Nnamdï’s sixth and latest album, Please Have a Seat (Secretly Canadian/Sooper), begins and ends with versions of the same refrain: “Some days I wake up ready to run.” Sure enough, since moving to Chicago from the suburbs a decade ago, the inexhaustible artist has essentially operated at a dead sprint. He records prolifically. He co-owns […]
Category: Music Review
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Chicago nightlife queen Ariel Zetina celebrates trans narratives on her debut album
DJ and producer Ariel Zetina has become a major player in Chicago nightlife in no small part because she works in more than one medium. Zetina moved to Illinois in 2008 to study theater and creative writing at Northwestern University, and she’s flourished as a playwright. Her reimagining of the tragic life of computer scientist […]
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Freddie Gibbs rides his rap roller coaster through hedonistic fun on Soul Sold Separately
Freddie Gibbs has been on a famous rapper roller coaster since he put out his first mixtape in 2010—a journey marked with decadent twists, dizzying heights, and equally terrifying descents. Public beefs with big-name artists, moments as a media darling, well-received acting roles (including the lead in last year’s Down With the King), and acquittal […]
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The world is a beautiful place with Algernon Cadwallader in it
The pop-culture industry loves to resurface detritus from my youth, add a little polish, and launch it on whatever streaming service I’m most likely to drop due to rising subscription fees—and I’m mostly just exhausted by it. Band reunions, especially of bands whose reputations and fan bases have kept growing since their breakup, are a […]
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In her first Chicago appearance, Clara de Asís collaborates with Aperiodic to model the aesthetic virtues of nonintervention
Clara de Asís is a Spanish-born, France-based multi-instrumentalist and sound artist who uses played and collected sounds as prompts to focus the power of the listener’s attention on the potentialities of the sound fields around them. The crackle of static and the decaying reverberations of struck metal on her new collaboration with Ryoko Akama, Sisbiosis […]
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Swedish power-metal titans Sabaton continue to explore the Great War
Founded in 1999, Swedish power-metal veterans Sabaton cast a microscopic gaze on the horrors of war with a sweeping, majestic, and anthemic sound that walks the line between empathizing with humans on the battlefield and glorifying the unglorifiable. Their records deliver poetic lessons in military history (usually European), and though they aim to stay as […]
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Comic art rapper Open Mike Eagle keeps on fighting
Chicago-born, Los Angeles-based rapper Open Mike Eagle is a seemingly inexhaustible font of laugh-out-loud one-liners, and he delivers as always on his latest album, Component System With the Auto Reverse (on his own Auto Reverse label). You need to be careful drinking anything while listening to it, lest uncomfortable snorking ensue when the rapper gets […]
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UK electronic-noise duo Petbrick create a tantalizing sonic universe on their new album, Liminal
Plenty of bands do a lot with compact lineups, but few can match the huge black-hole vortex of sound that Petbrick creates. The London-based duo of British multi-instrumentalist and producer Wayne Adams and legendary Brazilian metal drummer Iggor Cavalera came together a few years ago with a plan to make “horrible noise” without compromise. But […]
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Discussing the Sun remix pop genres into a forlorn sound that’s all its own
I’ve heard plenty of great songs that capture the dissociative lonesomeness and strange thrills of navigating interpersonal relationships now that so much human communication is sucked up by the vortex of social media. The best recent example is “Shade,” a psych-tinged single that indie duo Discussing the Sun released to preview their new debut album, […]
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Ben Zucker’s stirring compositions are built on a lifetime of musical curiosity
Born in Pennsylvania, Ben Zucker lived in Berkeley, New England, and London before moving to Chicago for a graduate composition program at Northwestern University. He was excited to come here to study because he’d been a longtime fan of the city’s rich, varied musical scenes, including the jazz stalwarts in the AACM and the adventurous […]
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Ganser find the freedom beyond despair on Nothing You Do Matters
Dread can be suffocating, but Ganser make it work like a spark. On their new EP, Nothing You Do Matters (Felte), the Chicago postpunk four-piece take cues from dance punk for their end-of-the-world party music—they’re trying to build something worth living for in a hellscape that constantly finds boring new ways to make everyone feel […]
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Magma turn up the positivity on their new album, Kãrtëhl
Formed by drummer Christian Vander in Paris in 1969, Magma have made a career of defying convention, and the fact that they’re still actively recording and playing live today is an astonishing gift. Their music could arguably be labeled modern classical, progressive rock, free jazz, or even psychedelia, but it’s too big for any of […]
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Chicago mainstay Douglas McCombs dazzles on his first-ever solo LP
If you’ve paid even the slightest bit of attention to Chicago music over the past, say, 35 years, you’ve surely heard Douglas McCombs. He’s held down the low end for indie-rock legends Eleventh Dream Day since the mid-80s, acted as the heart and soul of postrock pioneers Tortoise since their founding in 1990, and helmed […]
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With Natural Brown Prom Queen, experimental pop fiddler Sudan Archives looks inward
When she filmed the music video for “OMG BRITT,” a trap anthem off of her new record, Natural Brown Prom Queen, Brittney Parks was determined to smash a violin on camera. Not just any violin, either: She wanted to destroy her very first instrument, the one on which she’d taught herself to play by ear […]
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Guitarist Yonatan Gat and the Eastern Medicine Singers combine avant-garde jazz and rock with Native American music
UPDATE: As of Sunday 10/2/2022, the Medicine Singers and Yonatan Gat concert scheduled for the Empty Bottle has been canceled. Contact ticket point of purchase for refund information. The Eastern Medicine Singers are a traditional Algonquin drum and vocal group based in Rhode Island. They sing mostly in several Algonquian languages, some of which are […]