Embarrassed by his stutter and tired of being overshadowed by his younger, more outgoing brother, seven-year-old Simon Davies simply opts out of speech for 18 years. During the long period that Simon doesn’t speak, his happiest moments are sitting on his bed with a radio on his lap, listening to the commercials, studying and worshiping the men whose mellifluous timbre and perfect diction advertise grocery stores and sports cars. When he does start speaking again, he has one improbable goal: to move to Chicago and become a professional voice-over artist....

When the 21st annual Warped Tour pulls into Tinley Park on Saturday, the traveling punk festival will be older than many of the fans who show up. While the fest has aged, though, its image hasn’t: unless you’ve seen the Warped Tour crowd with your own eyes, you probably picture swarms of suburban teenagers into poppy mall punk. But no institution that survives by catering to the tastes of kids stays static for long....

A recent study by the Pew Charitable Trusts found that, in 2015, about half of adult Chicagoans had never been married, up from 42 percent a decade earlier. I expect that trend to accelerate even more rapidly after this weekend, when Joachim Lafosse’s anguished Belgian drama After Love and Lake Bell’s spirited satire I Do . . . Until I Don’t arrive simultaneously on local screens. After Love focuses on the crumbling union between an upper-class woman and the husband she’s been supporting financially, a situation complicated by their little twin daughters and the husband’s unwillingness to go....

This damaged postpunk trio from Olympia, Washington, spend an awful lot of time lurching through their new double album, Yellow (Captured Tracks), a repetitive exercise in crude deconstruction clearly inspired by their key influence, Wire. But where Wire operate with deadly precision and purpose, Naomi Punk seem more baffled than baffling, and it’s anyone’s guess why they decided to express in 75 minutes what easily could’ve been dispatched in 20. The trio’s unmoored explorations of minimal postpunk tunefulness include some wonderful moments, and their songs work especially well when tantalizing melodies recede or collapse just when a payoff seems on the horizon—but after 30 minutes, not to mention 45, that method begins to feel like a gimmick....

The other night, as I was coming off my first weekend at the Rhinoceros Theater Festival—a six-week fringe performance extravaganza, produced annually for the last 25 years by Curious Theatre Branch—a friend asked me, “What does ‘fringe’ mean?” Good question. I flailed around for a while, trying to pull a response out of the seven shows I’d just seen, but eventually realized that I was giving examples rather than an answer....

I’ve lately fallen into a K-pop K-hole, listening to Spotify’s K-Pop Daebak playlist. The Korean word daebak can mean different things in different contexts: “surprise!,” “big success!,” or “awesome!” It’s also the name of a new Korean barbecue restaurant on the second floor of the once desolate eastern corner of the Chinatown Square mall. Daebak is owned by a woman named Namhee Kim, who a few years ago, drawn by an untapped market of K-pop-loving Chinese teenagers, opened the K-Pop of Chinatown store on nearby Wentworth....

This arty sci-fi thriller, adapted from a 2000 novel by Michael Faber, raises far more questions than it answers, yet that enigmatic quality is central to its appeal. Like Birth (2004)—the previous feature of director Jonathan Glazer, with Nicole Kidman as a woman convinced that her dead lover has been reincarnated as a preteen boy—Under the Skin hints at several different readings without confirming any of them. That makes for an occasionally frustrating viewing experience, yet it also ensures that the film stays with you....

Peter Gannushkin / downtownmusic.net Pandelis Karayorgis at the Hungry Brain Chicagoans usually have many nightly options when it comes to quality jazz, but this is an especially fertile weekend. In this week’s Soundboard I wrote previews for shows by violinist Regina Carter, guitarist Kurt Rosenwinkel, and pianist Brad Mehldau, but there are three more strong bands—both local and touring—playing around town over the next couple of nights. Tonight at Constellation the fantastic Boston pianist and composer Pandelis Karayorgis will perform with the Chicago-centric quintet responsible for last year’s Circuitous (Driff), one of my favorite albums of 2013....

Daniel Bachman continues to see past the limitations of acoustic guitar music. He’s only 26, but he’s already waxed nearly a dozen albums (not counting side projects released under different names), revealing a quiet virtuosity that’s always subservient to mood and tone. His strongest work yet, November’s eponymous album for Three Lobed, artlessly braids together some of the related strains on which his playing has recently focused. Like so many fingerstyle players, he’s fully conversant in the American Primitive approach pioneered by John Fahey, whether it’s an ambling blues or a meditative ragalike vibe....

Mike Sula Klin maeng da I never pass up a chance to make insect sauce, so I was thrilled when Friend of the Food Chain Leela Punyaratabandhu offered to send me some water-bug essence she brought back from Thailand. Maeng da na essence, or cà cuống essence as it’s known in Vietnam, is a pheromone collected from the male Lethocerus indicus, a fearsome-looking denizen of rice paddies that makes our common cockroach look positively Lilliputian....

For the Tomorrow Never Knows festival in 2017, the Audioleaf talent-buying team for Lincoln Hall and Schubas booked Monobody to open for Tortoise. The move was a tacit endorsement of the position of the younger band as the new torchbearer for Chicago’s decades-long postrock tradition. Monobody’s nervy, whiplash-inducing take on the form bends toward metal, bleeds into prog rock, and gets its power from punk. Which is only fitting, since the members of the band’s monster rhythm section cut their teeth playing in some of city’s dirtiest DIY punk holes-in-the-wall; bassist Steve Marek and drummer Nnamdi Ogbonnaya previously played in erratic math-punk group the Para-medics, and the band’s other bassist, Al Costis, still gigs with adrenalized punk experimentalists Pyramid Schemes....

“Victory of the people” is the rallying cry of Cole Theatre, a new company from Chicago-based actors Boyd Harris and Layne Manzer. So it’s a bit ironic that the group’s inaugural production is Mike Leigh’s Ecstasy, whose downtrodden working-class characters would seem anything but victorious. Tormented yet enjoyable characters are a trademark for Leigh, who carves with precision heroin addicts, smoking asthmatics, and slowly drowning alcoholics. Kidwell’s Jean drags gin around her sad-looking bedsit like it’s a security blanket....

Regular readers of Beer and Metal already know how I feel about doppelbocks and Belgian quads in the wintertime. Of course, when it’s cold enough for your eyelashes to freeze together, a Russian imperial stout hits the spot too—and late last month, Surly obliged Chicagoans by shipping bottles of Darkness here for the first time. A lot has changed since then—I’ve tried many more imperial stouts, for one thing, and these days I can put away maybe 12 ounces of Dark Lord before it’s nap time....

Little Village’s Feria del Mole, now in its tenth year of celebrating the traditional Mexican sauce in all its varieties, originally started as part of Universidad Popular’s Women’s Empowerment Program. About 20 women, mostly Mexican immigrants, had a weekly support group focused on developing their self-esteem, and the only thing they all thought they were good at was cooking. Each was particularly proud of her mole. Inspired by a mole festival in a town near Mexico City, some Universidad Popular staffers helped the women organize the first Feria del Mole to showcase their culinary skills....

Starting today I’ll be counting down my 40 favorite albums of 2013. The usual caveat applies: I truly love all this music, but take the rankings with a grain of salt. And please bear in mind that I’m not trying to be definitive. Necks, Open (Northern Spy)This majestic Australian trio returns with a single 68-minute improvisation fueled by inventive, resourceful elaboration on the most basic elements of musical language, initiated here by pianist Chris Abrahams mucking about inside his instrument....

Belgian quartet Oathbreaker have dribbled all over the metallic map in their three full-length albums, the most recent of which, Rheia, came out last fall on Deathwish. There’s something for everyone in their rapid-shifting mixture of shoegaze dreaminess, black-metal vitriol, and postpunk abstraction—which means that there’s sure to be something for everyone to dislike. But like Chicago weather, give it a few minutes and it’ll pass. This is a very versatile crew, and they have an uncanny ability to make albums hang together as a whole despite the eclectic nature of their tones and textures....

Q I’m a bit out of your usual demographic, age-wise (I’m 70), but I am still an avid reader. (This is true, not a Penthouse letter.) My cousin and I have flirted and joked about getting it on together for about 50 years or more. Now she’s divorced and having the time of her life. The other day, she told me what she’d really like is to have a “lesbian experience” with me watching and then joining....

Allison Tolman and Bob Odenkirk on the not-really-an-adaptation Fargo It’s not impossible to turn a movie into a good TV show. But for every MAS*H, there are a dozen Baby Talks. (C’mon, you remember Baby Talk, the ill-fated sitcom based on Look Who’s Talking. Great idea, world.) Movies are stories and stories have arcs—beginnings, middles, and ends. Expanding on one can feel unnecessary, plus it smacks of greed and laziness, like a bunch of fat, mustache-twirling execs are smoking cigars in a boardroom somewhere, plotting ways to profit off something’s existing popularity....

Barrier For the past couple of months, Polish cinema has been all over Chicago. The Gene Siskel Film Center is about to wrap up “Martin Scorsese Presents: Masterpieces of Polish Cinema,” a program featuring some of the country’s best films—over a dozen of them in total. Meanwhile, at the Music Box, Paweł Pawlikowski’s J.R. Jones-approved Ida has enjoyed a prolonged residency. All national cinemas have distinct attributes and Poland is no exception: Scorsese himself puts it quite succinctly in his introduction to “Masterpieces of Polish Cinema” when he writes, “This is a cinema of personal vision, social commitment, and poetic responsibility ....

Q I am a genetic male with recurrent questions about my gender identity. Straddling desires to maintain my stature in the professional world, keep my wife at my side, and become who I feel like I am, I have experimented with cross-dressing, chastity, antiandrogens, and, prior to all that, steroids. While the matrimonial veto has been enacted for some feminine expressions, my wife and I have reached a middle ground where I can pursue sexual and aesthetic androgyny....