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Flesh PanthersNGC 2632 (Tall Pat/Dumpster Tapes) Zombotron wrote the new album’s lyrics by drawing inspiration from a list of about 100 words and phrases—”flies,” “city living,” and “linear energy,” to name a few. “There’s an insect theme in the album, but there’s also a mysticism that has to do with the planets and stars and space,” he says. Those themes inspired the album’s title, which is an astronomical-­catalog designation for the Beehive Cluster in the constellation Cancer (the ancient Chinese called it “Exhalation of Corpses”)....

When I first heard Nottingham duo Sleaford Mods, Jason Williamson’s unhinged vocal delivery immediately captured my attention. Their minimalist music—which is simply Williamson ranting about working-class struggles over Andrew Fern’s sparse, chintzy electronic beats—could appeal to anarcho-punks, hip-hop heads, and Mark E. Smith devotees alike. Williamson is a force: wide-eyed and frothing at the mouth, he breathlessly spills out his profanity-laden, machine-gun rap-ramblings, and onstage he’s the punkest, angriest madman you’ve ever seen perform....

“He shall judge between the nations, and shall arbitrate for many peoples; they shall beat their swords into plowshares and their spears into pruning hooks; nation shall not lift up sword against nation, neither shall they learn war any more” (Isaiah 2:4) Amidst the intensifying fighting, Samar, Jad, and their eight-month-old daughter Meriam left their home, which was in a part of Homs more prone to clashes between the people and the government....

It would be convenient if all the films that showed at the 74th Cannes Film Festival from July 6-17 could nestle together into a tidy box labeled “the new post-COVID cinema,” but the generalization won’t stick. For one thing, a good number of the feature-length releases that played here (The French Dispatch, Benedetta) were finished before the pandemic started and have been sitting on ice with distributors for a year. Others (especially many short films, like the ones in The Year of the Everlasting Storm) were shot under quarantine conditions, and include its realities....

Upstart garage punks the Bobby Lees formed after guitarist-vocalist Sam Quartin moved to Woodstock, New York, and took a suggestion from a friend to recruit her new bandmates from the local School of Rock. Now in her mid-20s, Quartin is an established actress who’s played alongside the likes of Crispin Glover, Michael Pitt, and Marilyn Manson, but in the Bobby Lees she gives you the idea that she might prefer basement shows to red carpets....

Two things immediately come to Alejandra Aranda’s mind when asked about her hometown of Iguala, Mexico, in the north-central state of Guerrero. The first is its scenic nature; how El Tehuehue hill serves as a beautiful backdrop to this city, home to more than 100,000 people. The second is the relentless bullying she experienced there, much of it from those closest to her. Aranda’s journey in the 90s mirrors what many LGBTQ migrants experience today....

Showbiz ain’t easy. Come hell or high water or 90-degree temperatures and biting flies, the show must go on—and smile, damn it. The Lipizzan horses at Tempel Farms up near the Wisconsin border are troupers of the old school. On a recent disgustingly hot afternoon when any horse with any sense would rather be hidden away in a shady stable with a nice trough of water doing the equine equivalent of Netflix and chill, the Tempel Lipizzans were out in the blazing sun performing the same precision maneuvers their ancestors did in imperial Vienna 400 years ago....

Chicago native Henry Threadgill has been on a tear lately with his inventive and versatile band Zooid, whose interpretations of his dazzling compositions are guided by fixed harmonic intervals embedded in the material. That means everyone improvises all at once, in a context that demands the highest levels of concentration but yields dividends worthy of the investment. The music keeps on giving, rich in sophisticated interplay and melodic and harmonic detail....

In retelling Charles Dickens’s perennial holiday classic, A Christmas Carol, playwright Maya Malan-Gonzalez performs the theatrical equivalent of completely gutting a building, keeping the foundation and outer walls, but changing everything else. Her A Xmas Cuento Remix, set in a contemporary urban area, concerns a sour Christmas-hating Scrooge of a woman, Dolores, successful in business but mean to her employees and estranged from the only family she has left, her niece’s family....

Few things excite a devoted music fan more than new discoveries, especially a discovery that’s new to everyone else too. That goes a long way toward explaining the swollen reissue market, as well as the obsession with old private-press albums over the past decade or so—because contemporary music is relatively easy to find, it can’t satisfy the demand for obscurity. When the 1970 album Obnoxius by Brazilian singer, songwriter, and guitarist José Mauro was reissued in 1995 by British label Far Out—then a key player in the burgeoning rare-groove scene, with a decidedly Brazilian emphasis—it certainly qualified as “obscure....

Annie Saunders, 46, grew up in the Chicago area, and as a teenager she moved into a punk house and began putting on shows. These days, she works as a veterinarian in Wisconsin and sings and plays bass in Chicago-based punk and power-pop band Time Thieves. Inspired by the Instagram page @punkhouseoakland, Saunders launched @punkhousechicago last month to document the city’s punk houses past and present. She’s accepting photo submissions at punkhousechicago@gmail....

“Open Season,” which debuts today at the Reva and David Logan Center for the Arts at the University of Chicago, is artist Larry Achiampong’s first show outside of the UK. The exhibit features 16 blackboards; each one contains chalk-written text in the style of a student being disciplined for a transgression; line after line is repeated for the purpose of being burned into memory. Inspired by various images, words, and sound clips mined from social media, Achiampong compiles each source to reflect a wide range of opinions, such as sentences that read “The people on the podium are black women” and “Build the Wall....

Now that I’ve cleared my throat, let me explain: I was torn about spelling out in print all six letters of the hate-filled N-word. I don’t like saying it in mixed company. That means around white people, even at rap concerts. They stood behind Pritzker and offered forgiveness that suggests to a lot of people-white people, that is-that they too should get a pass for sneaky racism so long as they don’t speak in vicious racial slurs....

Denver-born, New York-based MC and producer Deca wallows gleefully in the loopy psychedelic end of hip-hop. His past records have owed debts to the Native Tongues collective (groups who were part of it, including De la Soul and A Tribe Called Quest, get frequent shout-outs), but Deca’s 2018 instrumental album Flux (Beulah) draws equally on loungey trip-hop. Some tracks feel like they could be outtakes from classic Dan the Automator records: On “Space Dust” Deca combines laid-back beats, drifting horn samples, and corny inspirational snippets of announcements and dialogue into an ode to expanded chemical and spiritual consciousness....

I was ready to be a little disappointed when I arrived at the Harris Theater for the Mark Morris Dance Group’s performance of Dido and Aeneas last night. There’s nothing uninteresting about Laurel Lynch, who has both lead parts. Statuesque and fluidly expressive, she’s a compelling stage presence—whether as Dido, the angular and elegant Queen of Carthage, or her jittery antithesis, the evil Sorceress. And, if you have a taste for Baroque music, this genre-blending mash-up is a multisensory treat....

A friend I eat with a lot likes to press his nose up against every menu and scan for typos. When he finds one, it’s like a rancid amuse-bouche that he’s thrilled to alert his server to. But when a menu misspells prosciutto—and menus often do—it’s even worse, like he found a fly in his soup. The mistake colors his experience with a bilious yellow filter of lowered expectations. The latter’s run by chef Austin Fausett, a newcomer late of Proof in Washington, D....

A TV show that begs to be hate-watched isn’t, by definition, a “bad” show. The most glaring example is Girls, a “good” show that’s nearly impossible to view through any lens other than unfiltered contempt—its quartet of fairly loathsome Brooklyn gentrifiers, moving messily through their 20s, are subtly exaggerated caricatures that are meant to simultaneously represent and critique their demographic. But Girls is addictive because of the surface-level familiarity of the setting and styling, enough so I’ll clench my jaw while watching a very specific subset of upwardly mobile urban “creatives” behave noxiously....

Courtesy Ghastly Menace Ghastly Menace Ghastly Menace has tripled. Four years ago, the band was just Andy Schroeder and Chris Geick, two former posthardcore musicians that got together to play pop. Now, the psychedelic outfit has six members. A rotating cast of characters simmered down to a steady lineup during the recording of the band’s debut album, Songs of Ghastly Menace, which came out on Tuesday via The Record Machine....

Steven Levenson’s family drama, set in the months immediately before and after the 2000 presidential election (but before 9/11) offers a time capsule of the cusp of the millennium, complete with Nader voters, newfangled cell phones, and Internet chat rooms. But the issues it tackles have only grown more pronounced, from gentrification to the eldercare crisis to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict (not to mention presidential election shenanigans). At times, Levenson seems determined to underscore the old chestnut about “two Jews, three opinions....

While nearly 60 people spoke at a public meeting on civilian oversight of the Chicago Police Department, none of them came out in favor of the reform proposals pitched by the head of the City Council’s public safety committee who’s been hosting a series of meetings on police reform. But the CPAC plan has been repeatedly written off by city officials. Reboyras, a staunch ally of Mayor Rahm Emanuel, has said giving elected civilians the power to hire and fire the police superintendent is “out of the question....