If Americans are going to pass laws that require people to do things they’d rather not, let me suggest a law that requires opinion makers in big cities to spend a couple of years in small towns. We’re all one country, but the differences between our boonies and our metropolises go far beyond scale. But damn it, it isn’t a perfect world. Some of those shopkeepers have minds as broad as cowpaths....
ARTIST: Ryan MowrySHOW: Russian Circles, Wovenhand, and Taiga at Metro on Fri 1/30MORE INFO: etsy.com/shop/pencilplan
Update 3/19: After the publication of this story, the Chicago Board of Elections reported that, upon a final vote count, Sixth Ward alderman Roderick Sawyer was three votes short of the 50 percent plus one vote needed to win reelection. Sawyer is in a runoff against Deborah Foster-Bonner. In the southwest-side 13th Ward, incumbent Marty Quinn trounced 19-year-old challenger David Krupa with nearly 86 percent of the vote. This is about what happened in 1991, the last time a candidate dared challenge an incumbent backed by Michael Madigan, the Illinois state house speaker and 13th Ward Democratic committeeman of 50 years’ standing....
Memphis-based vocalist Karen Wolfe got her start in the mid-90s singing backup for her sister-in-law, the late Denise LaSalle. Encouraged by LaSalle to go out on her own, she released her debut album, First Time Out (B&J), in 2006; it pairs her sweet, supple vocals with the usual synth-heavy southern soul-blues backing—the same sound, more or less, that’s characterized her studio output ever since. But from the beginning Wolfe has made it a point to recruit the finest sidemen available for her live performances, allowing her to spark her shows with an energy and sensual grace that her recordings didn’t always reflect....
Courtesy of Bleach Party’s Facebook page Bleach Party want to believe. On their new single “Secret Ships,” the Chicago-based garage-rock band vanish into the stars during a mysterious alien abduction set in the late 90s. Lead vocalist Meghan MacDuff sings about joining dozens of astronauts on a journey across the cosmos, only to be jettisoned back down to Earth once they realize she’s human. Unlike the most famous songs about starmen and space voyages, “Secret Ships” doesn’t worry too much about paving the future with its sound....
At first it was not clear where the ritual hex would be performed. Then three women strode purposefully across Kedzie Avenue, black capes blowing in the wind. They stopped at the corner of Kedzie and Milwaukee and proceeded to unload a large bundle of black pens, a lighter, several sticks of incense, comment cards, stickers, and a packet of neatly printed half-sheets detailing the hex and the protective spell of the day, in both English and Spanish....
Marcello Cancelli Area Wine Director, Boka Restaurant Group One of the veteran sommeliers in the Chicago scene, Marcello Cancelli was first introduced to fine wines in an incredibly romantic way. Cancelli recalls finishing up his shift each night at Jean Claude Bistro in the late 90s, to gather around a table with fellow servers and the late legendary chef Jean-Claude Poilevey smoking cigarettes, sipping wine and talking life, politics, and whatever came to mind....
Kevin Warwick, Reader associate editor The Counts, Funk Pump This 1974 funk record sits right in the sweet spot of the decade, when a band could be cosmic enough to levitate but not shoot off into outer space with George Clinton and company—and prior to the late-70s disco deluge, when every album had at minimum two tracks of glitzy symphonic decadence. The Counts relocated from Detroit to Atlanta (and Aware Records) after hometown label Westbound, which released their debut, went all-in on Funkadelic and the Ohio Players....
Mike Krol makes the kind of distorted pop-rock that’s so sunny it’s liable to burn you till your skin peels. He’s a devoted student of the decades-old magic that allows punk fury and pop sweetness to coexist, which is why the songs on his fourth album, January’s Power Chords (Merge), feel familiar at first listen. And though the relatively languid, beachside tune “Blue and Pink” tips its hat to the long-standing fascination that Beach Boys-style has with the sand and ocean, when Krol sings wanting to feel palm trees fall and flatten his body it’s clear he knows that even paradise can fail to cure what ails him....
Q: It’s taken a lot to do this, but here goes. I am a 38-year-old gay male. I have been dating this guy for one year and ten months. It’s been a lot of work. He cheated on me numerous times and he lives with me and doesn’t work and I’ve been taking care of him for seven months now. He always accuses me of cheating or finds something to blame me for....
Listening to The Big Freeze (Don Giovanni), the fifth album from New York singer-songwriter Laura Stevenson, feels a little like eavesdropping on her innermost thoughts—an impression that owes as much to the raw, stripped-down acoustic arrangements as it does to Stevenson’s songwriting. “A lot of my songs, I write for myself to deal with something that I am not ready to share with anybody,” she told Noisey in March. But while she expresses her vulnerability through music, she’s not always totally forthcoming....
Olivia Junell, 33, has been codirector of Experimental Sound Studio since 2015 and managing director of the Hyde Park Jazz Festival since 2014. In 2015 she joined the board of Afro-feminist troupe Honey Pot Performance, whose research and outreach efforts include the Chicago Black Social Culture Map. On March 21 she helped launch the Quarantine Concerts livestream series with ESS codirectors Adam Vida and Alex Inglizian, drummer Ben Billington (who books the Resonance series), and guitarist Daniel Wyche (who curates the Elastro series at Elastic Arts)....
Chicago metal/experimental polymath Bruce Lamont (Yakuza, Bloodiest, Corrections House, Brain Tentacles) has just released his second solo album, Broken Limbs Excite No Pity (War Crime Recordings), and will be celebrating its release tonight. Lamont is such a tireless collaborator—along with his many bands, he frequently appears on albums by others—that his solo output has been somewhat sublimated, but when he stretches out in his own zone he brings a sophistication borne of years among diverse perspectives to his sonic layerings....
Numerous intersecting lines connect the members of Broken Shadows, a new quartet devoted to the music of three saxophonists who emerged from Fort Worth, Texas: Ornette Coleman, Julius Hemphill, and Dewey Redman (the group also tackles “Song for Ché,” by bassist Charlie Haden, who worked with Coleman and Redman). Front-line saxophonists Tim Berne and Chris Speed worked fruitfully together in the remarkable quartet Bloodcount for much of the 90s; bassist Reid Anderson and drummer Dave King have been playing together for nearly two decades in the Bad Plus; and King also plays in Speed’s fantastic trio....
In the spring of 2015, I walked into the Cook County criminal courthouse at 26th and California. I was there for the resentencing hearing of Adolfo Davis, a 38-year-old man who had been given a life sentence at the age of 14. “That’s Abner Mikva,” she exclaimed. “Ooh,” Morfin replied with a sigh of relief. McKay slipped up more than once, referring to Mikva as “your honor,” or “Judge Mikva....
Last month Philadelphia MC, poet, and sound artist Moor Mother (aka Camae Ayewa) gave a riveting performance at the Hideout, driving her fevered, politically charged oratory with blown-out beats, scuffed-up samples, and in-the-red synths. Few of the spoken-word artists working the post-hip-hop landscape can match her intensity, precision, and metaphoric power; I’ve seen her twice this year, and both times she had total control of the audience by the end of the set....
Underappreciated Chicago metal monarchs the Atlas Moth have been incubating their new album, Coma Noir, for nearly four years, and this week their dormancy comes to a welcome end. The band started out more than a decade ago playing a hybrid of psychedelic stoner rock and sludge metal, but every time they return they have a larger wingspan, dazzling and terrible in a new way. Their latest release is ambitious in scope, and its songs hang loosely on a cinematic framework, inspired by a dark and subversive drama—one that exists as much in the lyricists’ heads as it does in the music itself, and thus hints at more than it reveals....
I’ve developed a theory, based on sorting through press releases for Chicago’s fall theater season. It’s this: That as more and more narrative entertainment and bigger and bigger audiences flow toward screens—from network and cable to Netflix—playwrights feel freer and freer to tackle social issues on live stages.
Independent Book Store Day is Saturday, so we’ve scoured the shelves (and Instagram accounts) of book nooks across the city. Here’s a few views of cozy places to read, learn, sip, wander into a podcast, or just get lost in other worlds.
Last October, as coronavirus cases began to slowly climb throughout Chicago, Kenia Campeano arrived at a brick McDonald’s on the southwest side, where the 31-year-old had worked for nearly two years as a cook. Despite the pandemic, the store did a bustling business, and this particular day felt busier than usual, with customers gathered inside and a line of cars snaking through the drive-thru. As she hustled to assemble orders, the store manager arrived, saw the backup and asked why so few employees had shown up....
