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In the years since Gossip Wolf covered the live debut of experimental postpunks Facs in January 2017, they’ve become one of the best bands in town, dropping dense albums at least yearly and playing consistently high-caliber concerts. (The Sleeping Village release show for Void Moments last spring, with Melkbelly and CB Radio Gorgeous, would’ve been great if COVID-19 hadn’t canceled it.) On Friday, May 21, top-shelf Chicago label Trouble in Mind releases Facs’ fourth album, Present Tense, where drummer Noah Leger, bassist Alianna Kalaba, and guitarist-vocalist Brian Case marry the dark, rumbling energy of their earlier efforts to a broader and more melodic songwriting palette—to this wolf, it sounds like a light at the end of a long tunnel....

“Humor can often be the most disarming thing and put people in a position where they’re questioning things that they might not have otherwise,” said Matt McLoughlin, a lanky man with a thick handlebar mustache and a tiny ponytail, as he and a few acquaintances settled at a table in the center of Ceres Cafe in the Board of Trade building. On the night of Wednesday, October 16, Ceres became ground zero (or perhaps one of several ground zeros) for an evening of drinking and alleged romantic indiscretions by Chicago police superintendent Eddie Johnson....

Add the Chicago Human Rhythm Project (CHRP) to the list of noted Chicago performing arts organizations undergoing a major leadership shift during a historic summer marked by upheaval, reflection, and the seismic financial/existential crisis of season cancellations due to the COVID-19 virus. That letter sparked a subsequent onslaught of social media posts stating Alexander made CHRP a place defined by body shaming, sexism, and the cultural erasure of tap’s origins in Black and African cultures....

Q: Is it a superdouchey move to pretend to be a lesbian to avoid unwanted male attention? I’m a straight single woman in my mid-30s and a very plausible lesbian in terms of sartorial stereotypes. Occasionally a guy will hit on me in an awkward or creepy way and I’ll trot out a line about “not being into men.” Most recently I used this pose when a courier broke down in my driveway and I invited him in for a glass of water while he waited for the tow truck....

When James Swanberg isn’t making sunny bubblegum pop in the Lemons, he’s cranking out blissful lo-fi ditties as Today’s Hits. Beginning in March 2011, Swanberg wrote and recorded a song a day under that name for nearly three years, and though his output has slowed since then, he’s nonetheless got a catalog of more than 1,000 tunes. On Thu 5/7 Swanberg will hit the Whistler to play 100 of those songs, all recorded during his first months in Chicago­—and because they usually last a minute or less, you won’t be there all night....

Earlier this summer I was walking through a residential part of Lincoln Park south into Old Town when I heard . . . could it be . . . live music? It’d been so long since I’d been to a full-band concert (March 4, to be exact) that as I approached the sound I had visions of that old Looney Tunes bit where Bugs Bunny bursts from his tunnel thinking he’s on Miami Beach, then runs off whooping into what turns out to be the Sahara Desert....

When you think of Slow Mass, CSTVT, My Dad, and Noumenon—assuming you know they’re some of the best local bands to play emo and mathy indie rock in the past five or ten years—the last things that come to mind are blastbeats, breakneck hardcore, and explosive sludge. But on the brand-new Mourner by Chicago trio Stay Asleep—whose members have played or still play in all four of those bands—you get all that and more....

This piece was originally published in Momentum, an anti-racism blog officially powered by Medium. Many journalists, local and otherwise, immediately condemned the piece—especially for its lack of compassion for the young victim and the community still mourning his loss. “What about Adam’s humanity?” we asked. My Northwestern colleague Steven Thrasher canceled his subscription to the paper and in a letter to Tribune leaders wrote: “I will not, under any circumstances, support journalism which calls for the debasement of marginalized people; which tries to justify the summary state execution of children; and which argues against my humanity....

If America were a king in a Greek play, his tragedy­­—the circumstance he can’t evade, the sin for which he can never atone—would be slavery. For all its horror, the subjugation of Native Americans can be viewed as a tectonic motion of history. One plate sliding bloodily over the other. Slavery was a business strategy. Sure, plenty of us think the Civil War paid the price for black servitude in lives, money, and legislation....

Q: Is it a red flag or sign of deeper attachment or commitment issues if your long-term partner never tells you he loves you? Q: My fiancé has an ex-girlfriend who just can’t let it go. He’s blocked her on social media but his mother still follows his ex and is friends with her and they interact at least monthly. Likes, comments, etc. Can I address the issue with his mom or is that just somewhere you don’t go?...

TBS has ordered a comedy pilot from Chicagoan and The Chi and Master of None writer Lena Waithe. Twenties will be about a queer black girl named Hattie and her two straight best friends, and Waithe previously described it as “my Master of None about life in my 20s, set in LA.” “I always wanted to tell a story where a queer black woman was the protagonist and I’m so grateful to TBS for giving me a platform to tell this story,” Waithe said in a statement....

When I first heard the term “dungeon synth,” I imagined a style of dance music you’d hear in a subterranean goth club, but it’s actually a dark hybrid of neoclassical music, ambient, and black metal, heavily influenced by medieval lore and fantasy literature. What it lacks in grooves, it often makes up for in atmosphere and imagination—both of which are special strengths of Vetus Sepulcrum. The brainchild of Dutch musician Maurice de Jong, aka Mories, who’s so prolific you could fill an entire record collection with releases from his various projects (Gnaw Their Tongues, Seirom, Aderlating), Vetus Sepulacrum infuses its enormous blackened soundscapes with lush textures and a profound sense of majesty....

In 2015, Jesús “Chuy” García, longtime Cook County commissioner, former alderman, and state senator, became the only challenger to ever push a Chicago mayor into a primary runoff. Now García is running to represent Illinois’s Fourth District in the U.S. House of Representatives—a spur-shaped area gerrymandered to capture large Mexican and Puerto Rican communities on the west side of Chicago and in the western suburbs. Current congressman Luis Gutiérrez, in office since 1993, endorsed García’s candidacy in the same breath as he announced his retirement....

Is there anything more seductive to a Chicagoan at the start of a cold, soggy March than the idea of Hawaii? About this time of year, when the winter weary dream of torching all the dibs on the streets in a massive spring bonfire of rebirth, a little vision of sunshine and seawater sounds pretty good. Not many of us have the ability to drop thousands of dollars on an island escape, but on the cold, car-swept corner of Western and Ogden, there’s a tiny outpost that provides a fix....

Last week Elena Vázquez Felgueres and Tamar Fasja Unikel, the owners and proprietors and also chief bakers and delivery drivers of Masa Madre, which is, as far as they know, Chicago’s only Jewish-Mexican bakery, met in Vázquez Felgueres’s kitchen in Pilsen to try out recipes for Passover, three weeks away. “Some say, ‘add puño,’ a pinch, a handful of flour,” adds Vázquez Felgueres. “But it depends on the [size of the] hand....

I’m not going to pretend I’m thinking about much besides yesterday’s election. Even if Biden squeaks this one out, the country still has to contend with the fact that nearly half its electorate supports a president openly calling for a fascist coup. And I’ll never understand why millions of Illinois voters rejected the Fair Tax amendment, which would’ve benefited workers who’ve already suffered and lost so much during the pandemic—now the state will close its budget gaps without troubling the rich, so get ready for more service cuts and new burdens for those least able to pay....

Relax Feet relaxfeet.us Pulp Fiction’s Vincent Vega would agree that a foot massage is a touchy matter. Relax Feet takes them seriously, providing certified massage therapists, a soothing and thoughtfully decorated environment, clean premises, and very competitive fees. There’s even a separate room for two people where you can throw the most relaxing party ever—if you let them know about your mini celebration in advance, they’ll make the place look festive at no extra cost....

London quartet Black Midi have been getting lots of good press, including an ecstatic Pitchfork review of their 2019 debut, Schlagenheim (Rough Trade). It’s not hard to see why: the band deftly reference the spiky, difficult, complicated music of edgy rock geniuses such as Wire, Sonic Youth, and King Crimson without sounding directly derivative of any of them. The vocals of singer-guitarist Geordie Greep are as itchily adenoidal as those of the Violent Femmes’ Gordon Gano as he wails semi-articulate lyrics that occasionally disintegrate—such as on “Ducter,” where he declares, “It will never break me,” then spits out a series of yodeling chipmunk yips....

CaSera “DJ Ca$h Era” Heining, 25, is a producer at WGN Radio and runs her own mobile DJ company. She’s also the official DJ for Young Chicago Authors’ annual Louder Than a Bomb youth poetry festival and competition. DJ Ca$h Era made this mix for London-based music media platform Mnrchy in 2018. I always thought of that as a side job; my main focus was always radio. I first wanted to be on-air at a radio station, and then that energy switched my junior year, ’cause I kept hearing horror stories—like on-air talent can get let go at the drop of a dime for nothing....

The Mountain Movers are among my current faves, because they know how to freak the fuck out. Formed in the mid-2000s, the Connecticut band started as a showcase for the songs of New Haven indie rocker Dan Greene, and since then their cosmic trajectory has been eerily similar to that of many mid-60s rock groups who started out playing fairly straightforward pop but ventured into blistering psychedelia by the end of the decade....