Category: Music Review

When Canadian producer Jayda Guy, who makes music as Jayda G, was a child, her father began spending hours in a room with a specific goal: to record his life story. William Richard Guy had grown sick, and as his health declined he enlisted the help of Guy’s older sister to compile 11 hours of […]

Sampa Tembo was born in Zambia and raised in Botswana, but she was living in Australia when she released her breakout second mixtape as Sampa the Great, 2017’s Birds and the Bee9. Sampa’s hip-hop career soon took off internationally, and after COVID-19 spread worldwide, she left Australia for Zambia. The move helped her expand her […]

Chicago R&B artist Elijah LeFlore sings with the understated cool of someone who’s found peace and mostly just wants to share that whole-body tranquility with you. In January 2022, he self-released his debut full-length, Sunset Radio, where his lilting voice floats among gentle guitars, nimble electronic percussion, and soothing keyboards; he followed that up in […]

The Texas Rubies are the great Chicago alt-country phenomenon that wasn’t. Lead vocalist Jane Baxter Miller and guitarist and harmony singer Kelly Kessler were Kentucky transplants who met in Chicago in the early 90s and started writing hard-hitting retro-country songs in the tradition of Hazel Dickens and Alice Gerrard. They released one album, Working Girl […]

Histories of jazz tend to play up the significance of composers and conceptual innovators who also lead bands. Harrison Bankhead will not stand in their ranks; during a career that began in the 1970s and lasted until his death in Waukegan on April 5, he only made two albums as a leader. But as a […]

In 2019, Detroit-born drummer and composer JoVia Armstrong recruited trusted musical collaborators to support her dissertation research on time-based sound processing (e.g., reverb and delay) at the University of California, Irvine. That contingent became the Eunoia Society, the flexibly rostered ensemble that joined Armstrong on one of 2022’s most gripping debut albums, The Antidote Suite, […]

Stuck became one of my favorite new Chicago bands during the worst of the pandemic. Their taut, bracing postpunk is exactly the kind of music I love to see played in rooms so cramped that the walls sweat—and that’s exactly the kind of environment I’ve avoided since COVID-19 arrived. I find this irony alternately funny […]

The story of Brainiac still haunts Ohio indie-rock fans and appreciators of deliriously weird electronic rock and pop. This Dayton band—who loved to annoy zine editors by styling their name 3RA1N1AC—formed in 1992 and released three brilliant, ever-surprising albums that made them feel like a harbinger of subversive, futuristic rock to come. By the time […]

Finally! An album for the real bitches. The ones who let their heart override their wounds and will flash fangs when necessary. This type of R&B- and funk-tinged, southern-fried hip-hop can’t be duplicated, only demonstrated, and that’s exactly what rapper Kari Faux does on her anthemic new album, Real B*tches Don’t Die. Every artist wants […]

In 2017, Reader critic Peter Margasak noted Tinariwen’s recurring practice of featuring rock musicians as guests on their records. Their new album, Amatssou, doesn’t change that approach, but it perfects it. Originally, the long-running ensemble of Tuareg musicians (also known as Kel Tamasheq, meaning speakers of Tamasheq) intended to make the album at Jack White’s […]

It feels like a lifetime since Chicago pop-punk veterans the Bollweevils have put out an album. They formed in 1989, and unless you count a posthumous compilation, they haven’t released a full-length since 1996—that one was Weevilive, a live recording of a Metro set from the previous year. The group went dormant after a final […]

Martin Dupont was one of the most enigmatic and exhilarating coldwave bands of the 1980s. The group was founded in 1980 in Marseille, France, by songwriter and bassist Alain Seghir, who wanted to explore new wave after spending time in rock and jazz bands. Over the next few years he linked up with several musically […]

Since the 2010s, a crop of artists have shifted and contorted electronic dance music into new levels of aggression and experimentation, challenging as well as rewarding their listeners. Bristol duo Giant Swan, who create raw and pummeling industrial techno with meticulous attention to detail, are at the vanguard of this sound. They collide clattering synths […]