I’m wary about jumping on the “nature is healing” train, but I have to admit that when I heard the news that groundbreaking gay country band Lavender Country were returning to the Hideout stage for the Cosmic Country Showcase, it felt like a pretty big ray of hope—every time they’ve graced this festive event with […]
Author Archives: Monica Kendrick
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Austin doom outfit Monte Luna takes their dazed and heavy doom on the road
In 2016, Austin doom unit Monte Luna dropped their debut demo—a self-titled release with just one self-titled track more than 20 minutes long—and just a few months later followed it with their powerful first EP, The Hound. These served as appetizers for their self-titled 2017 full-length debut, which exuded confidence and showcased a trippy heaviness […]
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Ministry continue to rage on their 15th album, Moral Hygiene
In their 40-year career, Ministry have certainly been down more than once, but they’ve never been completely out. They’ve been sacked by record labels, they’ve had so many players come and go that “revolving-door lineup” hardly describes it, and they’ve carried on through drug addiction and the deaths of longtime members. In the ashes of […]
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Chicago indie-rock mainstays Eleventh Dream Day celebrate their 14th album, Since Grazed
When Chicago indie-rock stalwarts Eleventh Dream Day released their 14th album (and first in five years), Since Grazed, in April 2021, the pandemic prevented them from having a proper release party. The group, formed in 1983, are creeping up on their 40th anniversary, and though they didn’t hold together this long by being impatient, they […]
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Chicago’s Starless merge shoegaze and metal on Hope Is Leaving You
Chicago four-piece Starless launched in 2014 with a lineup including members of local bands Beak, the Timeout Drawer, and Our Earth Is a Tomb. This month the four-piece (not to be confused with the Japanese prog band or the Scottish art-pop band of the same name) are releasing their second full-length, Hope Is Leaving You. […]
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Wilco and Sleater-Kinney team up for an evening at Pritzker Pavilion
Wilco released their latest album, Ode to Joy, in October 2019. Sleater-Kinney released their new record, Path of Wellness, in June. Due to the pandemic, neither record has had the kind of live support you’d normally expect such high-profile indie-rock releases to get. That gives this doubleheader tour all the more potential to be amazing, […]
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Annihilus’ Luca Cimarusti brings Chicago musicians along on his experimental black-metal journey
Chicago multi-instrumentalist and Reader contributor Luca Cimarusti is having a busy summer. In July his minimalist postpunk trio, Luggage, dropped the album Happiness, and now he’s about to put out the second full-length from his black-metal solo project, Annihilus. Cimarusti originally wanted to keep this project anonymous, but he dropped that idea after releasing his […]
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Chicago sound wizard Mark Solotroff makes grounding, elegiac music on Not Everybody Makes It
Chicago sound wizard Mark Solotroff has been wielding his powerful electronic grimoire since the mid-80s as the leader of Intrinsic Action, Bloodyminded, and Anatomy of Habit. He’s also collaborated with a who’s who of industrial and metal artists, including the Atlas Moth, Indian, Locrian, Plague Bringer, Wrekmeister Harmonies, Brutal Truth, and the Body. Then there […]
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The Pine Valley Cosmonauts make Tom Waits’s 1973 debut feel relevant for our times
Led by Jon Langford of the Mekons and the Waco Brothers, Chicago alt-country band the Pine Valley Cosmonauts have covered plenty of ground in their quarter century or so of existence: they’ve made tribute albums for icons such as Bob Wills and Johnny Cash, spearheaded a series of death-themed covers compilations called The Executioner’s Last […]
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Dark synth artist Perturbator explores destruction on Lustful Sacraments
French multi-instrumentalist James Kent, who makes music as Perturbator, has a lifelong history with synthesizers—his parents were in a band that used them—and he negotiates the possibilities of his instruments as fluently as a native tongue. Though Kent has a background as a black-metal guitarist, he prefers to work alone, and as he told Tunecore […]
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Norwegian noise-rockers Årabrot delve into dark pop on Norwegian Gothic
Norwegian noise-rock band Årabrot have undergone many personnel changes over their two-decade career, and front man, composer, and sole constant member Kjetil Nernes has brought forth a different phase in the group’s sound with every one. In recent years, his main collaborator has been Swedish-Norwegian electronic producer and singer Karin Park; they’re also a married […]
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Madison stoner giants Bongzilla blaze through the Badger State on Weedsconsin
It’s hard to believe it’s been 16 years since Madison stoner giants Bongzilla dropped a studio album—surely at least a few people rocking out to their brand-new Weedsconsin LP were in diapers back then. The band, formed as a four-piece in 1995, had a lengthy run as one of the midwest’s finest purveyors of slow, […]
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Dutch extreme metal band Autarkh transform loss into triumph on Form in Motion
Dutch avant-garde metal band Dodecahedron released two spectacular albums, 2012’s self-titled debut and 2017’s Kwintessens, that promised a bright future for the band with their use of disturbing dissonance, bleak synthesizer textures, and gnashing industrial rhythms. But tragedy struck before they could live up to their potential: front man Michiel Eikenaar (also of black-metal group […]
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Sunburned Hand of the Man merges woe and joy on Pick a Day to Die
Sunburned Hand of the Man are a loose Boston-based collective whose work has sprawled across multiple genres, including free improv, noise, folk, drone, and psychedelic jams. Founded in 1997 out of the ashes of art-rock trio Shit Spangled Banner, they became part of a scene that specialized in indulgence and reveled in long builds, endless […]
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Brazilian thrashers Nervosa reemerge with a powerful multinational lineup
Last spring, the future of Nervosa seemed uncertain. The powerful Brazilian thrash-metal band had changed drummers a few times since forming in 2010, but in April 2020 bassist and vocalist Fernanda Lira and drummer Luana Dametto, two-thirds of the trio on 2018’s Downfall of Mankind, quit the group. That left just one founding member, guitarist […]