Tag: Vol. 33 No. 42

Like Saddle Creek stablemate and fellow Robert Smith emulator Conor Oberst, the Good Life front man Tim Kasher is a literary songwriter. But where Oberst unspools endless tangles of poetic verbiage, Kasher is an economical writer of short fiction, curt and blunt. He’s also just as fatalistic and self-consciously seedy as you’d expect of a […]

The designers of the new Pritzker Pavilion’s sound system claim that the speakers on Frank Gehry’s spidery trellis will create a “room” above the audience that will approximate the sound of a traditional concert hall. This weekend we’ll find out if they do. To inaugurate its new space, the Grant Park Orchestra has commissioned a […]

During much of the 90s it was common–and not entirely unfair–to knock John Wesley Harding as a B-grade Elvis Costello. Their voices sounded uncannily alike, they had a similar taste for wordplay-laden folk pop, and, perhaps most damning of all, they shared band members–a pair of Attractions made up the backing band on Harding’s first […]

It’s amazing how a healthy dose of irony can alter our perspective. The film that was greeted as a quasi-pornographic turd upon its release is now held up as quintessential gay camp, a worthy successor to the Roger Vadim-Russ Meyer school of cult filmmaking. Showgirls, Paul Verhoeven’s 1995 “expose” of the Las Vegas skin trade, […]

Pelt follows musical mavericks like Harry Partch and Henry Flynt in combining Eastern influences and North American folk sounds to make visceral, challenging art music. They didn’t start out in that direction: the band’s earliest singles were middling indie rock derivative of Sonic Youth. But by the time they recorded their first album, Brown Cyclopaedia […]