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Life on the road in an indie rock band can be rough, but that only intensifies the simple pleasures. A cold beer, the crack of a snare drum, the sunset on the horizon, the blue stage lights . . . It’s addictive, even when the show’s a total bust. Jon Fine still savors these moments. Now executive editor of Inc., Fine revisits his decades-long former life as an indie rocker, when he was a guitarist for Bitch Magnet, Vineland, and Coptic Light, in Your Band Sucks: What I Saw at Indie Rock’s Failed Revolution (But Can No Longer Hear), a rock memoir that’s worthy of the underground’s golden age, or at least the tour van library....

Whenever an outsider style of rock music finds crossover success, it’s inevitably plagued with a surge of mediocre newcomers, but one band to rise above that fray in recent years is Swedish trio Monolord. The Gothenburg group formed in 2013 and released two promising albums on Rising Easy before making their Relapse debut with 2017’s Rust—as perfect a traditional stoner-metal album as anyone has put out this decade. On their brand-new No Comfort, Monolord have stripped back some of their characteristic fuzz to highlight their songwriting prowess and the sheer magnitude of their sound....

Q: I’m a longtime fan and part of the 47 percent of white women who did NOT vote for Donald Trump. I’m disappointed, horrified, scared, and mad about the election. I donated $100 to Planned Parenthood this morning because I honestly felt like there was nothing else I could do. That said, I wanted to share that on election night I had one of the most weirdly charged, hottest, and sexiest orgasms of my life....

Welcome to the Reader‘s morning briefing for Monday, July 11, 2016. More foster parents are needed to take in homeless LGBTQ youth Illinois social service agencies are asking foster parents to take in some of the approximately 25,000 homeless LGBTQ youth in the state. More than a third of those children and teens are homeless because they identify as LGBTQ. “Our teenagers, in particular, are quite hard to place simply because of the age and the developmental stage....

On April 13, LGBTQ health center Howard Brown launched its free safe-sex kit delivery program to support the stay-at-home order and to facilitate safe sex in your home. The program encourages people to social distance, and that includes not traveling to their clinic spaces. By providing the kits across the city (and the country) folks won’t have to purchase items for intercourse. Have no fear—Howard Brown is here to make sure all of your stay-at-home sex needs are met....

Michael Gebert Pierogi at Pierogi Street One thing I’ve noticed about online food discussions is that nobody gets into fights about steak or foie gras or other luxury goods. If you really want people to go nuts, start with the most plebeian ingredient of all: flour. People argue about pizza (and its crust), about bread and pie, about pasta, about ramen (and its noodles) and the soup dumplings known as xiao long bao—and, of course, about doing without it (and its gluten)....

As the countdown continued toward today’s one-day teachers strike, I started getting calls from the we-love-Rahm community—there are still a few members out there—teasing me about my “Jacobin friends” in the Chicago Teachers Union. As though that’s what her parents had named her. In fact, many of CTU’s recent actions leave me scratching my head. Like its inability to just bury the hatchet already in its endless fight with state rep Christian Mitchell....

Irreversible Entanglements will leave you shaken. The group make tight, synergistic free jazz anchored by the dynamic spoken-word declarations of poet Moor Mother, aka Camae Ayewa. Their music sometimes sounds chaotic and freewheeling, but it ensnares listeners with arrangements carefully considered to help deliver fiery political messages. The five-piece ensemble—the lineup also includes saxophonist Keir Neuringer, trumpeter Aquiles Navarro, bassist Luke Stewart, and drummer Tcheser Holmes—originally performed as two different groups at a 2015 New York benefit show called Musicians Against Police Brutality....

For New York noise artist Margaret Chardiet, aka Pharmakon, the body is a wet, alien thing that hangs on the self like meat on a butcher’s hook. Her defining album, 2014’s Bestial Burden (Sacred Bones), chronicles a serious illness and hospitalization. It opens with the multitracked sound of her desperate breathing, in a claustrophobic symphony that makes you feel like you’re being asphyxiated. Throughout the album she screams and coughs and vomits searing electronic barrages in a terrifying evocation of her own disintegrating shell....

Chance the Rapper, Donnie Trumpet, and the Roots at Taste of Chicago

Coco, the new children’s animation from Pixar/Disney, screened for Chicago critics Tuesday afternoon, but the Chicago Reader wasn’t there. We boycotted the screening in solidarity with the Los Angeles Times, which has been barred from press previews in retaliation for its news coverage of Disney’s business dealings with the city of Anaheim, home of the theme parks Disneyland and Disneyland California Adventure as well as the lucrative Disneyland Resort. Last Friday, the Times noted in its holiday movie preview that “Walt Disney Co....

Alkali A year and a half ago, local producer and DJ Jeremiah Meece (a member of The-Drum and organizer of Cold Tech) linked up with Bronx-based R&B singer Rahel through rapper Le1f (a mutual collaborator) and they began working on music together. Last week, their effort Alkali was released online. Meece’s projects have always taken elements of both deep R&B cuts and mainstream pop and run them through a spaced-out, psychedelic filter....

Prop Thtr will probably never produce Stephen Sondheim’s Follies. Yet somehow, the news earlier this month that they will be moving out of their longtime two-venue space in Avondale by October made me envision Carlotta the aging showgirl, crooning “good times and bum times, I’ve seen them all. And, my dear, I’m still here.” So what happened? COVID. Prior to the COVID shutdown, Lilley was working on Diary of an Erotic Life, a devised piece derived from proto-Expressionist Frank Wedekind’s writings, including his famous “Lulu” plays....

Republicans will stop at nothing to stop Donald Trump. They’ve pulled a maneuver out of their playbook they haven’t used in years. It’s like a Superbowl quarterback facing fourth and 20 at his own 5-yard-line and scratching the Statue of Liberty play into the dirt. “This is the party of Lincoln,” said House speaker Paul Ryan. “We believe all people are created equal in the eyes of God.” “This is the party of Abraham Lincoln....

On the new double-disc compilation Defilements, long-running Japanese band Coffins solder together a patchwork of death and doom metal from five out-of-print releases that trace their development throughout the 2010s. Coffins spike the collection with covers of iconic American groups such as Death and Buzzoven, faithfully executing each homage, and their original tracks simply swing. Metal can swing as surely as jazz and funk can, and without that crucial element of their sound, Coffins might have ended up just another plodding rock act pummeling worn-out musical tropes....

Last Tuesday, when Roosevelt Myles was released from prison after 28 years, he held a celebratory gathering at home with close family. His fiancee, Tonya Crowder, cooked fried chicken and french fries for everyone. But as the gathering went on, she became concerned that Myles was talking to everyone but not eating. Did he not like her cooking? Incarcerated for the length of their relationship, he’d never had a chance to try it....

I tried to tally up the total number of releases by noise wizard Masami Akita, better known as Merzbow, and polymorphous metal trio Boris before I started writing about their new joint album, but it proved to be a fool’s errand. These Japanese artists are among the most prolific musicians in modern history, and their combined catalogs include hundreds of titles. The brand-new 2R0I2P0 (a play on “RIP 2020,” a sentiment I think we can all get behind), is their eighth collaborative release since 2002....

Lordy. As if last year’s Power Trip record, Nightmare Logic (Southern Lord), wasn’t enough of a super boon from the Texas-born purveyors of pummeling thrash metal, this January we were blessed with Mammoth Grinder’s Cosmic Crypt (Relapse)—the Austin band’s first full-length in five years. Fronted by Power Trip drummer Chris Ulsh, Mammoth Grinder lay down a more subterrestrial blend of death and thrash than their metal brethren, which Ulsh complements with a baleful growl that compares to the sound of a concrete saw being run through a drum of gelatinized street sludge....

Russ Tutterow Sad news from Chicago Dramatists: its longtime artistic director Russ Tutterow died today, after a battle with cancer. A beloved director and stalwart of the Chicago theater scene, Tutterow was a widely recognized nurturer of playwrights and champion of new work. Tutterow served as Artistic Director at Chicago Dramatists for 30 years, establishing it as an acclaimed hub for the development and production of new work. He worked with hundreds of playwrights, including Rebecca Gilman, Tina Fey, Sarah Ruhl, Keith Huff, Lydia R....