Dakhabrakha As much as I hate to admit it, summer is coming to a close. Fortunately the seasonal concert schedule isn’t letting up, and that means there are a lot of minifestivals popping up throughout the weekend. You can take your pick of Chitcago Fest, Bash on Wabash, ElSounds Fest, and The Boulevard. Beyond those blowouts there are plenty of other shows to see this weekend. “Born in the Bronx, 25-year-old singer and producer Prince Royce is among the artists building bigger audiences around the country for an updated take on bachata—a Dominican form of popular song whose heart-on-sleeve ballads combine delicate guitars and heavy emotions,” writes Maura Johnston....

Seattle singer-songwriter Alexandra Niedzialkowski, who records and performs as Cumulus, understands the mystique of the style of indie rock that emerged from the Pacific Northwest a generation ago and was perfected by the likes of Death Cab for Cutie—the kind of sweetly sentimental rock songs whose easygoing, weightless melodies belie the mountains of emotion hidden within the notes. And Niedzialkowski weathered her share of hurt in the period leading up to Cumulus’s forthcoming second album, Comfort World (Trans), which gets its name from a billboard for a shuttered mattress store she spotted a couple hours out of Seattle....

The Music Box Theatre and the Chicago Film Society present the 1930 film City Girl this Saturday at 11:30 AM as part of their monthly silent film series. The film’s director, F.W. Murnau, died the year after its release in an automobile accident, cutting short his life and remarkable career. He left behind a substantial body of work, though. The five filmmakers below also died much too young but had only made a handful of movies each, and in one case just a single film....

Michael Gebert Paul Fehribach with 1840s-style snowballs at a 2012 bourbon dinner So right as yesterday’s segment of my interview with chef Paul Fehribach of Big Jones about his upcoming southern food cookbooks was being editorized for enpublishment, Twitter went kerflooey over a spectacularly nasty review of an Appalachian-themed restaurant in uberhip Bushwick, Brooklyn: —But right there, you said fry in lard. And people don’t fry in lard, they use corn oil or something....

Kate and Geoff Mercer (Charlotte Rampling and Tom Courtenay) have spent most of their lives together; having weathered their share of adversity, including Geoff’s heart attack a few years back, these retired spouses aren’t easily fazed. But at the start of Andrew Haigh’s stellar drama 45 Years, they learn that the body of Geoff’s former girlfriend, Katya, has been found on the Swiss mountainside where she perished in a 1962 hiking accident....

If you prefer to listen to electronic producers who keep their personalities concealed you might take a liking to T.B. Arthur, who’s kept fairly busy the past year while going to great lengths to keep his identity hidden. Since beloved Berlin electronic-music shop and distributor Hard Wax first started selling EPs by the unknown techno producer last fall, Arthur’s secretiveness—and what little information he’s let come to light, such as the 312 area code on those Hard Wax 12-inches—has sometimes been the subject of more interest than his music....

Anyone who cares about the evolution of cinema should rush to see Bertrand Bonello’s Nocturama, which is screening all week at Facets. The film marks a breakthrough for Bonello, a highly original writer-director who’s long displayed a mastery of mood but whose movies (among them On War, House of Pleasures, and Saint Laurent) can be a little too obscure for their own good. In Nocturama, all his eccentricities—even his tendency for obfuscation—are organized around a palpable concept, which is nothing less than the precarious state of Western civilization....

Missiles erupt from American warships to strike Damascus, and Brian Williams of MSNBC calls the sight “beautiful.” He’s denounced, of course. The chemical attack on Syrian civilians, many of them children, by Bashar al-Assad outraged Americans of every political inclination; but the president’s eye-for-an-eye response—or what he’d clearly like to have Americans applaud as an eye-for-an-eye response—disgusts many of us as a tone-deaf glorification of violence. Maybe if he’d said ghastly beauty or the like, we’d have cut him a little slack....

In the liner notes for her dazzling new recording of Bach’s Goldberg Variations (Hyperion), Canadian pianist Angela Hewitt details each of the 28 pieces with casual erudition, dispatching technical observations with an easy familiarity that bleeds into something more personal. She writes of how with every onset of the 22nd Variation she gets “a feeling of rebirth,” also explaining how much energy and focus variation 26 requires right after “emptying everything from inside yourself in Variation 25....

QMy boyfriend of two years can’t climax or maintain an erection unless his testicles are handled, squeezed, pulled, or pressed on (preferably with my stockinged foot or knee). Needless to say, intercourse does not work very well, and our sexual repertoire is rather limited, which is frustrating for both of us. His doctor says his ED is not physiological. I’ve read your advice on “death grip” masturbation and suspect it’s a variation of that....

Some musicians are intrigued by the charms of eclecticism, but when it comes to the sound of his music, Atlanta R&B singer 6lack (pronounced “black”) never wavers from his focus. If you’ve heard his 2016 hit Prblms, you know what to expect from this year’s East Atlanta Love Letter (LVRN Records): slow-to-midtempo grooves, minimal fuzzed-out beats with ambient synth chill, and laid-back vocals that shift between Auto-Tune whining and quasi hip-hop talk- singing....

The Thons have been kicking around Chicago for a couple years, whipping up a rollicking brew of gnarly postpunk and adroit garage rock. They’ve released a few albums, but so far they’ve all been digital only: 2013’s Raw Real Rock and 2014’s Thirty Foot Snake are name-your-price downloads on Bandcamp, and this year’s Hot Fun is a measly $6. Now the Thons are finally giving all three full-lengths a physical form—specifically, cassettes!...

Frog plays don’t come along every week. Puerto Rico’s dearest native amphibian, the coqui, finally gets a taste of the theatrical acknowledgment it so richly deserves in this 90-minute celebration of the island nation’s heritage. Carlito (Manny Colon) is no ordinary coqui, though. Oh, no. Catch him doing fun things like eating cereal, dancing the cha-cha, and discussing rain-forest conservation at a level of abstraction inaccessible to children. His friends? They’re the kookiest bunch of flatly anthropomorphized tree dwellers in El Yunque....

Gnarfest has been running as a counter-Lollapalooza blowout for four years now, during which time it was mostly underground. In previous years the punk festival went down at various DIY spots in town, but this year it’s going above ground (for the most part) and in a big way: Gnarfest’s final event will take place tomorrow evening at the Illinois Centennial Monument in Logan Square. Local instrumental doom outfit Bongripper headline the outdoor portion of Gnarfest....

Must visit: Violet Hour Wicker Park’s hidden Violet Hour is a dark, sumptuously appointed retreat from the harsh world outside, attended by nattily dressed barkeeps who exhibit a balletic facility with jigger, shaker, and glass.—Mike Sula Photo Credit Must visit: Tac’s Lounge 5114 S. Prairie Ave., 773-536-2500 “Who you looking for?” I was asked upon stepping into this dimly lit Washington Park establishment, the first sign that it doesn’t attract too many outsiders....

Cabaret Prop’d Accompanied by a different band each week, a rotating cast of storytellers, tap dancers, burlesque feather dancers, comedians, and poets test out material and perform laid-back short-form sets in this late-night variety show. At the performance I attended, the Rocombu Jazz band, led by “growl” trumpeter Yves François, filled most of the two acts with a concert of groovy rumba songs and New Orleans-style brass numbers. Generous time slots and the emcee’s discursive crowd work make for a long haul, but there are some glimmers of traditional cabaret fun....

Last year Will Kraus, who records full-bodied, blistering shoegaze songs under his last name, talked to Pitchfork about his ambiguous lyrics. “It’s about half just kind of saying stuff into the microphone and half words,” he said. “I don’t feel like good enough of a writer right now to really have too many lyrics be front and center.” Though he hasn’t improved much on that front with his second album, March’s Path (Terrible), his glum, echoing vocals and crestfallen lyrics come through much more clearly on that record than on his charming 2016 debut, End Tomorrow....

Many of my favorite movies that received their Chicago theatrical premieres in 2018 expanded my sense of cinema history. Whether they were rediscoveries from past eras (such as the first and seventh films on my list) or new films by old masters (such as the films to hold the fourth- and tenth-place rankings), these works reminded me of how expansive the art form has always been in terms of visual beauty and social insight....

Since its release last spring, Daft Punk’s megahit “Get Lucky” has been everywhere—on the dance floor, on the radio in the grocery store, on the Grammys (it was named Record of the Year), even on its own line of Durex condoms. This spring Steppenwolf’s Russian Transport used it to deliver dread. In Erika Sheffer’s darkly humorous drama, a recent emigre from Russia (Tim Hopper, all the more scary for being cast against type) joins his sister (Mariann Mayberry, likewise) and her family in their Brooklyn home....

Nearly a year ago, Chicago producer and engineer Ivan “Ikon” Pryor nearly died in a fire that destroyed suite 42 at Fort Knox, an Irving Park building that housed several rehearsal spaces and recording studios—including the facilities of hip-hop collective and indie label Private Stock. Ikon had been resting his eyes in suite 42, and left the room just before the blaze. As my March Reader feature detailed, the Private Stock family have rebounded, and they’ve focused on getting out a mess of music this year....