The Greyboy Allstars are a bunch of rare-groove re-creationists from San Diego focused on mining soul, funk, and anything else with a deep pocket. Since forming in 1993, the group have consistently toured and put out six records and a couple soundtracks, but they spent the early months of the pandemic cloistered like the rest […]
Category: Music Review
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Uma Bloo’s languid indie rock will send a rush of blood to your head
Before Chicago singer-guitarist Molly Madden began performing indie-rock songs as Uma Bloo in 2016, she used that stage name as a burlesque performer. As she told Tribune critic Britt Julious in 2020, burlesque provided her an outlet to explore complex emotions while giving her a confidence she hadn’t felt growing up in a devout Catholic […]
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Summer Walker’s songs invite you to learn from their missteps in love
After the breakout success of Summer Walker’s 2019 debut album, Over It, the Atlanta singer-songwriter continued its saga of betrayals and learned lessons with their 2021 follow-up, Still Over It (LVRN/Interscope). The cleaning technician turned songbird fearlessly plumbs the truth in every heartbreak through somber, grappling melodies. On their second album, they continue this approach […]
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Heavee knows the code to bind footwork and video-game music
The producers who created footwork’s molten polyrhythms designed them to give dancers the flexibility to switch tactics in the middle of a battle. Yes, there are specific moves (Ghost! Erk n Jerk!), but the ever-changing percussion and bass patterns create a destabilized space where footworkers can “choose their own adventure,” as it were, by adapting […]
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Freakwater and the Mekons unite to sing about coal’s dark, transatlantic legacy
In the early days of the COVID pandemic, retail clerks, day-care staff, public-transportation employees, and many other workers learned what coal miners have known for a very long time: that the authorities who deem their labor essential don’t necessarily feel the same way about their lives. Freakwater and the Mekons have each sung folk ballads […]
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Ensemble dal Niente collates five-year-old highlights on Object/Animal
Ensemble dal Niente’s Object/Animal follows closely on the heels of the local contemporary classical group’s November release, Confined. Speak., a retrospective of pieces performed sans live audiences in 2020 and 2021. Object/Animal is likewise chronologically narrow: dal Niente premiered all the works on the album in 2017. Aesthetically, however, the three featured compositions are as […]
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Sludge-metal all-stars Absent in Body live up to their lineup on their debut LP
Like it or not, supergroups are an inevitable part of the music landscape. There’s always a new one in the works, in no small part because they reliably attract media attention even before they’ve done anything. More often than not, though, supergroups turn out to be letdowns compared to the amount of hype they generate. […]
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New west-coast punk supergroup Plosivs includes members of Rocket From the Crypt, Pinback, and more
The pandemic has shattered so many bands that any project that’s come together since March 2020 represents a small victory. And when the project in question is as much fun as Plosivs—a new four-piece consisting of vocalist and guitarist Rob Crow, vocalist and guitarist John Reis, bassist Jordan Clark, and drummer Atom Willard—the victory isn’t […]
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Otherpeace kicks off a Hideout residency to support a restorative, rootsy debut album
In the early months of the pandemic, Wandering Boys banjo player Rob Jensen reached out to Matt Clark (of slowcore trio Pinebender and drone duo White/Light) with an invitation to jam. The music they made together planted the seeds for Clark’s new solo endeavor, Otherpeace, a loose group where he’s backed by Jensen (drums), Pinebender […]
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Duma show that the future of metal is in eastern Africa
Africa’s metal scene has been quiet compared to its counterparts on other continents. Duma rectify that, and loudly. Vocalist Martin Khanja (aka Lord Spike Heart) and guitarist and producer Sam Karugu hail from Kenya, and they relocated to Uganda to release their self-titled 2020 debut album on Kampala’s Nyege Nyege Tapes. That label is known […]
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Chicago rapper CantBuyDeem makes loosies with more energy than most radio hits
If an MC has put in enough work that they can wrap a verse around a beat so tightly you can’t separate the two, then the odds are good they’ve accumulated a trunk full of unreleased material in the process. Englewood’s CantBuyDeem is just such a rapper, and he’s strung together a handful of those […]
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On Comedian, Without Waves make mood-shifting prog metal that’s no laughing matter
I can hardly believe it’s been five years since I previewed Without Waves’ previous album, the 2017 release Lunar. When the Chicago progressive-metal quartet leapt back into the saddle for their third full-length (their second for Prosthetic), that time seemed to just melt away: the new Comedian is one of the best records I’ve heard […]
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Sir Richard Bishop continues to chart his own guitar language in the studio and onstage
Sir Richard Bishop has spent about as much time recording under his own name as he did with the Sun City Girls, a deftly bohemian, genre-bending avant-rock act that dissolved after the 2007 cancer death of founding drummer Charlie Gocher. For almost 30 years, the band (which also included Bishop’s brother Alan) teased at the […]
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Young Guv’s Guv III threatens to give you the warm fuzzies
In all my years contributing to the Reader, the artist I’ve written about the most is probably Toronto’s Ben Cook—partly because he’s been so incredibly prolific for the past two decades, but also because his widely varying output is so consistently solid and great. He cut his teeth in the hardcore world while fronting No […]
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Shane Parish brings electrified sea shanties and improvisational explorations to Elastic Arts
There’s no pinning down Shane Parish. On acoustic guitar, he spins webs of bright, densely packed notes; plugged in, he dips into a deep well of jagged rhythms, gnarled chords, and elongated ribbons of humming sound. Stylistically, he seems equally at home meditating upon American folk tunes, negotiating high-speed hairpin turns with mathy combo Ahleuchatistas, […]