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Start a two-piece instrumental bass-and-drums rock duo with a penchant for mutant masks and sounds that might’ve been forged during the opening reception of a back-alley art gallery, and watch the Lightning Bolt references roll in. Space Blood are plenty deserving of comparison to the iconic noise-rock band, but to stop at that alone would underserve their music. On 2017’s very solid Tactical Chunder (Lonely Voyage), the pair of Sam Edgin (bass, etc) and William Covert (drums, etc) are much more sci-fi theater and less hardcore-punk than their Providence-born predecessors, using synth loop after synth loop to tip a ten-gallon hat to Battles while soldering enough rhythms and deviant riffs together to hurtle their sound into the cosmos....

When meals involve chefs summoning hunks of spitting meat from towering curtains of flame, they summon all sorts of pleasurable primeval associations: the sun setting over the field where your enemies lie vanquished, your horse is tied panting to a post, and you’re wiping gore from your blades in anticipation of the spoils you’ve killed for. Second courses will appeal to more hardcore carnivores. Compressed veal sweetbreads in a pickly house giardiniera are a bit stiff, the breast implant of sweetbread dishes....

Courtesy of Karla Huffman MC Adad Tomorrow night Chicago MC Adad celebrates the forthcoming release of his album, Drifted, with a headlining show at the Promontory. Judging from the music I’ve heard, I interpret the title as a reflection of feeling increasingly detached from society. On “Danger Us,” Adad raps from the perspective of a fictional protagonist, one who sees a mother prepare to make funeral arrangements for a baby and grapples with the weight of having family members wind up in jail or get shot to death....

Last week Iranian-American Muslim fashion blogger Hoda Katebi posted video of a five-minute interview she’d done on January 31 with WGN News. It had been pitched to her as a segment about her fashion book, Tehran Streetstyle, but turned into an interrogation of the 23-year-old’s politics by anchors Larry Potash and Robin Baumgarten—and some of their questions and comments had Islamophobic overtones, including Baumgarten’s suggestion that Katebi didn’t “sound American.”...

Q I consider myself a straight guy—but for the last four years, I’ve been having an affair with “Connie,” a trans girl I met online. It was just casual at first, but over time we developed a deeper personal relationship but kept it hidden. At some point, I figured out she was in love with me. I love her too, but I don’t think I am “in love” with her. Several weeks ago, I went on a couple of dates with a girl I met on Match....

These days the field of classical music is crowded with prodigies whose careers seem to have been cemented before puberty, so it’s refreshing to discover that one of today’s most acclaimed younger pianists was a late bloomer. French pianist Lucas Debargue began studying music when he was 11, but his studies weren’t rigorous. By the time he was in high school he was more taken with literature than the piano, and it wasn’t until after he earned his bachelor’s degree that he pursued formal music studies....

Ukrainian Village barstaurant Pub Royale is best known for its Devon Avenue-worthy Indian food, but it also happens to serve a great burger, excellent hot chicken, a chicken tikka wrap that makes for ideal stoner food, and a decadent doughnut. So it should come as little surprise that the kitchen staff knows how to whip up a really good pizza. “We do pizza a lot,” says chef Nate Tano as he shapes the crust for one of the off-menu pies that the staff often subsist on....

QI’m a straight male kinkster who used to do live performances as a rope bondage top, but I recently jumped out of the kink community. I just think I’ll have better luck finding a long-term relationship with a girl from the vanilla world. So long as she’s GGG, I can live with it. As much as I loved the sex/kink with people I met in “the scene,” I never found anything/anyone for the “long term....

If the 80s had been a perfect decade for music, we wouldn’t have the overproduced, radio-friendly power pop of Eddie Money or Bryan Adams still getting pumped over the airwaves—instead, we’d have the fun, catchy anthems of Julian Leal. The Romeoville native, who now lives in Plainfield, never reached the mainstream heights he deserved, probably because he never had management or a regular band and his singles were as DIY as they come....

The music community that lives together reunites together: In recent years, many of the northern-Virginia and D.C.-area screamo bands that warped punk back in the late 90s and early 2000s and went on to influence contemporary heavies (Touche Amore, anyone?) have reemerged. The group of bands in that scene—which includes City of Caterpillar and Malady, among others—would be incomplete without Majority Rule, whose three members teamed up again last year for the first time since they called it quits in 2004....

Marc Maron overshares. For almost seven years now, an ever-expanding audience has heard him talk about himself twice a week on his groundbreaking podcast, WTF With Marc Maron. These personal updates, which sometimes last up to half an hour, precede recorded interviews (or “conversations,” as he prefers) with comics, actors, musicians, and other creative types. In his stand-up shows he favors an improvisational, flying-by-the-seat-of-his-pants approach that relies heavily on mining material from his daily life....

Cate Blanchett (center) in Cinderella; the magisterial costumes are by Sandy Powell I’m not sure if children are going to enjoy Disney’s new live-action version of Cinderella, which opens in wide release today. It’s a subtle film, marked by greater consideration for psychology and decor than one typically finds in children’s entertainment. Barring the broadly comic performances of Helena Bonham Carter (who turns in a cameo as the fairy godmother) and Sophie McShera and Holliday Grainger (who play the wicked stepsisters)—not to mention the presence of some anthropomorphized mice held over from the 1950 animated original—the characters are introspective and the performances are reserved....

Chicagoans is a first-person account from off the beaten track, as told to Anne Ford. This week’s Chicagoan is Elizabeth Yerkes, pediatric urologist. “The thing is, you can decide which bathroom the baby uses at school and what clothes you dress them in, but their gender identity is innate, and until they grow up, you don’t know what it is. Gender identity is the feeling that you are a man or a woman—though not everyone has to identify as one of those—and how you identify yourself may not match what’s present on the inside or the outside....

This week Chicago’s revamped Department of Housing rolls out an online dashboard with maps and statistics on developers’ compliance with the city’s Affordable Requirements Ordinance—a law that’s meant to spur construction of new affordable housing units. Users can explore a map of all the developments that have “triggered” the ARO since 2008 through requests for zoning changes or city funding or purchases of city land below market prices. The dashboard shows the number of affordable units planned, in progress, or constructed by community area....

A couple weeks ago, when I spoke with director Steven Cergizan about his documentary on Chicago hardcore, No Delusions, he told me that what motivated him to make it was the desire “to contribute something to the scene.” Cergizan didn’t start going to local hardcore shows till the early 2000s, but his desire to give back connects him to the young musicians in the 1980s who planted the seeds for the jumbled, expansive, multigenerational community he explores in No Delusions....

Joe Segal, my cantankerous friend and inadvertent mentor, died last week on Monday, August 10. He was a champion of creative music for more than 70 years. His once peripatetic Jazz Showcase—firmly settled at Dearborn Station since 2008—drew jazz fans from around the world like moths to a flame, and in 2015 he became only the second nightclub owner to be named an NEA Jazz Master. He was 94; even in a wheelchair, having been in ill health for the past several years, he still showed up at the club once in a while....

UK guitarist and composer Justin Broadrick is best known as a founding member of the industrial metal assault that is Godflesh. But capturing purely annihilatory noise in that pounding maelstrom is not his only musical interest. He formed Jesu in 2003 to focus on postpunk, goth, and the bleaker, lonelier shores of shoegaze, and characteristically, his latest album under that name, Terminus (Avalanche), is an exercise in nonmetal darkness that provides chiming soundscapes for a gray and empty existence....

Ten years ago, “Gee!” by Girls’ Generation became one of the first K-pop singles to break out of South Korea. The success of that track made the group stars in Japan and the U.S. years before Psy went viral with “Gangnam Style”—and even longer before the arrival of the omnipresent BTS. Thanks in part to Girls’ Generation’s efforts, K-pop is now a global phenomenon, but the group itself has been on hiatus since 2017 while several of its eight members, including California native Tiffany Young, pursue solo careers....

Welcome to the Reader‘s morning briefing for Wednesday, November 29, 2017. Dorm without heat, hot water forces Chicago State University students to stay in hotels Many Chicago State University students are being housed in hotels after a pipe burst, leaving a dorm and the student union without heat or hot water. “When it became clear that heat and hot water would not be working in either the Residence Hall or the Student Union building, we immediately made plans to provide our residential students with warm, safe accommodations,” interim CSU president Rachel Lindsey said in a statement....

If you took a spin down Clark Street through Wrigleyville last Saturday evening you could imagine it was a game day rather than a national outpouring of grief, rage, and rebellion. The sun dappled patios were packed with the sandaled and unmasked, shedding coronavirus for Corona buckets. Ready or not, patio season is back, more harrowing than ever. This week he and his crew, along with their not- for- profit Public Media Institute, launched Community Kitchen, out of the brewery and Kimski....