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Santa Cruz hardcore outfit Gulch cover a lot of ground in the brief 16 minutes of their new Impenetrable Cerebral Fortress. The four-piece leave no punk or metal stone unturned; they cram every possible take on dark, heavy, and mean into the album’s eight tracks, which all grind to a halt just as quickly as they start. Impenetrable Cerebral Fortress is so wildly intense and varied it’s nearly impossible to do it justice in print....

There are two kinds of horror comedies: the scary kind and the silly kind. The scary kind—from Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein (1948) to An American Werewolf in London (1981) to Drag Me to Hell (2009)—keep the laughs and the chills strictly segregated, building tension and then releasing it in a laugh (and, sometimes, cutting short that laugh with an even bigger scare). The silly kind—from Young Frankenstein (1974) to Shaun of the Dead (2004)—erase the line between the two, turning the monster into an object of burlesque....

The year-long war over Illinois’s budget was a nightmare for social service agencies. And, as the Reader reported in July, even the stopgap deal reached at the 11th hour earlier this summer wasn’t enough to reverse the damage done by a year of inaction. One of these groups is Lyte Collective, a Chicago-based nonprofit that works to meet the needs of the city’s queer homeless youth. That’s become increasingly difficult during the ongoing budget crisis....

This is my last column for the year, and in place of writing some variant on “The Future of Chicago Theater: Are Artists Ready to Return to the Stage?,” I thought this might be a good time to acknowledge the many ways the performing arts community in Chicago took care of itself and others in 2020, even as the official neglect and virulent incompetence of the outgoing administration found new lows....

Just southwest of Chicago, on Archer Avenue in Justice, Illinois, across the street from Resurrection Cemetery, is a bar called Chet’s Melody Lounge. Chet’s is a classic roadside tavern, with a pool table, a jukebox, a popcorn machine, and a large clientele of bikers. But Chet’s has an unusual tradition: every Sunday, the staff leaves a Bloody Mary at the end of the bar for a ghost. The ghost’s name is Resurrection Mary, and she has haunted this stretch of Archer since the 1930s, when she picked up young men dancing to the big bands at the Oh Henry Ballroom....

Since 2004 Plastic Crimewave (aka Steve Krakow) has used the Secret History of Chicago Music to shine a light on worthy artists with Chicago ties who’ve been forgotten, underrated, or never noticed in the first place. The family moved to Long Island when deLisle was seven, and within a couple years he gave his first public musical performance, singing folky songs (“Tom Dooley,” “The Battle of New Orleans”) in front of his class at school....

Moholy-Nagy: Future Present” is perhaps the most outstanding major exhibition the Art Institute has displayed during the past few years. The subject, Laszló Moholy­-Nagy, a Hungarian artist who was based in Chicago for most of the last decade of his life, was a prominent professor in the Bauhaus school, and made a significant contribution to contemporary art and design. At the same time, he’s someone many spectators are likely unaware of—even those who possess a baseline familiarity with art history....

On October 3, influential American composer Steve Reich turned 80, and celebrations of that milestone seem certain to continue for the next 11 months. Reich is one of the key architects of minimalism, along with Terry Riley, La Monte Young, and Philip Glass, and he’s enjoyed perhaps the most successful and rewarding career, consistently finding new ways to approach the deceptively simple constructs at the root of his music. Tonight the Chicago Symphony Orchestra’s MusicNow series at the Harris Theater presents three Reich pieces composed between 1988 and 2007....

Stay-home edicts and orders preventing Illinois residents from public congregation have only been in place for about a month as I write this, but people are already feeling the effects of living like Emily Dickinson (albeit with access to a 24/7 news cycle and grocery delivery). Dickinson is perhaps one of our most famous American homebodies, but even the confines of her father’s house in late-19th-century Massachusetts was inspiration enough for her to come up with worldly and lascivious lines like “Rowing in Eden — / Ah, the sea / Might I moor — Tonight — / In thee!...

Nicole Mitchell may have moved from Chicago to teach at University of California, Irvine, in 2011, but she performs in town so often that she might as well still live here. In June she and operatic vocalist Lisa E. Harris debuted the suite EarthSeed at the MCA, and last month the Hyde Park Jazz Festival and Chicago World Music Festival jointly sponsored a residency and concert by Bamako*Chicago Sound System, her collaboration with Malian kora player Ballaké Sissoko, while local imprint Third World Press released Liberation Narratives, a record that sets poet Haki Madhubuti’s recitations to music by Mitchell’s Black Earth Ensemble....

After ten former Northwestern University students wrote an open letter last week alleging a history of sexual misconduct by professor Alec Klein, 15 Medill School of Journalism, Media, Integrated Marketing Communications faculty members have responded. Here below is the faculty letter in full, reprinted with their permission: Dear Alison Flowers, Meribah Knight, Kalyn Belsha, Olivia Pera, Suyeon Son, Lorraine Ma, Yana Kunichoff, Natalie Krebs, Lauryn Schroeder, and Fariba Pajooh: As faculty members at Medill we’d like to respond to your public letter to our dean concerning the treatment you received in the course of study, or employment, in our School....

A Hedda Gabler An empty wicker birdcage hangs portentously from the rafters in A Hedda Gabler, a new adaptation of Henrik Ibsen’s 1891 drama from Red Tape Theatre and local playwright Nigel O’Hearn. The cage is meant to be symbolic of Hedda’s entrapment, her “caged” subservience to men, the “imprisoning” role society demands she play as a woman. More than once, men stare into the cage, lit from above by a hot spotlight, and deliver lines as if Hedda were inside....

Gary Middendorf/Sun-Times Media The six opponents of Tenth Ward alderman John Pope (left) say he’s too cozy with Mayor Rahm Emanuel. Last week Mayor Rahm Emanuel and Tenth Ward alderman John Pope announced that the city wasn’t going to wait any longer to clean up an environmental hazard on the southeast side of Chicago. They issued a statement declaring that the city was rejecting a request from KCBX Terminals Company to take more time before enclosing its heavy-polluting piles of petcoke....

On its third album, Mambo Cósmico (Glitterbeat), Mexico City juggernaut Sonido Gallo Negro expands well beyond its cumbia roots and further extends its psychedelic treatment of vintage Latin American dance forms. The group balances kitsch with earnest adoration, injecting twangy surf-guitar licks and wheezing Farfisa organ riffs into galloping polyrhythms. Its largely instrumental music (excepting a few simple vocal chants) summons the spirit of the Peruvian chicha craze of the 60s and applies it to an assortment of tropical dances, including mambo, danzon, and porro—the last on a strutting cover of “Tolu,” a 50s gem by Colombian cumbia star Lucho Bermúdez....

Indie-rock stalwarts Pinback have spent considerable time on the road in recent years, but they’ve been quiet on the studio front since the release of Information Retrieved (Temporary Residence) in 2012. Now, 20 years removed from Pinback’s self-titled debut, prolific multi-instrumentalists and singer-songwriters Rob Crow and Armistead Burwell “Zach” Smith are back with a new single—and they’ve hit the road again with their most famous band, one whose melodic progressions, distinctive guitar and bass tones, and oft-delicate vocal delivery were influential in late-1990s and early-2000s underground circles....

Veteran LA noise maven John Wiese has dramatically slowed his release schedule in recent years, but he’s made up for that relative scarcity by increasing the rigor in each project. Last month he dropped Continuous Hole (Gilgongo), a stunning collaboration with Drew Daniel of Matmos that redirects his penchant for sonic violence. The pair spent a decade developing the album’s 11 terse, fat-free tracks, arranging impossibly dense packets of visceral noise into ferocious rhythmic patterns borrowed from club music....

This year the 2021 Sundance Film Festival was virtual, and its offerings trimmed down from previous years. It included 73 feature films, 50 short films, four Indie Series, 23 talks and events, and 14 New Frontier multimedia projects. We watched 38 of the 73 films, including most of the award winners. Here are some sneak peaks of our favorites to look for in the year to come. Eight for Silver In a foggy 19th-century village, a wild animal is ripping people apart....

Ashlee Rezin/Sun-Times Media Incoming 35th Ward alderman Carlos Ramirez-Rosa has vowed not to become a mayoral rubber stamp. Carlos Ramirez-Rosa says it’s clear why he and more than a dozen other newcomers have been elected to the Chicago City Council, and why Mayor Rahm Emanuel had to fight so hard for his own reelection. But as he well knows, these aren’t exactly promises till death do us part. In 2007, SEIU and other labor groups vowed to stir things up....

P Perhaps she was passed over, she muses, because unlike Rasheed (Al’Jaleel McGhee), who got the job, she’s “not black enough.” This problematic sentiment, combined with her insistence that she doesn’t date “black guys” and her habit of wearing a wig of long, straight, light brown hair, sets Margaret up as the self-hater in the play’s subtitle. It’s a shame, because Nwandu’s writing shows moments of engrossing nuance, the sort that might make Margaret’s journey wholly convincing....

It’s important for me as a progressive stereotype to listen to public radio while driving and to get outraged at the news. If my hackles are especially raised, I will even tweet about it. (Like I said, progressive stereotype.) This is what transpired in October after I heard a report from WBEZ’s Odette Yousef about the common Chicago policing practice of confiscating and throwing away the tents of the homeless. According to Yousef’s story, one explanation the Chicago Police Department gives to defend the practice is a law that says it’s illegal to block a public thoroughfare....