Anyone who’s ever told you to keep your eye on the ball has clearly never been hit by a bat. El Kempner, who makes music as Palehound, has learned the lesson instilled in me during a decade of midwestern softball: the importance of staying vigilant toward potential dangers and adversaries in your midst. “Suckers will […]
Author Archives: Shannon Nico Shreibak
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Plantasia grows into a two-night affair at Garfield Park Conservatory
Time has only deepened the music community’s affection for Mort Garson’s 1976 flora-themed synth spectacular, Mother Earth’s Plantasia. In celebration of Garson’s enduring legacy, Empty Bottle Presents and Brooklyn label Sacred Bones have created a festival of lush sights and sounds at Garfield Park Conservatory. For the event’s fourth iteration, they’ve expanded Plantasia into a […]
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Algiers bring the sounds of Atlanta’s strident past and joyous present to Sleeping Village
The cover imagery on Algiers’s new album, Shook, can be interpreted as empowering or forsaken. A black wolf with feral or fawning eyes—you decide—stands in profile with its head lowered, a chain dangling from its mouth. I like to think that the wolf isn’t genuflecting but rather holding the tools of its oppressor between its […]
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Black Belt Eagle Scout reconnects with her ancestors through The Land, the Water, the Sky
The early months of the COVID pandemic left many of us settling into wherever we happened to be living, but Katherine Paul, who makes music as Black Belt Eagle Scout, hit the road. Journeying from Portland, Oregon, north to the Swimonish Indian Tribal Community on Washington’s Puget Sound, Paul returned to the home of her […]
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Michael Shannon and Jason Narducy put their spin on the Modern Lovers’ classic debut
Michael Shannon calls Brooklyn home these days, but the award-winning actor and founder of A Red Orchid Theatre still spends enough time in Chicago to remain one of the city’s most cherished nightlife figures—he’s right up there with Sharkula and the Tamale Guy. He played the main antagonist in The Shape of Water, and in […]
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Drone legends Sunn O))) bring their new concept, Shoshin Duo, to Thalia Hall for one bone-rattling night
Over the course of 24 years and nine full-length studio releases, drone-metal outfit Sunn O))) have cultivated a lofty mystique. In fact, their reputation often precedes them: you’ve probably heard the lore of their 120-decibel live shows, with their glacial cadences and bone-rattling soundscapes. But their first Chicago appearance since a 2019 stint at Rockefeller […]
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White Lung end their career with rebirth on Premonition
It’s always rare to see a band graduate from DIY rabble-rousers to PTA presidents, especially when they start out as legendarily raucous as Vancouver punks White Lung. Who knew that a decade after front woman Mish Barber-Way sang “Steel-toed boots / Smash rubber chains” on “Thick Lips,” she’d be a mother of two waxing poetic […]
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Plantasia puts down roots at the Garfield Park Conservatory for its third installment
Bridging the ultrasynthetic and hyperorganic, Mort Garson’s album Mother Earth’s Plantasia is a Moog-powered salve “for plants . . . and the people who love them,” as the cover art notes. Since its 1976 release, Plantasia has become cultural canon, attracting reissues of varying legitimacy and providing grist for several exhaustive cultural critiques. After New […]
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Cat Power brings catalog cornerstones and reworked classics to Thalia Hall
Chan Marshall, who’s performed as Cat Power since the mid-90s (she adopted it from the name of her first band), refreshes even the most weathered motifs with her smokestack voice. While she’s amassed a formidable catalog of soulful originals, she’s most renowned for refracting other artists’ radio hits and obscure B sides through her singular […]
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Hana Vu carves new pop landscapes with Public Storage
Storage units, with their heavy padlocked doors and stockpiles of intimate possessions, are ripe for metaphors about emotional compartmentalization. On her debut album, Public Storage, Los Angeles guitarist and songwriter Hana Vu finds inspiration there, drawing on memories of the storage units her family used during their frequent moves and her subsequent feelings of displacement. […]
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Desert Liminal make art for artifice with Glass Fate
The lead single from Desert Liminal’s latest album bursts with a gut punch of a line: “I don’t need no southbound highway sign to tell me hell is real.” Glass Fate, the Chicago experimental pop band’s second full-length, overflows with similarly oblique and poetic imagery—lilac tides and blood moons and sunlit roads line a journey […]
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Edgar Miller’s handmade homes have become wellsprings of inspiration for local artists
Like a scarlet pane of firelight shining from a brick-and-mortar facade, a red door on the 1700 block of North Wells announces the presence of a little piece of magic in the Old Town neighborhood. “You just walk beyond that barrier and you leave your life behind—a calm washes over you and you’re in this […]
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Mia Joy dives diary-deep on her debut album, Spirit Tamer
Update: This concert has been postponed to a yet-to-be-determined date. If ever an artist were predestined to create deep-seated dream-folk songs, it might be Mia Rocha, who performs as Mia Joy. Her parents, a poet and a musician, encouraged her to use music as a channel of expression and self-discovery, and each of her songs […]
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Lala Lala questions identity and isolation with I Want the Door to Open
Lala Lala’s ebullient new fourth album, I Want the Door to Open, feels like a musical antithesis of the isolation and insularity of the past 18 months. The project of Chicago songwriter Lillie West, Lala Lala rose to prominence with 2018’s The Lamb (Hardly Art), which was recorded live with a three-piece band. IWTDTO, by […]
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The Body and Big|Brave draw on the Band and Appalachia for Leaving None but Small Birds
The Body and Big|Brave are both known for their takes on pulverizing, minimalist postmetal, but their new collaborative album, Leaving None but Small Birds (Thrill Jockey), gazes at the infinite possibilities of traditional folk music through a warped and weathered all-seeing eye. Crafted in the studio with engineer-producer Seth Manchester (a frequent collaborator of the […]