Chicago posthardcore four-piece Tar broke up in 1995, and the number of times they’ve reunited for a show since then you can count on one hand—this gig will be the first time they’ve buffeted a live audience with their mischievous stomp since 2017. They haven’t exactly been silent the past five years, though: for one […]
Category: Music Review
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Kali Malone’s disciplined compositions tune into the church organ’s expressive potential
Stockholm-based, American-born composer Kali Malone is known for her pipe-organ works, and her path to the instrument was hardly conventional. Five minutes into her first and only organ lesson, she prevailed upon the teacher to let her get inside the instrument. She left with a referral to an organ tuner, with whom she eventually apprenticed. […]
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Mayorkun has grown swiftly into one of Nigeria’s most reliable pop stars
In early 2016, Nigerian songwriter Mayorkun posted a video of himself covering “The Money,” a 2015 single by Nigerian American pop star Davido. At the time, Mayorkun was dissatisfied with his banking job, and when he submitted his resignation letter, he fortuitously received a DM the same day from Davido, who had seen the clip […]
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Tink finds her sweet spot again with Pillow Talk
Singer, rapper, and songwriter Tink broke out of Chicago’s hip-hop scene about a decade ago, becoming one of the constellation of new stars lighting up the city. Like many local artists who emerged around the time of drill’s first wave in 2012, she signed to a big label—in 2014 she closed a deal with Mosley […]
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Stranded Civilians have made one of the best Chicago hip-hop releases of 2022
Chicago rappers Tony Santana and Aubry know that all the talent in the world can’t make a hip-hop duo work if the MCs don’t click. As Stranded Civilians, Aubry and Tony rap off each other like they just hang out and vibe 24-7—and their second mixtape, February’s self-released Obsidian, will make you wish you could […]
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Nicole Mitchell and Fabio Paolizzo’s Medusae brokers a truce between man and machine
Flutist Nicole Mitchell and composer Fabio Paolizzo first performed together live in 2018, in a concert at the University of California, Irvine. More accurately, Mitchell played a duo set with VIVO (Video Interaction VST Orchestra), a machine-learning program engineered by Paolizzo, which recorded her flute and voice improvisations and generated real-time accompaniment through loops and […]
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The Hyde Park Jazz Festival connects the south side to the wider world of jazz
Hard times will bring out anyone’s true colors, and the Hyde Park Jazz Festival certainly showed what it was made of when COVID-19 brought live music to a halt in 2020. Its organizers emulated the music that the festival supports, improvising ways to support local jazz. First, they arranged the Jazz Postcards series, small-scale outdoor […]
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Pioneering electronic producer Man Parrish reworks the music of his departed friend Klaus Nomi
You might expect an album of Klaus Nomi material to sound like Klaus Nomi, but Man Parrish’s Dear Klaus Nomi isn’t that. Instead, the New York producer has added highly technical musical accompaniments to archival recordings of the cult figure’s songs to give them fresh sounds and feelings. The result is a love letter from […]
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Reunited dance group Ten City help make the Chicago House Music Festival a don’t-miss event
Ten City’s fifth album, 2021’s Judgement (Ultra), was a long time in the making—and not just because the crucial Chicago house group’s previous album, That Was Then, This Is Now, came out 27 years earlier. The origins of Judgement arguably go even further back than 1986, when Ten City producer Marshall Jefferson issued the foundational […]
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Alkaline Trio play an intimate Metro gig before their Riot Fest set
The past decade has been an odd one for Alkaline Trio. Following the release of the Chicago punk band’s eighth studio album, 2013’s My Shame Is True, all three members took time off to focus on solo material and side projects. But when vocalist and guitarist Matt Skiba joined Blink-182 in 2015, the band he’d […]
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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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Santigold is still headed toward a new world on Spirituals
When Santigold emerged in the late 2000s, her hip alterna-pop seemed to waltz out of left field, incorporating elements of every genre she could put her hands on: punk, hip-hop, new wave, dub, and whatever else wasn’t nailed down. More than a decade later, it’s clear to see how her genre-smashing music paved the way […]
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Chicago-based sound artist Dorothy Carlos refreshes drone textures on Circuit Spectre
Cellist and sound artist Dorothy Carlos moved to Chicago last year to begin an MFA in sound at the School of the Art Institute, but she’s got a foot planted on the east coast. She studied cello performance and anthropology at New York University, and she recorded all of the new Circuit Spectre (American Dreams) […]
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Yola has persevered through peaks and valleys to stand for herself
If you’ve ever fought to pursue your dreams despite pressure from family or society, Yola’s inspiring story will resonate with you. Raised by a single mother in Bristol, UK, the guitarist and singer-songwriter fell in love with music at a young age, but her mother discouraged her from pursuing it as a career because it […]
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Praise expertly honor the D.C. melodic hardcore of the 80s
Baltimore band Praise have been working within a classic melodic hardcore sound since their 2010 debut seven-inch, and they dig even deeper into that terrain on their newest album, All in a Dream—their first for legendary hardcore label Revelation. While they started out in a more traditional mosh-heavy vein, Praise started diving hard into the […]