It may come as a surprise to find out that all of the members of Auckland four-piece the Beths are university-trained jazz musicians; their catchy, direct indie pop seems as far from jazz as Western music could get. But listening to vocalist and guitarist Elizabeth Stokes discuss the influence of jazz standards in a recent interview with Substream Magazine makes the line between their education and their recorded output more clear....

There’s an old adage: The Kurds have no friends but the mountains. Rojava is a complete inversion of the nearby Islamic State in deed and law. In Rojava, women fight alongside men and are equal in both status and power, radical democracy plays out in the streets, and environmental protection is enshrined in law. The Connecticut-size patch of land far north of Aleppo has flourished as a secular oasis amid the chaos of the Syrian conflict that has left an estimated 500,000 people dead....

In the 90s, Bogotá bassist and producer Simón Mejia was strongly influenced by Sidestepper, a British and Colombian collective that combined electronic music with salsa and cumbia rhythms. He’s been following a similar blueprint with his band Bomba Estéreo since 2005, and the formula hasn’t gotten old yet. That’s in no small part thanks to Mejia’s incendiary collaborator Li Saumet, who sings and raps with tireless, infectious grit. The band’s most recent release, Live in Dublin (Polen), captures the butt-swiveling, arm-waving rush of their performances, with loose-limbed drumming from Andrés Zea and stinging wah-wah guitar from Jose Castillo vying for attention with Mejia’s joyfully cheesy synth lines....

This is the story of a Chicago theater Christmas miracle. It’s also the story of how the Agency Theater Collective got the cab for its production of Hellcab, Will Kern’s play about a cabbie on Christmas Eve. “It was perfect,” Austin says. Well, almost. It wasn’t drivable. It smelled like something—perhaps many somethings—had died in it. And the asking price was $2,000—way over budget for the tiny Agency. Touhy is still miffed about that....

Ladrones, a Mexican heist comedy that opened in multiplexes this past weekend, is being advertised all over town, though for audiences unfamiliar with Mexican cinema and TV the film is shrouded in mystery. The distributor (Pantelion Films, a partnership between Lionsgate Entertainment and Grupo Televisa) didn’t alert any English-language press outlets about a preview screening in Chicago, leading one to assume that they previewed it here only for the Spanish-language press....

Kent Burnside, My World Is So Cold (Lucky 13) Kent Burnside’s grandfather, the late R.L. Burnside, spent most of his life playing raw, single-­chord “trance blues” in jukes around his hometown of Holly Springs, Mississippi. Like any self-respecting son (or grandson) of the blues, Burnside remains true to his lineage while blazing his own trail: on his debut album, My World Is So Cold, he duplicates R.L.’s distinctive style with almost eerie accuracy, reinforcing it with tough, bass-heavy bombast borrowed from modern rock and R&B....

Eyehategod The first Eyehategod LP in 14 years is due out in late May, and the band has just released a preview track from it, and holy crap, it’s fucking awesome. The new song, “Robitussin and Rejection,” is today’s 12 O’Clock Track, and it may as well be a cut off of Take as Needed for Pain. This is classic Eyehategod, front to back: the Sabbath-on-codeine riffs, the nihilistic and hateful lyrics of Mike IX Williams, the massive wall of guitars....

The sharpest political mind in southeastern Michigan belongs to a 15-year-old girl named Sadia. She’s not old enough to vote, nor is she a citizen—and neither are her parents. Plus she’s superbusy. She’s got school, and then because, birth order-wise, she sits somewhere in the middle of a gaggle of kids, some of whom have kids of their own, she spends a great deal of time caring for infant nieces and nephews, as she would if she hadn’t left Bangladesh for the Banglatown neighborhood of Detroit at the age of eight....

Most people don’t necessarily think “Chicago” as soon as you mention “Gothenburg, Sweden.” Alexi Front does, though. Gothenburg and Chicago, he explains, are both second cities. “They’re both cities that were built on the transport industry,” he says. “They’re both historically beer-drinking cities. And the people who are from second cities have a special mentality.” As Front sees it, that mentality involves (among other things) metal music. Front started out scheduling the fest for between Christmas and New Year’s, when nothing much was happening in Gothenburg....

AMC Lee Pace and Scoot McNairy on Halt and Catch Fire Halt and Catch Fire, AMC’s latest attempt to own your Sunday night, is already drawing comparisons to Mad Men. Aside from being produced by the same cable network, they’re both period dramas (set in the 1980s and 1960s, respectively) that recall better days for the American economy. They both have mysterious, magnetic leading men who are flanked by sidekicks and subordinates struggling with their own ambitions....

Local label Not Normal Tapes has been on the Reader‘s radar for a few years, and it’s been releasing eardrum-­obliterating hardcore punk—on LP, 45 and cassette—since 2008. We’re especially fond of their recent seven-inch reissue of the cassette demo from brutalist Chicago hardcore “war perverts” Gas Rag, whose blink-and-your-nose-is-broken mosh-pit slayers have this wolf totally seein’ red! Anyway, to celebrate its fifth anniversary, the label is pumping out 12 new cassingles, including stompers from Bloomington’s CHUD, NYC hardcore killers Deformity, and Milwaukee’s Failed Mutilation....

Comedian Nick Vatterott doesn’t think outside the box so much as set the box ablaze with a blowtorch. The Chicagoan-turned-New Yorker, who returns to town for a Comedy Central record taping, has never been known for conventional stand-up—his sets are better understood as a series of microperformances than as flowing, cohesive pieces. Trained in sketch and improv, Vatterott celebrates the what-the-hell-?! glitches in his brain, weaving them into his comedy in a way that elicits confused laughs until he circles back to make sense of his nonsense....

The uneasy ties between black metal and white supremacy are long-standing, tangled, and rarely addressed publicly; even less often are musicians forced to reckon with their own racist histories. But in 2015, rumors of Inquisition’s Nazi affiliations reached such a pitch that front man Dagon had to field questions about them in an interview with Decibel. Dagon said he wasn’t a Nazi, waved away questions about Inquisition’s relationships with infamously racist metal labels such as No Colours, and hedged about his own Hitler-­sampling noise project, 88MM—the name of which is itself an allusion to World War II-era German artillery (and possibly to the neo-Nazi code “88,” another invocation of the leader of the Third Reich)....

O lder adults in their 70s and 80s gather in the lobby of New Pisgah Haven Homes every Thursday morning. The low-income senior building in Auburn Gresham provides a necessary service, run by residents for residents: a communal trip to the grocery store. For many older adults who live alone on the south side, being part of a community, remaining active, and having people to rely on are not just important—they’re necessary to their everyday needs and their overall health and well-being....

Jaimie Branch may have moved away from Chicago in 2012, but she’s never severed her roots here. They go so deep on the trumpeter’s first album, Fly or Die, that they could wrap a few times around the Deep Tunnel: not only is it being released by local imprint International Anthem, but everyone who plays on the record is a present or former Chicagoan. The music has a narrative flow that encompasses a series of ongoing exchanges....

When N.W.A dropped their incendiary debut album, Straight Outta Compton, in 1988, the FBI fueled its notoriety with a letter condemning songs such as “Fuck tha Police” for inciting violence. The album, with lyrics reflecting the brutal conditions facing black Americans under the boot of Ronald Reagan’s war on drugs, eventually sold more than two million copies. N.W.A found their message of protest lost on most white listeners, and today the relationship between hip-hop, corporate record labels, and white America continues to obscure the music’s subversive function....

Can I interest you in deliciousness?” Kyle Kelly calls to the infrequent passersby on the sidewalk next to his food truck, the Cajun Connoisseur. It’s a cold morning in January, and most people appear uninterested in lingering outside any longer than necessary. Kelly is parked near Polk and Paulina in UIC’s Medical District, in what the city has recently designated one of Chicago’s 37 food truck stands—though it’s not immediately apparent: there are no signs to identify the 40-foot zone, and his is the only truck parked along the stretch....

For a city that’s in such close proximity to the dairy-filled state of Wisconsin, Chicago doesn’t have nearly enough cheese-centric destinations. Our neighbors to the north aren’t afraid to pile cheddar on anything on the menu, cocktails included, and you can hardly spit without hitting some sort of emporium off the side of the highway that’s filled with curds, dips, loafs, melts, and things you never imagined could be made out of cheese....

You don’t really have a problem if it morphs into a funny story, right? Sean Flannery has long been the local comic embodiment of Alcoholics Anonymous, spewing forth enough anecdotes about his booze-soaked pratfalls to deter even the most red-nosed drinker from ordering another. He’s the creator and host of The Blackout Diaries, a Saturday-night showcase of stand-up and storytelling in which he enlists both fellow comics and everyman guests to reminisce about, say, drunkenly tackling a 30-feet-tall Christmas tree in an apartment-building lobby....

Never ask a Bulgarian, “How are you?” He’ll wince at the question, his mouth will turn down at the corners, and he’ll begin to catalogue his ailments, his misfortunes, and the infuriating things his neighbor’s done. A finalist for both the Strega Europeo and Gregor von Rezzori awards, in addition to being a critical and commercial success in its native country, The Physics of Sorrow sees Gospodinov taking a deconstructed approach to narrative and underscoring the absurdity of life in general by jumping across time and space to craft a story of brief, evocative episodes that mostly take place in “the saddest place on earth,” as the Economist called Bulgaria in 2010....