This year in music isn’t any easier to distill into a list than any other year—which is to say it’s hard to assign a number to Spiderbait, the album that local rock three-piece Vamos released this summer. The band have been kicking around for a few years, releasing a handful of cassettes, opening for the likes of the Meat Puppets, and playing last year’s Riot Fest. Spiderbait was Vamos’s first piece of vinyl, released through Logan Square label Maximum Pelt, which has been on a hot streak this year—its catalog is a veritable tutorial on the finer rock sounds bubbling in the underground....

Total Recall This week’s biggest release is José Padilha’s remake of Paul Verhoeven’s RoboCop, a SF classic that’s one of the crown jewels of 80s Hollywood. It’s the second of Verhoeven’s major films to be remade in recent years, following Len Wiseman’s tepid take on Total Recall. I get why major movie studios are keen to remake Verhoeven’s work. They are, after all, consummate Hollywood films, though not for the reasons most people think....

QMy son is 15 going on 16, and he’s been experimenting with masturbation. At the moment, I pretty much just think fine, whatever, he’s a teenager, there’s very little I can do about it. So long as he doesn’t get porn obsessed and start letting his grades slip, it’s fine. The issue is that, a few months ago, his younger sister found one of her tampons in the garbage, and it was covered with poop....

This wolf is a big fan of Wired Fridays, the noontime gatherings that turn the Chicago Cultural Center into a dance club every first and third Friday of the month. If you prefer to spend your lunch break getting down instead of gobbling fries, there’s no better place to be. The Cultural Center always books great locals to spin, and Friday, December 4, features house legend Curtis A. Jones, aka Cajmere!...

Chicago four-piece Clearance play the kind of indie rock that, several decades into its existence, I’d now call classic—hooky songs that are deeply reverential of rock’s past and carry it forward with exceptional ease. Their melodies unwind like a Homer Simpson-type football fanatic settling into his favorite spot on the sofa, and the songs build to big, hooky crescendos like the emotion of said football fan cheering the winning touchdown of his favorite team....

Welcome to the Reader‘s morning briefing for Monday, August 14, 2017. Hundreds march downtown to denounce racism after Charlottesville violence Hundreds of Chicagoans gathered to denounce racism and bigotry on Sunday in the wake of a deadly clash between white supremacists and peaceful counterprotesters in Charlottesville, Virginia. “We must mourn and we also must organize,” the organizers of the Chicago Stands With Charlottesville rally wrote on Facebook. “We must show that right-wing hate, racism, and violence will not be tolerated....

It turns out Martin Shkreli doesn’t even deserve points for originality. I thought that was the one thing that could be said in favor of the hedge fund manager and pharmaceuticals CEO when news broke that he’d bought the right to manufacture the drug Daraprim—then jacked the price from $13.50 to $750 per pill. The Times reports that in 2015 alone, “Valeant raised prices on its brand-name drugs an average of 66 percent, according to a Deutsche Bank analysis, about five times as much as its closest industry peers....

Rich Hein/Sun-Times In this image from October 2013, Mayor Rahm Emanuel speaks about the 2014 budget with the Sun-Times editorial board. Did he mention that he would increase the scope of his South Loop DePaul/Marriott boondoggle? In one of those quirky coincidences of life in Chicago, my property tax bill arrived yesterday—the same day as the public hearing for the latest variation of Mayor Emanuel’s grandiose South Loop boondoggle....

Silver Screen Fiend is the story of Patton Oswalt’s addiction. Not to hard drugs but to moviegoing. From May 20, 1995, to May 20, 1999, Oswalt kept meticulous record of the hundreds of movies he saw, and in his second memoir he reflects on how those films and that time in his life changed him. How did that time shape you as a comedian? Anything that you do, whether you have kids or don’t have kids, as you grow older it’s going to change, especially if you’re trying to be as honest as you can in your stand-up or what you’re writing or whatever you’re doing as a person....

It’s not difficult to imagine the old days of the Chicago Athletic Association, when jowly titans of industry circled each other like rutting pronghorns, slugging whiskey and lobbing medicine balls in their sweat-damp towels. The recent restoration of Henry Ives Cobb’s 122-year-old Venetian Gothic edifice is so remarkable that if you could only shut out the chatter of the new Michigan Avenue hotel’s casually dressed guests you might hear the ghosts of the fusty old patriarchy harrumphing at the sudden presence of the fair sex in their midst....

Michael Gebert Kevin Zraly with a panel of winemakers from Codorniu Raventos Winemakers come to town to put on a show all the time—to talk up their wares and get restaurateurs and wine writers to taste them. They’re always interesting—even if the wine isn’t that interesting, the mere fact that anyone gets to live that life in their family’s 18th-century chateau is enough to get you working on being reincarnated into a winemaking family next time—and they do their best to dance around the ineluctable fact that turning the abstract sensory experience of wine into words never really feels like it works....

Soon after Mayor Rahm announced he wasn’t running for reelection, I got a text from my old friend Ken Davis, host of CAN TV’s Chicago Newsroom, asking how long it would be before I wrote a sentence that began: “Say what you will about Rahm, but . . . ” People who didn’t depend on city services. People whose neighborhoods weren’t boiling over with crime. And the message was that Rahm was the kind of Democratic mayor who was unafraid to inflict damage on the city’s most vulnerable residents—as though that were the true sign of political greatness....

English hardcore band Doom came together in 1987 in Birmingham, channeling much of the same grimy, industrial misery as their hometown allies Black Sabbath, Napalm Death, and Godflesh. Spending their initial three-year run pioneering the genre of extreme crust punk, Doom produced an explosive, flawless 1988 debut LP, War Crimes: Inhuman Beings, which set the standard for hardcore, grindcore, crossover thrash, and powerviolence to come. The group first called it a day in 1990, but have reunited and broken up again a handful of times since....

Q: A problem has cropped up for me ever since the reports of Donald Trump’s pissing Russian hookers made the news. Every time someone on social media tries to make a comment about how disgusting that is, someone else scolds that person for “kink shaming.” By normalizing my piss fetish, you’re making it dull for me. Piss was one of the few things that even the kink community found disgusting. My polyamorous boyfriend and I found each other without knowing we shared a love for piss....

Reader staffers share stories that fascinate, alarm, amuse, or inspire us. Hey, did you read: About how the climate deal came together? —John Dunlevy That local R&B singer Jeremih isn’t happy with the way Def Jam handled his new album? —Leor Galil About the yuccie (pronounced “yucky”), the successor to the hipster? —Aimee Levitt This New York Times profile of Kricket Nimmons, a black trans woman from the rural south, and her path to gender reassignment surgery?...

AP Photos Republican gubernatorial candidate Bruce Rauner has ties to a company that makes money by punishing poor people for minor criminal violations. During stops in black and Latino neighborhoods in Chicago this week, Republican gubernatorial candidate Bruce Rauner promised to fight crime in low-income neighborhoods by creating jobs, funding a stronger social safety net, and especially targeting the most dangerous criminals—all things that he accused Governor Pat Quinn of neglecting to do....

At times I wonder if musicians who have gone fishing for gold in 90s-era emo are aware of the cliche frequently misattributed to Albert Einstein: the definition of insanity is repeating something over and over again in hopes of getting a different result. Houston fourth-wave emo trio Football, Etc. realize it takes just a bit of subtlety to unlock hidden powers in the gently recycled, plaintive melodies of emo’s yesteryear—even a slight shift in the breeze over the guitar chords can suddenly make everything feel both familiar and completely different....

Monday night EDM posterboy Skrillex used his recently launched phone app called Alien Ride to stream his forthcoming debut full-length, Recess (not to be confused with local kids’ musician Justin Roberts’s Grammy-nominated album of the same name). I haven’t listened to the entire album, partially because I’ve been stuck on a single song—”Coast is Clear,” which features Chance the Rapper and his band, Social Experiment. This has been a common experience I’ve had with many, many songs Chance has appeared on the past couple years, which should be obvious from the number of times I’ve written about him since he released his video for “Fuck You Tahm Bout....

Aimee Levitt Michael Chabon signs books at the Harold Washington Library. Michael Chabon came to the Harold Washington Library Thursday night to discuss The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay, this year’s One Book, One Chicago. It was an unusually liberating experience for him, he told his interlocutor, Angel Ysaguirre, the new director of the Illinois Humanities Council (who, endearingly, appears to have an aversion to socks), because for once, he got to discuss the book’s ending instead of worrying about spoilers....

The countdown continues. Read about numbers 40 through 31 here. 27) Necks, Vertigo (Northern Spy) Veteran Australian piano trio the Necks are famous for the way their hypnotic, powerful concerts build slowly from tiny improvised kernels into epic journeys, but they’ve increasingly been exploring and shaping those impulses in the studio as well, rather than simply attempting to capture the feel of their live performances. The single harrowing track on Vertigo uses plenty of electronics and overdubbing, shaping its churning drone with scatterings of fragile melody, thickets of sludgy texture, and ripples of feedback....