Lost in Alphaville Originally formed as a Weezer side project, Matt Sharp put together the Rentals in 1995 to explore his new wavey synth-pop side. By 1998 it was his full-time musical outlet; but one year later the Rentals had officially disbanded. The Rentals’ albums, Return of the Rentals and Seven More Minutes, were wildly fun pop records, driven by simplistic, fuzzy bass lines, topsy-turvy Moog leads, and sugary vocal harmonies (originally provided by Rachel and Petra Haden of That Dog) that supplemented Sharp’s dry deadpan....

Nothing much pleasant ever occurs in a trench. Long, narrow ditches are the natural habitats of trench foot, trench mouth, and trench warfare, to name just a few discomforts. Certainly nobody expects good food and good times to inhabit a trench. And yet that’s the name chosen by Heisler Hospitality’s Kevin Heisner and Matt Eisler to reboot Trenchermen, their popular Wicker Park tavern, after founding chef Patrick Sheerin stepped away at the end of last year....

Before Prohibition, Illinois was one of the biggest whiskey-producing states in the U.S. Peoria alone had 73 distilleries and paid more whiskey tax to the federal government than any other city in the country; Chicago paid the second-highest tax. Very few distilleries reopened in Illinois after Prohibition was repealed, but in 1933 Hiram Walker & Sons established the largest distillery in the world in Peoria, which closed in 1981 after the decline of the American whiskey market in the 1970s (Archer Daniels Midland took over the plant and now produces ethanol there)....

Carl Sandburg died 50 years ago this July, but he remains one of America’s most widely known and read poets. For drummer Matt Wilson, who grew up downstate in Knoxville, Sandburg was a constant presence. The poet was from neighboring Galesburg, and buildings named after him—a junior high school, a shopping mall—were everywhere. As a teenager in the late 70s, Wilson connected with Sandburg’s writing, in part because it largely dispensed with rhymes....

In another world, 22-year-old Ephraim Bugumba would be a prince. Originally from Makobola, a village in northeastern Congo, Bugumba was born into a royal family. His grandfather was the chief, and he was the fifth child among seven brothers and sisters. When Bugumba was three, the Makobola massacre tore his village and his family apart. The bloodshed erupted during the New Year’s holiday in late 1999, in the midst of a rebellion against President Laurent Kabila, and claimed an estimated 500 to 600 lives....

“What’s the difference between Courtney Love and the American flag?” whines the stand-up comedian. “It would be wrong to urinate on the American flag.” Welcome to the world of Neil Hamburger, a cult performer (real name: Gregg Turkington) who wears bus-window glasses, an old-school Vegas tux, and a comb-over that could pass for a Georgia O’Keeffe painting. Cranky and phlegmatic, Hamburger is the central character in Entertainment, a daring and mainly successful black comedy about a dour and depressive comedian on a dead-end tour of California....

AP Photo/Ted S. Warren Getting a Lyft in Chicago could change real soon. It was one hell of a mustache ride, but it’s looking more and more like the laissez-faire heyday of rideshare companies like Lyft and Uber is drawing to a close. Two separate pieces of legislation are currently pending that would regulate app-based driver services—a bill at the state level, HB 4075, and an ordinance at the city level....

A Reader staffer shares three musical obsessions, then asks someone (who asks someone else) to take a turn. Neuköllner Modelle, Sektion 1-2 This multigenerational free-jazz unit takes a familiar approach—an ad hoc sax trio improvises with no preset material. Drummer Sven-Åke Johansson has called its music “constructive free jazz,” a fair way to describe the limber, obliquely melodic, pulse-driven sound he creates with bassist Joel Grip and saxophonist Bertrand Denzler. The group explores within a comforting form, especially Johansson—his drumming clenches and loosens in a contemporary take on the free jazz of the past....

Fanny Ardant and André Dussollier in Resnais’s Life Is a Bed of Roses I know it’s purely coincidental, but it feels fortuitous that there have been so many revivals of Stephen Sondheim musicals in Chicago in the wake of Alain Resnais’s death. Resnais was an outspoken fan of Sondheim’s—he recruited the groundbreaking Broadway composer to write the score for Stavisky… (1974), and it’s presumed that he cast Elaine Stritch in Providence (1978) on the basis of seeing her in Sondheim’s Company when he lived in New York in the early 1970s....

Courtesy of Goodman Theatre’s Education and Community Engagement Programs Students rehearse for last year’s final GTS production. The Goodman Theatre’s General Theater Studies program is an anomaly for both high school and the acting profession: it builds confidence and self-esteem instead of tearing them to shreds. Over the course of six weeks, the 80 student participants tell stories and improvise scenes based around a single theme which the adult “teaching artists” craft into a 90-minute performance piece....

Doug Tuttle Local label Trouble in Mind, run by Bill and Lisa Roe, has been releasing records at an incredible rate since its inception in 2009. Starting out mostly focusing on garage rock, the label has gone on to lean more toward pop with an experimental flare, with superpsychy and Krautrock LPs becoming its hallmark. One of these releases is the debut solo effort from former Mmoss member Doug Tuttle, which came out in January, and on Sunday, May 11 he brings his first tour under his own name to the Burlington....

The Roches’ Speak My mom spends a lot of her time out of the country lately, so I get to see her a lot less than I’m used to. On Sunday I was able to spend much of the day with her, which was great; aside from it being Mother’s Day, it was also nice to just catch up and hang out with her. The same day, my friend Alfred Soto posted this Roches song, claiming it was the best Mother’s Day song ever....

The crusade for same-sex marriage was in part a heady debate over constitutional principles. In June the struggle reached its climax as the U.S. Supreme Court ruled laws forbidding same-sex marriage unconstitutional. Now only bitter-enders such as Kim Davis refuse to live with the results. In some eyes Davis is a hero, but she’s not to me or to anyone I know, or to anyone in that vast circle of distant acquaintances speaking their piece on Facebook....

More than two years after I first heard a rumor about its opening date—which at that point was supposed to be fall 2012—the Lagunitas Brewing tap room in North Lawndale is finally in business. Last Tuesday it held an unveiling party, mostly for the press (I wasn’t invited—a small blow to my already negligible professional pride), and on Wednesday, June 25, it will officially welcome the general public. Second, and perhaps of more interest to beer nerds, was that the tap room’s 32 draft lines will pour not just year-round Lagunitas beers but also tap-only oddities and one-offs shipped from the brewery’s home base in Petaluma, California....

Ultimate Painting Ultimate Painting—a new British duo featuring James Hoare of Veronica Falls and Jack Cooper of Mazes—have arrived stateside, and will be playing an in-store tonight at Permanent Records to kick off their tour. The band’s self-titled debut LP—just released on local imprint Trouble in Mind, a label that’s constantly cranking out quality records—is a loose-limbered, meandering collection of Velvet Underground-influenced pop, heavy on jangle, melody, good vibes, and fuzzy guitar shredding....

In line with the hush-hush theme of the Spring Books issue, we asked some Chicago authors—whose soon-to-be-released books involve secrets in some way—to spill the beans about everything from combating writer’s block to exposing hidden information. I think it’s probably easier to keep a secret now than ever before because the stakes have been made more clear. Social interaction has been warped by technological capabilities to the degree that now it’s assumed everyone will share everything....

I hate it when someone acknowledges that Chicago is a wonderful place for architecture, art, music, and food but whines that it’s too difficult to access outdoor adventure or natural beauty here. Sure, we’re not Denver or Seattle or even Minneapolis in that respect. But on top of living next to a watery wilderness in the form of Lake Michigan, we’ve got something many of our peer cities lack: easy access to car-free camping....

The unctuous lounge-lizard croon that marks the singing of Dead Rider’s Todd Rittman has started to fray on the group’s fantastic new album, Crew Licks (Drag City), as if to suggest that his sinister shadiness is getting tangled within his own web of deceit. As usual, it’s often difficult to know exactly what he’s going on about, and when there’s some relatively clear idea at work it’s unsavory: “The Listing” seems to be about some kind of desperation-driven prostitution (replete with samples of an auctioneer at full tilt), while on “When I Was Frankenstein’s” the narrator boasts about carrying a feathery umbrella and wearing a fine cap despite being a monster....

In late 2014, Cullen Omori was unsure where his music career was headed—he just knew he wouldn’t be going any further with his longtime band, Smith Westerns. He and bandmate Max Kakacek (who’s since formed the group Whitney) weren’t seeing eye to eye about songwriting, and Omori felt Smith Westerns had hit a roadblock creatively. “There was no real reason to make the band work anymore,” he says. That’s when I started working on music....

Baby boomers are retiring in droves now, with plenty of disposable income to spend on movies. This might be the reason that in the past couple years I’ve reviewed at least a half-dozen features (and seen at least that many outside work) about middle-class characters in their 60s who reevaluate their lives after retiring or losing touch with their grown children. The crisis of how to spend one’s twilight years has inspired Hollywood comedies (the Meryl Streep-Tommy Lee Jones rom-com Hope Springs, the Billy Crystal atrocity Parental Guidance), indie fare (Old Goats), and European art movies (Le Week-End, On My Way)....