Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Last year I came across the Del Maguey table later in the evening and wasn’t able to try all the mezcal they had brought—they hadn’t run out, but I was very close to reaching my alcohol intake limit, and sampling eight mezcals wasn’t about to happen. So this year I located the table early on, and was struck all over again by how different from each other the mezcals tasted....

SOLVEIG SLETTAHJELL | Good Rain | Curling Legs Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » This Norwegian percussionist, now based in Madrid, first made his mark as a free improviser (he visited Chicago a couple times in the trio Tri-Dim with guitarist David Stackenas and reedist Hakon Kornstad), but he’s since channeled his energies into abstract sound pieces that follow preconceived structures. His solo record In is a single 26-minute track of muffled clatter and wobbly, resonating drones that steadily builds in density and tension as it progresses....

Record Store Day, which falls on April 20 this year, has turned into a zoo. It’s no longer the domain of giddy discophiles who sweat uncontrollably upon hearing the words “limited” or “out-of-print”—those folks were overwhelmed by the crowds after the first installment in 2008. And RSD special releases have proliferated indiscriminately, so that you have to sort out the contrived from the inspired—many feel more appropriate for a Best Buy display than the well-thumbed stacks at an indie store (take the vinyl version of Linkin Park’s debut, Hybrid Theory, for example)....

National Pride Month, established by Bill Clinton in 2000 as Gay Pride Month and recently rechristened by Barack Obama as Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, and Transgender Pride Month, wraps up this weekend with the annual parade—this year taking place on the 40th anniversary of the Stonewall riots—as well as parties and other festivities. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Backlot Bash This annual party in the parking lot of Cheetah Gym in Andersonville offers drinking, dancing, and live bands....

All Over the Map Shaped like a boat getting ready to cast off across Ashland, El Barco isn’t short on gimmicks: menus are so absurdly gigantic that one covers half of a four-seat table, and many selections come on huge troughlike platters. The house-made salsas are very good; the tostadas they come with less so. We enjoyed some excellent grilled squid and octopus, fresh and meaty, with a slight char that contrasted nicely with the tender white flesh....

I’ve got to give some credit to the preservationists of Chicago: the relatively cloutless crew of architecture buffs has put Mayor Emanuel in a bind. According to Cubbage, Northwestern can get the project under way as soon as the city grants it a permit to demolish Prentice. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Mayor Rahm Emanuel would typically operate the wrecking ball himself for a project of this magnitude, but Northwestern’s not looking to knock down just any old building....

In summer 2007, when the City Council first proposed licensing for independent event promoters, it didn’t expect much public response, and with good reason—word got out only a few days in advance that the council would be meeting to vote on it. But bad news travels fast online, and dozens of angry promoters and local music advocates showed up to testify, unaware that the city had already bowed to pressure from big players like the United Center and withdrawn the ordinance for a rewrite....

SAPS C’mon Already–Start a Fire | self-released Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Local indie-pop acts like Office and the Changes have started inching into the national spotlight, but this unflashy foursome, which has been together for more than seven years, has had trouble getting noticed just around town. Though there’s probably a reason for that, it can’t be that the Saps don’t make equally solid music–their new C’mon Already–Start a Fire proves it....

White Savage, Magas, Headache City, Attack Formation INFO 773-278-6600 or 800-594-8499 Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Finally, about a year into it, they practiced. They’d recruited bassist Ryan Weinstein, who’d been in ZZZZ with Sharp and also played in the Returnables, and guitarist John Martin from the Austin band Zulu as Kono, who bartended with McCann at Delilah’s. Martin left after two rehearsals and was replaced by Colin Smith of the Screaming Yellow Zonkers....

I hate the casual arrogance implied by those two words—the best—particularly when they’re applied to the infinite universe of food, but really when they’re applied to anything at all. You could spend a lifetime reading, listening, watching, eating, and chances are you still wouldn’t have read, heard, seen, or eaten nearly enough to know what’s “the best.” And in a year when the relentless tide of new restaurant openings barely slows despite the crappy economy, it only becomes more improbable that anyone could definitively identify some platonic ideal of Best New Restaurant....

It’s been nearly four years since the Locust put out their last full-length, Plague Soundscapes–I’m not counting the ten-minute 2005 “album” Safety Second, Body Last–but for me the bloom still hasn’t come off that giant buzzing corpse flower of a record. (Granted, that may be because I can only listen to it when I’m already trembling from insomnia.) On New Erections, released in March on Anti-, they cut the number of tracks in half and sometimes break the three-minute mark....

Intro | Saturday | Sunday Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » 5 PM Tortoise I never saw Tortoise as radical reinventors of rock. To me it just looked like they had good taste, deep curiosity, and remarkable focus; what other people called “postrock” was just the band following their interests where they led, using whatever atypical instrumentation it took to do it. But they were nonetheless anointed standard-bearers of a movement, and with that distinction came heightened scrutiny—even now a new Tortoise record gets dissected like a 100-day-old presidential administration....

See our reviews of the bands playing on:Friday • Saturday • Sunday Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » As Pitchfork Media has grown from a scrappy, indie-oriented web­zine into a legitimate competitor to the old guard of music journalism, so too has the annual Pitchfork Music Festival evolved from a scrappy, indie-oriented alternative to Lollapalooza into one of the most important summer festivals in a city whose calendar is packed with summer festivals....

(No, I don’t know what was up with the movers. I’m not going to mention the company by name until we hear their side of the story, but if you happen to stumble on their listing on MovingHelp.com and go through all their ratings—as I should have done—you will see that this wasn’t the first time they had pulled something like this.) Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Around dawn Jeff took the U-Haul away and went to a hotel since he hadn’t slept in about three days....

Order the saganaki wings at Travelle, the restaurant in the Langham hotel, and you’ll be treated to a display that will evoke, depending on your mood, either a grease fire or Greektown’s stock expression of celebration. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Still, it’s one of a few moments at the Mediterranean-inspired restaurant from former Tru and Paris Club chef Tim Graham that reveals an intent to break from the staid predictability on which hotel restaurants all too often depend....

First up is a press conference. A table and chair have been set out onstage. A man walks on wearing a baseball cap over casual business attire: shirt, slacks, striped tie, blazer. We hear camera shutters click. He takes his place at the table, says, “All right, everybody, let’s just get going.” Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » But then he veers off script and into reverie....

If there was any justice in pop music, the Yo Majesty refrain “rub on my monkey” would be as established in the lexicon as “get your freak on” and “chirp back.” So far the Tampa Bay trio has remained an Internet phenomenon, a favorite of MP3 bloggersteins and UK online-radio DJs quick to realize that a shoulda-been hit like “Kryptonite Pussy” was more than just novelty flash. Shunda K, Jwel B, and Shon B have been rapping together since 2000, but they still have the freshness of isolated amateurs, coming up with their own nasty and slightly peculiar catchphrases rather than sticking strictly to convention....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » “In the performance of his duties, President Stroger submitted his executive budget to the board’s finance committee on October 17, 2007,” says the complaint, filed in county court by Stroger, state’s attorney Richard Devine, and sheriff Tom Dart, naming all 17 board members as defendants. “All conditions precedent to the board’s duty to adopt an Annual Appropriation Ordinance have taken place....

It was one step forward and two steps back at the January 8 meeting of the Community Development Commission, the mayorally appointed board that oversees the city’s tax increment financing districts. The good news is that a bigger crowd than usual—several dozen residents—showed up to protest the latest boondoggles. The bad news is that the CDC approved them anyway, including the second-largest TIF handout in the history of the program: $75 million to help Rush University Medical Center rebuild and expand its hospital campus....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » As reported in this week’s Gossip Wolf, local synth guy Alex Barnett is about to release his new LP, Retrieval, a collaboration with Faith Coloccia (who also plays in Mamiffer with Aaron Turner from Isis), and is readying its release tonight with a set at Empty Bottle, opening up for proggy duo Zombi. Barnett spent years playing in the eerie, droney band Oakeater alongside Seth Sher and Jeremiah Fisher before he started performing and releasing material on his own....