cut-out works. Films by the Brothers Quay These two excellent programs collect short puppet animations by Stephen and Timothy Quay, identical twins from Pennsylvania who studied at Britain’s Royal College of Art in the late 60s....

Key Ingredient was a multimedia cooking series produced by then-Reader staffer Julia Thiel and food writer/filmmaker Michael Gebert from 2010-2018 in which Chicago’s baddest chefs challenged their colleagues to redeem unusual, underappreciated, or often abhorrent ingredients by showcasing them in beautiful plated dishes that might or might not have been edible. The ingredient: dry-ass chicken breast Jupiter shredded the chicken, crust and all, but added ancient grains to the mix instead of breadcrumbs....

Lynda Barry is now officially a genius. She was bestowed with the title MacArthur fellow this September along with 24 other creative people from a variety of fields. The fellowships, commonly referred to as “genius grants,” reflect the achievements and prowess of the individuals who receive it, but her fans have been calling out her genius for years. Despite this lofty title, Barry has a reputation for being humble that dates back to her college years in the 70s at Evergreen State in Washington, where friends Matt Groening and John Keister secretly published Barry’s first comic strips in their college newspapers without her knowing because they all knew that she would never do it on her own....

There’s a famous exchange in Robert Bolt’s play A Man for All Seasons between Thomas More, who is Henry VIII’s lord chancellor, and William Roper, his son-in-law to be. More is refusing to sanction the king’s marriage to Anne Boleyn, a stand that could (and will) cost him his life. Roper urges More to arrest a dangerous enemy who, inconveniently, has broken no laws. The scene is commonly cited as an exhibit of the kind of courage and principle there’s too little of these days....

On HBO’s Crashing, former Chicago comedian Pete Holmes plays a green stand-up named Pete Holmes (role of a lifetime) who struggles to find his footing after his wife cheats on him. Their divorce leaves Holmes homeless and he resorts to couch surfing. Through a variety of humiliating misadventures he ends up in the company of more established comics such as Sarah Silverman, Artie Lange, and T.J. Miller. They pity Holmes enough to allow him to spend the night, but the naive comic also gives them an opportunity to pump up their own egos by sharing their stand-up wisdom....

Last month Polo G‘s major-label debut, Die a Legend, ranked number 46 on the Billboard 200 while Chance the Rapper’s The Big Day sat at 58. Chance’s “debut” album had arrived at the end of July, nearly two months after Die a Legend, but Polo G outlasted it on the charts with just a fraction of the publicity. And I understand why so many people have continued to stream Die a Legend all these months later, because I’m one of them....

Khudejha (Kauser Mohamed) has a problem. She’s wearing too much clothing—or rather the wrong type of clothing. Upon arriving at a sex party that she was invited to by a friend, she’s told her “power shirt” is in fact lame and that she should undress appropriately. We learn through her friend Natasha (Aasia LaShay Bullock) that it’s been a while since Khudejha got some (or any) and this kink party is going to be a reset....

When elegiac doom band Warning take the stage at Reggie’s Rock club on October 26, it will be their first and last time playing in Chicago. The UK-based band, which formed in 1994 and disbanded for three years in the early 00s before breaking up for good in 2009, are on a brief and final return for a number of festival appearances along with this US tour. Vocalist-guitarist Patrick Walker had been fielding reunion offers for some time, but as he recently told Revolver, this year was an “appropriate and convenient time” to reunite; his current outfit, 40 Watt Sun, had just completed their most recent album, 2016’s Wider Than the Sky....

As the sun set on a temperate fall evening October 5, roughly 200 people gathered outside the Wellington United Church of Christ in Lakeview to honor the memory of TT Saffore—and join a call to action. Within the broader dialogue about black lives, trans and gender-nonconforming people don’t receive the same levels of solidarity or empathy offered to black cisgender men killed by police officers or racist vigilantes. But Chicago activists refuse to let that keep them down....

Some folks would have you believe that everything is running smoothly, A-OK even, as the globe keeps spinning toward its next mass extinction—one that will almost definitely include us. We’ve got vaccines (though only a third of Chicago has received a shot as of this writing), we’ve got the beginnings of economic recovery (though most $1,400 stimulus checks have gone to silly things like medical debt)—Jesus Christ, are you still complaining?...

Chicago DJ and producer Jermaine Collins, aka Composuresquad, became a pillar of the city’s nightlife scene after hooking up with local dance collective and record label Them Flavors in 2013. He joined the crew the following year, and soon the name “Composuresquad” on a party’s bill became a sure sign it was worth attending. His interest in DJing kept him glued to the decks, which helps explain why he’s only now issuing his first full-length, Auto D....