As much as I love emo in many of its forms, I sometimes get dispirited after listening to one too many recent albums by bands that just want to be American Football. But there are plenty of groups that see fit to crib only a few notes from the genre’s second-wave acts instead of studying them like they’re a manual, and the resulting sounds are generally fascinating. A number of these off-the-map releases ended up being among my favorite emo albums of last year, including Dreamliner—it’s a noisy and crusty LP from locals Brighter Arrows, whose drummer John Olds also released a couple killer outre emo songs last year as part of a three-piece called Mans....

Chapter & Verse, which finishes a run in Chicago tomorrow night, follows a former gang leader (Daniel Beaty) who, after serving eight years in prison, reenters society and struggles to adapt to his changed Harlem neighborhood. Beaty cowrote the film with director, educator, and activist Jamal Joseph, who loosely based the narrative on his own experience. Leah Pickett: According to the Sentencing Project, one in three black men in the United States will end up in prison....

People tend to talk about long-lived rock bands as though it’s surprising or admirable that a group of folks can stick together for so many years. But I think belonging to a band can be the thing that helps you soldier on through the challenges and hurdles of life. The husband-and-wife team of guitarist Tara Key and bassist Tim Harris have been the core of New York band Antietam since they founded it in 1984 (they’d previously played in Louisville’s Babylon Dance Band)....

I miss the old Kanye, who wasn’t pro-choice in regard to slavery. I wish I could still binge The Cosby Show without contemplating real-life violations of consent. But in this era of MAGA meatheads and #MeToo reckonings, as famous and powerful men trash their own legacies left and right, the only celebrity I have sympathy for is Clem Burke. Rock’s best journeyman drummer became a Hall of Famer in 2006 for his decades in Blondie, with an awesome asterisk for his cup of coffee with the Ramones and a skinny tie full of midwest power-pop merit badges for his service with the Romantics....

“I owe my life to the comrades in this room—and to Nelson.” Monje spoke a few feet from a small spread of memorabilia from Peery’s life, including a side-by-side World War II veteran’s baseball hat and a Soviet Army officer’s cap adorned with a hammer and sickle. Attendees at the memorial service remembered seeing Peery wherever the action was. A nephew, Joe Peery, once came to visit Nelson in Los Angeles, where he and his late wife, Sue-Ying, lived and organized at the time of the 1965 Watts riots....

In general, people go to steak houses for two reasons: for work, or to celebrate something. Technically, I was at the Barn in Evanston for the first reason, but everybody else was there for the second. The enormous wire chandelier covered with little white bulbs like a Christmas tree made the message clear: we were all here to enjoy one another’s company, and many of us were also going to eat enormous slabs of meat....

AP Photo/RIA-Novosti, Alexei Nikolsky, Presidential Press Service Putin may be “on the wrong side of history,” as President Obama states, but the fervor he’s incited might be on the other side. When President Obama said Vladimir Putin’s invasion of the Crimea put him “on the wrong side of history,” it made me wonder what those two sides consist of. I suppose there’s the dark side, on which the sun is setting, in which history is made by force of arms....

The cover of “Trip II the Moon (Pt. 2)” For me the highlight of the Pitchfork Music Festival was DJ Spinn’s set on Sunday, in which roughly 30 people were onstage rapping, dancing, embracing, and generally doing everything they could to get the crowd moving. The music was at once futuristic and deeply aware of electronic music’s past, particularly some of the hallmarks of early-to-mid-90s rave music. At certain points the breakbeat-heavy music sounded no different than some jungle and ‘ardkore that I’ve heard, mostly thanks to Simon Reynolds’s mind-melting Generation Ecstasy....

Sure, laugh at the Mormons and their crazy creation myths all you want—but are they really any nuttier than stories of, say, a virgin getting pregnant and delivering a deity? The Book of Mormon, the 2011 Tony-winning musical now making a brief pitstop at the Oriental Theatre, has always worn its affection for the mysterious workings of faith on its short white shirtsleeves. Creators Trey Parker, Robert Lopez, and Matt Stone also clearly love and understand the conventions of musical theater....

A federal investigation of the Chicago Police Department “in my view would be misguided,” Mayor Emanuel asserted Tuesday in an interview with Politico Illinois. Politicians prefer making clarifications to acknowledging complete flip-flops. George H.W. Bush won the 1988 presidency in part because of his famous pledge, “Read my lips: no new taxes.” Less than two years after he was elected, he clarified that no new taxes meant “except for tax revenue increases....

Mayor Rahm Emanuel and Cook County board president Toni Preckwinkle, the two most powerful politicians in Chicago-area government, rarely appear together in public. In fact, they almost never even mention each other. Neither will admit to a rivalry, but during the primary election season two years ago they endorsed opposing candidates in local and statewide races, and Preckwinkle is widely viewed as one of Emanuel’s potential challengers in the 2015 mayoral election....

We don’t usually think of social workers as having a great deal of power—”overworked” and “underpaid” are often the first words that spring to mind. But in the system known as child protective services, the opinions and observations of these harried civil servants carry more weight than anyone’s in determining whether parents should be separated from their children. The possibilities for mistakes, blind spots, and biases are numerous, the consequences far-reaching and potentially devastating....

Singer-guitarist Jake Xerxes Fussell grew up in Durham, North Carolina, surrounded by American folklore, raised by a father, Fred Fussell, who often took him on expeditions to document the rural blues and old-time music of the south and hang with fellow sonic archivists like George Mitchell and Art Rosenbaum. The experience made an indelible impression on Jake, who as a kid began studying and playing the music his father exposed him to....

Pianist and composer Jason Moran had been experimenting with his project called Fats Waller Dance Party for a couple of years before entering the studio to cut his fine new album All Rise: A Joyful Elegy for Fats Waller (Blue Note), performing it all over the globe (including twice in Chicago) with a relatively steady cast of collaborators. The subject of his homage—the idiosyncratic composer, singer, and pianist Thomas Wright “Fats” Waller—was a shape-shifting entertainer of the highest rank whose individual talents were always secondary to his ability to engage a crowd and get them moving, and Moran treats that knack as sacrosanct in this effort, transforming standards like “Honeysuckle Rose” and “The Joint Is Jumpin’” with strong doses of modern R&B and hip-hop....

Michael Gebert Ryan Kimura, Dave Rand, and Gary Lazarski in Local Foods’ future space “There are things that are like Match.com for farmers, to connect them with restaurants,” says Andrew Lutsey, founder of Local Foods Grocer & Distributor, a start-up distributor for, well, locally grown foods. “But distribution was missing. Farmers were reluctant to hand over what they raised because they were afraid distributors wouldn’t represent them properly or care for the product properly....

I realize it doesn’t feel much like spring at the moment, but the fact is, winter ended more than three weeks ago, and Spiteful Brewing is celebrating the thaw with its newest beer, an English-style barleywine called Dibs Are for Dummies—a dig at the Chicago postblizzard tradition that presumes some sort of parking-related equivalence between lawn furniture and a car. Bomber bottles shipped late last week. Spiteful currently has a modest two-and-a-half-barrel brew house, with seven five-barrel fermenters....

We try to avoid anniversary stories around here, because really, who the hell cares? Forty years since the Beatles did this, 50 years since Elvis did that—in popular culture, an anniversary is usually just a marketing hook, a new banner to slap across an old book, record, or movie. The Chicago International Film Festival has been celebrating its 50th anniversary since the beginning of the year, with retrospective screenings at the Cultural Center and on WTTW, and now the real thing has finally arrived, with even more blasts from the past: if you count the two director’s cuts being presented by Oliver Stone, a full sixth of the features screening this year are revivals....

Have we reached peak food list yet? There’s no surer vehicle for clicks than lists, however Pavlovian they may feel when you’re the one clicking on them, and food media have taken to them with a vengeance, announcing the ten best burgers and the 11 sexiest pho joints and the 12 chicken ‘n’ waffles you must eat now to be a playah. I could certainly make a case that lists are edging more substantive food-related content out of the marketplace—”I’m gonna write about sexism in wine selling just as soon as I finish ranking Chicago’s ten hottest somms”—but I’d be a hypocrite for doing it because I write them too....

I’ve always loved these heavy riffers. What began as the duo of Mat Davis and Elizabeth Blackwell has expanded to include drummer Al McCartney, and as a trio Castle continue to possess an eerie and uncanny ability to tap into the late-60s/early-70s occult-rock vibe made famous by Black Sabbath—but also represented by Pentagram and the likes of Coven and Black Widow (whose “Come to the Sabbat” remains a goosebump-raising earworm). As far as contemporaries go, maybe only the original Witch Mountain comes close in the same way....

At 19, Oak Park native Tavi Gevinson has experienced more than most people do in a lifetime—but that doesn’t mean she’s going to slow down anytime soon. The teen blogger continues to run Rookie magazine, is gearing up to star in The Crucible on Broadway, and just released Rookie Yearbook Four. So this is the last yearbook? I don’t think it’s the end for Rookie in print, but it felt like it would be good to have one for each year of high school....