Avreeayl Ra is quite literally a driving force in Chicago jazz. He’s an enduring member of the Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians (AACM) who’s spent decades drumming for countless local and visiting eminences, including Ernest Dawkins, Ari Brown, Fred Anderson, and Nicole Mitchell. While he can be counted upon to bring emphatic, surging […]
Panama-born, Chicago-based drummer Daniel Villarreal is involved with myriad musical projects. He coleads the groups Dos Santos, Valebol, the Los Sundowns, and Ida y Vuelta; he’s collaborated extensively with grab-bag marching band Mucca Pazza, sibling duo Wild Belle, and soulful psych-pop singer Rudy De Anda; and he’s a familiar face on Pilsen’s DJ circuit. At […]
Lots of bands emerged from the lockdown era writing material with a darker tone than their pre-pandemic work. Local thrashers Oozing Wound take that to a new level with their brand-new LP, We Cater to Cowards (Thrill Jockey). Granted, they’ve never been purveyors of positivity—their catalog includes song titled “Everyone I Hate Should Be Killed,” […]
Dan O’Conor is best known as the Great Lake Jumper, but he’s also a Chicago-based artist and owns T-shirt company Dtox Designs. Raised in the north suburbs, O’Conor began going to concerts in the city in the early 80s, and his passion for live music led him to a career in the music and media […]
Chicago rapper Mugen! the Human grew up in Prince George’s County, Maryland, but on the new “Wanted” he raps with the speed and rhythmic fluency of someone who spent his youth in Chatham watching footwork dancers face off at Battlegrounds. The track kicks off his new self-released EP, For Her Consideration, with a live-wire flow […]
I first heard about Jen B. Larson when she played in Swimsuit Addition, whose scrappy, pulse-quickening punk combined doo-wop vocals and surf-rock scuzz. They released music through local DIY labels—Midwest Action, Tall Pat, Impossible Colors—or just put it out themselves. In short, Swimsuit Addition were exactly the kind of band the Reader‘s music writers like […]
Chicago punk four-piece the Brokedowns emerged from the same Elgin underground scene that gave us Ian’s Party, a homegrown humdinger of a music festival. That wintertime event hasn’t returned since the start of the pandemic, but at least we get a new LP from the Brokedowns, Maximum Khaki (Red Scare). When it comes to scruffy, […]
On June 24, the Supreme Court overturned the 1973 landmark decision Roe v. Wade, unceremoniously stripping away half of the population’s right to bodily autonomy and therefore full citizenship. While the ensuing backlash helped shape the outcome of the 2022 midterm elections, downgrading the “red wave” that political pundits and mainstream media had told us […]
Kankakee band Doghead make clean, controlled emocore whose energy draws on a wide spectrum of heavy music, not just old hardcore—they owe more to recent artists (D.C. flower-power group Give, much of the roster of Chicago label New Morality Zine) than to the genre’s 1980s beginnings. The professional polish of their debut EP, last year’s […]
Hard as it might be to believe, it’s been 15 years since Gossip Wolf (and the rest of the world) finally got hip to local outsider punk J.T. IV, aka John Henry Timmis IV. In the 1980s, Timmis released a handful of impossible-to-find singles and a compilation LP in near-total obscurity, and he died at […]
Alash are a Tuvan trio of singers and multi-instrumentalists Bady-Dorzhu Ondar, Ayan-ool Sam, and Ayan Shirizhik. Founded in 2005, the group perform khoomei, also known as Tuvan throat singing, a traditional vocal style practiced in Tuva, Mongolia, and Siberia, in which singers manipulate their mouths and throats to layer overtones over a fundamental pitch, often […]
Oddisee is aging like fine wine, becoming a producer-rapper’s producer-rapper. Two decades into his career, the native of Prince George’s County, Maryland, still doesn’t care about mainstream popularity—as long as he can feed his family off his music, fame isn’t important. This doesn’t mean mainstream accolades aren’t apropos; his big music is innately hip-hop, but […]
Ella Williams, the Massachusetts-born musician who makes music as Squirrel Flower, released her first EP, Early Winter Songs From Middle America, while attending Grinnell College in 2015, and she’s been steadily touring ever since. After graduation, she moved back to Boston to make her way in the DIY scene, and she soon turned heads with […]
Norwegian artist Helge Sten, who makes music as Deathprod, trades not in massive dynamic shifts but in uniformly gray ambient soundscapes. He typically uses a variegated array of homemade electronics, samplers, out-of-date processors, and other audio detritus that echo, hiss, and throb like futuristic boilers arduously coming online while retro steampunk conglomerations cough and doppler […]
Bass Drum of Death’s music feels like a headbanging night of fun and questionable decisions. At its best, it satiates with the brevity and heft of the greatest punk rock. At its worst, it gets the band lumped into a box with similar artists such as the White Stripes, Wavves, and Ty Segall. Fortunately, these […]
