Courtesy of Speakeasy PR The sophisticated gentlemen in Faith No More like to accessorize with a gimp. The Reader has never had much to say about Faith No More—in our admittedly patchy archives, the only reference I could find to these Bay Area alt-metal weirdos during their peak years was a dumb joke in a 1992 Bill Wyman column. “The imponderables of rock ‘n’ roll are many,” he wrote, clearly already pleased with his impending punch line, “from why does Billy Joel exist to why do so many current groups (Metallica, Faith No More, Soundgarden, to name just three) feature guitarists with funny facial hair....

Few styles of music lift my spirits more than the drum- and marimba-driven chants born along Colombia’s Pacific coast. These ancestral grooves survived the travails of 16th-century colonization to become the musical heritage of the region’s enslaved persons who’d escaped captivity—and to my ears, they distill freedom and joy in every note. The members of Bogotá trio Ghetto Kumbé are internationally recognized musicians who’ve each participated in projects that take the roots beats of Colombia into contemporary realms....

When Chevon Linear looked up at the sky as darkness descended over Wyoming’s Grand Teton National Park in August of 2020, she unwillingly began to cry. As her partner Kameron Stanton chuckled at her response, Linear tried to rationalize her reaction. As she sought to blame anything from light sensitivity to dust, she simply could not get past her shock at nature’s display. “I’ve never seen anything so vibrant, so beautiful....

Eighteen years ago, Superchunk drummer Jon Wurster called his friend Tom Scharpling, who had a radio show on New Jersey noncommercial station WFMU, and pretended to be an oblivious music critic named Ronald Thomas Clontle. Clontle had supposedly written a book called Rock, Rot & Rule: The Ultimate Argument Settler, and for the next 47 minutes, he and Scharpling—who was in on the joke—discussed which acts rocked, rotted, or ruled. Clontle’s criteria were so bizarre and confounding, and his knowledge of music so clearly impaired, that many listeners who didn’t realize what was happening called in to argue with him....

In the bad bad not good year that was 2020, optimism often felt as plausible as a unicorn. That’s a big part of why the recent second album from Sonny Falls, All That Has Come Apart / Once Did Not Exist (Plastic Miracles), lands so heavily. Ryan “Hoagie Wesley” Ensley, main man of this rugged Chicago indie-rock band, delivers its lumbering anthems as though through clenched jaws, with the haggard, workmanlike demeanor of someone who’s seen pieces of his life disappear....

AP Photo/Morry Gash What a long, strange trip it’s been. Reader staffers share stories that fascinate, amuse, or inspire us. • About genetic sexual attraction, which sometimes happens when blood relatives who were separated when one or both were very young reunite as adults, and about this father-daughter pair who fell in love and went to her prom and are now planning to marry and have babies and live happily ever after?...

French cellist Leila Bordreuil is a rising figure on New York’s improvising scene. She casually accesses concepts from jazz, contemporary classical, noise, and experimental traditions, but adheres to none of them. If anything distinguishes the work by her that I’ve encountered so far, it’s her fierce interest in pure color and texture. Sometimes she manipulates her strident arco sounds with amplification; in her Chicago debut she’ll employ a multichannel setup using different kinds of microphones and amplifiers to create a series of altered manifestations of her playing, which is knuckle-bloodying in its tactile grit....

Postrock, psych rock, western film scores, Krautrock, heavy dirges . . . there’s little Grails can’t deliver stylistically, and they always deliver their music well. For their most recent album, 2017’s Chalice Hymnal (Temporary Residence), the Portland band pare down to the core trio of Alex John Hall, Emil Amos, and William Zakary Riles and crawl deep into dusty post-Americana, library music, gnarly psychedelia, and Eastern motifs. With a few touring members in tow, the multi-instrumentalists hit Chicago as part of Lincoln Hall and Schubas’ Tomorrow Never Knows festival, and they’re joined by two other exceptional instrumental acts....

Let me suggest something: if the national anthem is giving Americans problems, let’s tweak it. Williams said he learned these lines as a child. No one can say the same about the third verse of the Star-Spangled Banner. I suggest we replace those egregious lines no one knows with lines inspired by Lazarus. For instance:

[content-1] King said it was time to change the street—named for Mussolini’s air commander shortly after he lead a squadron of seaplanes to Chicago in 1933—for the former slave, journalist, anti-lynching activist, and woman’s suffrage advocate. The aldermen say this would be the first Chicago street renaming since 1968, when South Park Drive was renamed to honor Martin Luther King Jr., and the first downtown street named for a woman and a person of color....

In a 2017 interview with Sixty Inches From Center contributor (and Reader staffer) S. Nicole Lane, Fran front woman Maria Jacobson talked about her nightly routine of playing her acoustic guitar just before she goes to bed. “A lot of times I still will use it kind of in response to things that happen in my life,” she said. “If I’m overwhelmed with anxiety or trying to unwrap some emotion, I’ll kind of take to the guitar....

Michigan’s Cloud Rat bill themselves as grind punk, but the truth is that they tear, slouch, and ooze across multiple genres of pissed-off and heavy music. Their 2015 full-length Qliphoth (Halo of Flies) howls from frantic hardcore head snapping to doom trudge, pausing in the middle for an ambient touch. Their three 2017 releases continue to show off their stylistic range and consistently feral attitude. On their split with Crevasse (Halo of Flies) they contribute four short bursts of aggression that forcefully flatten the line between hardcore and thrash, with vocalist Madison shrieking as if she’s being eaten by rabid bats before actually doing something recognizable as singing on their last track, “Fish in a Pool....

Q: I’m a woman who watches porn—we do exist—and I have a mad crush on a male porn star named Small Hands. Unfortunately, his videos focus less on his handsome face and more on some girl’s ass. Do! Not! Want! Is there a way to ask a porn star to please make a few movies in a certain way? I would like to see some movies that feature less of her and more of him!...

Reader staffers share stories that fascinate, amuse, or inspire us. This movie still rules. • About the worst drought in the history of Brazil, where the main reservoirs that supply tap water for Rio (pop. 6.3 million) are currently at about 1 percent of capacity? —Kate Schmidt • That measles is making a comeback? —Drew Hunt

Welcome to the Reader‘s weekday news briefing. Happy Holidays! Report: Taxpayers paying a price waiting for Joseph Berrios to start anti-patronage reforms Cook County taxpayers are paying for county assessor Joseph Berrios vintage Chicago Machine-style politics, according to a new investigation by the Tribune and ProPublica Illinois. Reports from monitors “reveal a persistent pattern in Berrios’ office of improper hiring and firing, arbitrary staffing decisions and resistance to change.” Any reforms to happen in the assessor’s office have been slow-paced, and Berrios does not seem enthusiastic to adapt, according to the report....

As the singer for local R&B band Astro Samurai, Thair has shown he has the fresh skills and magnetic allure to hypnotize a crowd. That serves him well in his solo project, in which he makes huge, colorful collage pop. Thair’s self-released 2018 debut EP, Summer Luhh, has a rough-hewn DIY charm; its lo-fi electronic clacks and occasionally chintzy synth tones help make his loftiest ideas feel closer to earth....

MondaysLoyola Farmers Market | Rogers ParkLocated steps from the Loyola Red Line station, this Monday market was conceived of and created by students back in 2011. It even features student-grown produce: veggies from the school’s retreat and ecology farm in Woodstock, plus flowers, herbs, and veggies grown on campus by students in the urban ag program. You can even preorder tilapia raised in their Ecodome. 6/8-9/21: Mon 3-7 PM; 9/28-10/12: Mon 2:30-6:30 PM, Loyola Plaza, 6540 N....

Kevin Coval’s poetry has always focused on the margins of identity and community. Tackling subjects like his Jewish upbringing and structural racism, the self-styled breakbeat poet has drawn inspiration from working-class Chicagoans and people of color whose stories were not often told. Coval had been wanting to write a book about Wicker Park for a long time, but it wasn’t until artist Langston Allston came into the picture that the idea became a reality....

When all hell broke loose two years ago over the yanking of Persepolis from the Chicago Public Schools, Mayor Emanuel’s press handlers wrote it off as a misunderstanding. They said some bureaucrat in the bowels of the central office misunderstood what he or she had been directed to do and things got out of control. To his surprise, the central office sent him copies of internal e-mails that high-ranking officials—including Barbara Byrd-Bennett, the CEO—wrote each other regarding the book....