Michelle Zauner launched Japanese Breakfast as a solo project amid massive life changes. In 2014, while fronting her Philly emo band Little Big League, her mother was diagnosed with Stage IV cancer, and Zauner eventually moved back home to Oregon to be with her family. Her mother passed away just months before Zauner wrote Japanese Breakfast’s 2016 debut, Psychopomp. That loss, along with graceful reflections on the distinct challenges of adulthood, colors the moving, slightly lo-fi indie-rock record....

No longer do John Hancock Center visitors have to trek up 94 floors to the observation deck to get an eyeful. Since May, the building’s lobby has become an attraction all its own thanks to Lucent, a dazzling permanent installation by UK sculptor Wolfgang Buttress. The artist collaborated with an astrophysicist from Australian National University to create the sculpture, which purports to accurately map the 3,106 stars that can be seen with the naked eye in the northern hemisphere....

As station director at Lumpen Radio (aka WLPN), as an awesomely insane flyer artist, and as half of the Gutter Butter DJ crew, Logan Bay is one the friendliest, hardest-working, and most dedicated folks in Chicago’s weirdo music and party scenes. Early on the morning of Saturday, March 25, while unloading DJ gear in front of his Bridgeport apartment, Bay was struck and pinned to his car by another automobile, suffering catastrophic injuries to both legs....

How many Mexican moms go to the trouble of making smoked chicken stock for fideos secos? Toasted pasta simmered in chile-spiked tomato sauce, the dish is the SpaghettiOs of Latin America, a beloved childhood favorite that’s rarely more complicated than that. Dávila’s food is big and bold, and there’s always a lot going on in it—it’s always in your face. And you’ll want to put it in your face. The question is: Are you strong enough to stand up to it?...

Patrick Sisson The Seed‘s detailed drug guide. Click to expand the image and expand your mind. Every week during a stretch of the Chicago Seed‘s 1967 to 1974 print run, staffers would make the trip: a pickup or VW Minibus loaded with hand-mixed ink and negatives for the next issue—diligently pasted up and typed out twice on an IBM Selectric—would drive two hours north to Port Washington, Wisconsin, so William Schanen, a free-press advocate, could print roughly 35,000 copies overnight....

Because I’m a nerd, I’m aware of many varieties of nerd rock—and just so we’re clear, I’m using the term in its narrow sense. I don’t mean bands that merely take their names from, say, Tolkien’s Middle-earth, but rather hard-core superfans who root all their songs in that world and its stories and characters. (It helps if they’ve got costumes to match.) The Star Trek universe is another popular source of inspiration, as are the various My Little Pony franchises (maybe you’ve heard about the 2012 Ponystock festival or stumbled across a “dubtrot” track on YouTube)....

“Were you Al Pacino in the movie?” a man on the street asks John Wojtowicz, whose botched robbery of a Brooklyn bank in August 1972 was dramatized in Dog Day Afternoon. “I’m the bank robber—fuck Al Pacino!” replies Wojtowicz. Questions of identity reverberate through The Dog, a documentary by Allison Berg and Frank Keraudren that chronicles Wojtowicz’s storied and terribly sad life. If you’ve ever seen Dog Day Afternoon, you surely remember its head-turning midmovie plot twist, when the Wojtowicz character is revealed as a gay man who wants money to finance his partner’s sex-change operation....

If, like me, you’ve fallen under the spell of agave spirits, you know the tasting event Mexico in a Bottle is the party of the year. Graduating from its increasingly crowded original digs at the Chop Shop, the 2018 incarnation of the festival is moving into roomier quarters at the Logan Square Auditorium, all the better for one to easily glide among more than 100 bottles from mezcaleros both established and unsung, more than of their destilados new to Chicago....

School of Life is a good if not exact translation of L‘École Buissonnière, the original name of Nicolas Vanier’s latest family drama about embracing nature; the French title is an idiomatic expression that means playing truant or skipping school (or work) to revel outdoors. A novelist, environmentalist, and educator widely known overseas for travel books and documentaries about his expeditions to Siberia, Alaska, and the Yukon, Vanier returns to Sologne, the rural region of north-central France where he grew up....

Put Ty Money’s recent Cinco De Money 3 mixtape on shuffle and right away you’ll find out what makes the Harvey rapper one of the most exciting voices to recently emerge in the local scene. Following 2016’s solid but inconsistent second installment in his Cinco De Money series, this release is taut and focused, and leaves lots of room for Money to make each beat his plaything. Without fail I return to “Intro,” which isn’t so much a great song as a platform that allows Money to display the depth of his skills in the amount of time it takes to microwave a burrito....

Jay Farrar titled the first new Son Volt studio album in four years Notes of Blue (Thirty Tigers), and he’s explained that the record was inspired by the spirit of the blues, with certain songs employing tunings used by the likes of Skip James and Mississippi Fred McDowell. But it only takes a few seconds of the opening track, “Promise the World,” with its oozing pedal-steel washes from Jason Kardong undergirding Farrar’s plaintive moan, to hear that Son Volt haven’t changed direction....

7/19: The votes are in and have been counted, and the neighbors have gone in favor of Haymarket. See the update at the end of this post. Per the city code, a notice was sent out to all neighborhood residents living within 250 feet of the property on Buena to alert them about the permit, and a meeting was scheduled for June 14 for neighbors to ask questions and raise concerns....

Three years ago wildly imaginative producer and MC Residente (aka René Pérez) disbanded Calle 13, the shape-shifting hip-hop and reggaeton project he started with his stepbrother Eduardo José Cabra Martínez (aka Visitante) in 2004 in their native Puerto Rico. That project catapulted the duo to global fame, and it gave Residente the resources to pursue his vision for self-titled 2017 solo debut—a musical investigation of his ethnic roots inspired and fueled by the results of a DNA test....

The members of Minneapolis hip-hop collective Doomtree appear to have a soft spot for Chicagoans. In June, their label (also called Doomtree) dropped a full-length collaboration between their producer Lazerbeak and veteran Chicago rapper Longshot. In August, Doomtree put out Artería Verité, an album that brings together group member Sims (and his recent go-to producer, Icetep) and futuristic Chicago rap group Air Credits—i.e., Hood Internet producer Steve Reidell and rapper ShowYouSuck)....

There were 16 students in the 2012 graduating class at Stewart Elementary School. I was one of them. I remember graduation day vividly. We were holed up in room 107, adjacent to the auditorium. We could hear the sound of feet shuffling and our loved ones exchanging pleasantries over our own nervous conversation. We filed out of the room in two lines, one of boys in red gowns, the other of girls in white, in order from shortest to tallest....

The name “Idles” is something of a misnomer—the members of this five-piece UK punk band have worked their tails off to cement their sound since forming in Bristol in 2011. By the time they self-released their debut full-length in 2017, they’d nailed it. Brutalism is as near perfect as any punk record in years, with heartbreak, desperation, joy, and hilarity playing tug-of-war across its wiry, mutating tracks—often within a single verse....

Publican-brand pastry chef Dana Cree’s cookbook Hello, My Name Is Ice Cream is out now, and it should be priority one for cooks who’ve dreamed of making their own frozen dairy products only to be foiled by ice cream enemy number one: ice itself. Cree, whose career-long runup to this book involved attending Penn State’s Ice Cream University, opens the alluring volume with a deep dive into the science behind ice cream, explaining how ice, fat, protein, sugar, and air alchemize into the miracle we all love....

Getting around Chicago via mass transit can be frustrating for any of us, but imagine what it’s like for people who are legally blind. Visually impaired sound artist, rock musician, and recording engineer Andy Slater offered to share his experiences navigating the city on public transportation and floated some ideas to improve transportation access for folks with disabilities. “There’s a layer over my vision like snow from an old TV,” he says....

These days Jawbreaker are almost as unapproachable as they are influential. Unlike most (if not all) of the other big-name punk bands partaking of the great 21st-century reunion boom, this San Francisco trio seem to have retained some of the mystique that surrounded their original pre-Internet run. Jawbreaker’s sophisticated, gritty pop-punk has attracted a cult of fans whose worship of the band can be off-putting to outsiders—and there are a lot of outsiders....

Which shade of King Crimson can one expect to see tonight? The baroque-hippie, fast-shredding prog-rock of “21st Century Schizoid Man”? The show-offy protomath prog-rock of the band’s 1972-’74 peak? The global-fusion avant-AOR prog-rock of the group’s trio of albums in the early-to-mid 1980s? I have some bad news: You probably won’t get any of these. What you’re likely to witness is what “King Crimson” has been about since 1995’s THRAK—cheesy, technically impressive prog-rock that’s favored by Guitar Center employees and diehard fans....