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Earlier this decade, new bands recontextualizing 90s emo and the torrent of 90s emo bands reuniting (even for just a few anniversary tours) provoked a surge of interest, but it has been petering out over the last couple years. This has led to situations such as elder statesmen Giants Chair playing a rare reunion show in late 2017 to a half-filled room at Chop Shop. It’s also meant a bit less anticipation around shows by highly influential Texas outfit Mineral than when they first regrouped in 2014....

International record club Vinyl Me, Please has been surprising its subscribers with a different LP every month since 2013, and in 2015 it launched a parallel seven-inch series with a new gimmick: the records, which contain previously unreleased material, come with generic white sleeves and center labels that don’t identify the artist or the songs. Roughly 3,000 of the club’s more than 20,000 members (chosen at random) receive each one, and they gather on the Vinyl Me, Please online forum to try to figure out whose music they’re listening to each month....

When I think of techno, I imagine meticulously, rigidly arranged electronic tones and beats. But people usually call Berlin-based American producer Laurel Halo a techno artist, and her recordings are often sleepy or a bit sluggish, with a decidedly homemade feel—her beats can be muffled or restrained, and her soft-edged synth patterns don’t always fit neatly between bar lines. Even her singing sounds subdued, as though she’s furtively experimenting in her apartment and trying not to disturb the neighbors....

Steppenwolf’s long association with Ladysmith Black Mambazo, the legendary South African male a cappella choral group, stretches back nearly 30 years, since Tug Yourgrau’s apartheid-era drama The Song of Jacob Zulu went from the company’s stage to Broadway under Eric Simonson’s direction. Simonson subsequently collaborated with the company on Nomathemba, and now he’s written and codirected (with Jonathan Berry) Lindiwe. The title character, played by the effervescent and vocally magnetic Nondumiso Tembe, falls for Adam (Erik Hellman), a young blues drummer in Chicago, while touring with Mambazo and finds herself in a few different kinds of hell—from an ICE detainment center to an afterworld run by Yasen Peyankov’s “Keeper,” who wants to keep her from singing and is willing to use her love for Adam as a bargaining chip to make that happen....

Q: I am male. A close female friend was raped by an old acquaintance of mine. I knew this guy when we were tweens, I didn’t really care for him as we got older, so it goes. It turns out that a few years ago, he raped my friend in an alcohol blackout situation. I don’t know more than that. She says she considers the encounter “not strictly consensual” and confided that this guy didn’t react well when she tried to talk to him about it....

These days it feels as though the difference between a rapper who sings and a singer who raps is as negligible as the difference between a rap mixtape and a rap album; a lot of it comes down to attitude and self-identification. Take Tyrone Griffin, better known as Ty Dolla $ign, a singer who was included in XXL magazine’s “Freshman Class” issue in 2014—an honor usually bestowed only upon MCs (his compatriots included Vic Mensa, Lil Bibby, Lil Durk, and Chance the Rapper)....

Although he’s only a hair’s breadth into his 20s, Gus Dapperton makes effervescent music that feels like it emerged from an early 80s time capsule that was discovered buried deep within a picturesque California mountainside. The songs on his self-released EP Yellow and Such, which came out last August, are so mellow that even its faint tambourines vibrate like thunder, and they contain the kind of luminescent keys and gently reverberating guitars that evoke the atmosphere of beachfront vacations (which most of us who are stuck in single-digit weather yearn for right about now)....

In lieu of a traditional funeral service, a young comedian asks for a livestreamed, no-holds-barred roast of honor to be performed by his colleagues and family at his wake. Complicating what could otherwise be a cathartic act of irreverence is the fact that the entire lineup is bitterly estranged, and his cause of death—suicide—makes it unclear if honoring wishes he made during an acute mental crisis is really healthy for anyone involved....

On Monday Chicago magazine published the blog post “Six Months After Laquan McDonald Fallout, Chicago’s Starkest Protest Music Is Surfacing,” a headline that might sound true to you if you’ve only been paying attention for the past couple weeks. Assistant editor Matt Pollock found his hook in two recent releases: Vic Mensa’s EP There’s Alot Going On and the video for Jamila Woods’s “Blk Girl Soldier.” Pollock wrote, “That the movement’s sharpest music is surfacing now makes sense....

Madhu Budhathoki knows about the viral urban legend known as the Momo challenge. A customer at his University Village restaurant told him about the creepy bird lady who supposedly appears on the screens children plant their faces to and ultimately encourages them to kill themselves. At the Momo World, they’re using commercial dumpling wrappers, which results in a durable dumpling unlike those at Chiya Chai Cafe, the city’s other momo specialist, where the wrappers are more delicate but tend to tear, making desirable qualities like juiciness a bit of a gamble with each individual dumpling....

Very few bands can claim to be equally revered by lovers of psych, mod, ska, punk, funk, R&B, disco, glam, and bubblegum pop, and had a racially integrated lineup in the turbulent 60s—and had hits. The Equals were such a band, though sadly in the States they were known mostly as a footnote to Eddy “Electric Avenue” Grant’s career. My gateway to their music was their monstrously mod-fuzzed “I Can See but You Don’t Know,” which I heard on a psych comp in the 90s, and there was no going back....

WCIU, the channel best known for airing daytime court television and reruns of The King of Queens, is kicking off the New Year with something a little different. Instead of relying on a 2 Broke Girls marathon to bring in viewers before midnight, the local station will air Chicago’s One Night Stand-Up, a showcase of local comics hosted by one of the city’s most visible stand-ups, Rebecca O’Neal. “I’m really happy that the lineup for the pilot episode was good, so that people can see what the Chicago comedy scene has to offer,” O’Neal says....

Whether you’re on the vast endless seas or stuck in your own living room day after day, the sameness of routine juxtaposed with the creeping sense of danger can do a number on your mind. Two current online offerings from Chicago theaters—Theatre in the Dark‘s live radio-play adaptation of Moby-Dick and Strawdog‘s anthology of short (mostly) solo video pieces, How Do We Navigate Space?—address that paradox. On the other hand, a scene between Ahab and Pip, the Black cabin boy, allows us a rare glimpse into Ahab’s vulnerability and desire for connection—but only on his terms....

Jeremy wants a girlfriend more than anything, but can’t get one. So naturally, he hides in his sister Bridget’s closet with a rope, planning to end it all. He changes his mind at the last minute—and goes for the razor instead, just as Bridget opens the door. He survives, but Bridget (who is avowedly proud of her single status) decides (to quote Todd Rungren), “We Gotta Get You a Woman.” So she basically tricks Chloe, a young woman she meets in a supermarket, into signing a contract agreeing to become Jeremy’s lover....

One of the most fascinating developments to keep tabs on in genre film is the push to diversify storytelling at a large scale. As long as horror continues to exist, there will always be chain saws, monsters, gore, and all the other tropes we’ve come to associate with the genre. But now more than ever, there is ample room to experiment with depicting less traditional but all-too-real social horrors like oppression, injustice, and a general lack of power....

The double album Houston 2012 captures a two-day encounter in October 2012 between English tabletop guitarist Keith Rowe and the experimental-music community of Houston, Texas. Rowe’s visit came about thanks to the initiative of Saint Louis double bassist Damon Smith, who lived in Texas at the time. While there Smith developed a strong working relationship with Sandy Ewen, who’s not only a splendid, unconventional guitarist but also an organizer committed to facilitating women’s access to the arts....

Though they tend to get overlooked when people remember the alt-rock scene of the 90s, pop trio Velvet Crush remains one of my favorite bands from the era. Its members had previously bounced around in several groups—the Reverbs, Choo Choo Train, Honeybunch, Bag O’Shells, and the Springfields, most of them aligned with the prolific late-80s jangle-pop community in Champaign—but they reached their peak as a unit. Drummer Ric Menck (a native of suburban Barrington) and bassist Paul Chastain (from Champaign) also worked frequently with Matthew Sweet’s touring band around the time of his 1991 classic Girlfriend—Menck actually plays on some of the album....

From Brianna Wellen’s introduction, “Losses and gains: Best of Chicago 2020”: Some business to get out of the way: the reader poll results were determined by you, the readers! If you’re angry about the results, you only have yourselves to blame! Let this be a reminder to keep a close eye on when voting begins next year so you can campaign for your favorites to get the top spot. Or better yet, share your own losses and gains on social media and tag us @Chicago_Reader with the hashtags #bestofchi and #BoC2020....

Like a cross between The Santaland Diaries and Sunset Boulevard, Jonathan Tolins’s 2013 one-man comedy sends up the lifestyle of the haves through the eye of the have-nots. Inspired by Barbra Streisand’s book My Passion for Design, it’s the story of struggling LA actor Alex More (Scott Gryder) who takes a job in the make-believe shopping mall in the basement of Streisand’s Malibu estate and is horrified to learn how the other half really lives....

This remarkable combo from Cleveland only formed at the start of 2016, but they’ve grabbed my attention with a flurry of recordings since then. Led by producer RA Washington, Mourning [A] BLKstar features a trio of dynamic singers—James Longs, LaToya Kent, and Kyle Kidd—and an indeterminate number of musicians. The ensemble traffics in a gritty strain of DIY Afrofuturist soul music, balancing hip-hop production techniques with lo-fi experimentation that bathes sultry grooves in darkness, either in scratchy samples or washed-out synth tones....