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Danish-born musician Casper Clausen is best known for fronting the long-running Efterklang, which plays exploratory and often ornate electro-infused indie rock, and for performing with that group’s synth-heavy and relatively spontaneous sister project, Liima. This year, for the first time since he began making music as a teen, he’s stepped out from a collaborative setting. His debut solo release, Better Way, was recorded in his home studio in Lisbon and mixed by Peter Kember (aka Sonic Boom), and it merges indie rock and avant-pop with various electronic fusions and dreamy experiments—Clausen’s songs tap into intimate moments in turbulent times and dare to imagine a day to come when hardships and heartbreak will recede into memory....

Every plant owner has lost a plant or two or 20. I have a second bathroom shower I deem “the plant graveyard” where empty pots and dead plants wait out the remainder of the winter. Come with me as I root through five houseplant fails. Pets Light Sweet Dee eyes a sedevaria blue giant succulent next to a Chinese money plant.Credit: Sarah Beckett

Whirlwinds rise on the horizon, brutal storms it isn’t possible to ignore. A page-wide headline in the Sunday New York Times announces, “Pleading for Peace in Chicago Amid Fear That a Bloody Summer Awaits.” Weisman describes himself as “largely disconnected from Jewish life and faith over the years, and like many American Jews I have been lulled into complacency.” That’s living life as if this were wartime. But take a long look at the horizon and maybe it is....

Welcome to the Reader‘s morning briefing for Friday, October 27, 2017. Have a great weekend! Illinois house fails to pass ban on semiautomatic rifle bump stocks The Illinois house rejected a ban on controversial bump stocks and other devices that allow guns to fire more rapidly Thursday after “opponents on both sides of the aisle contended the measure was too broad and would turn legal gun owners into criminals,” according to the Tribune....

Back in 2011, and then again in 2013, Court Theatre presented one of the best shows I’ve seen on a Chicago stage: An Iliad. Building on Robert Fagle’s English translation, adapter/deconstructors Denis O’Hare and Lisa Peterson turned Homer’s Trojan War epic into a bravura solo (performed by Timothy Edward Kane) that not only retold one of the founding stories of Western civilization but sent it vibrating up through the generations, into our time, and across our spines....

Welcome to the Reader‘s morning briefing for Thursday, September 22, 2016. The most dangerous police district has the youngest and least experienced cops The 11th police district, which includes Garfield Park on the west side, is the most dangerous in the city, with the highest murder rate. It also has the youngest and most inexperienced police officers in the city, with more than a third of those assigned having served less than five years in CPD....

Ryan Smith Joseph Vourteque (right) and fellow steampunk circus performer mingle shortly before their performance. Chicago steampunk circus maestro Joseph Vourteque stood on the corseted back of a fellow performer as she lay face down in shards of broken glass. Wearing a top hat and a button-up jacket with a watch chain dangling from the pocket, Vourteque flashed a toothy grin as his colleague stood up unharmed—but only a tiny fraction of the crowd clapped in appreciation of the stunt....

ARTIST: John Forbes SHOW: Velcro Lewis Group, Tijuana Hercules, Shuttle Run at Empty Bottle on Tue 7/5 MORE INFO: tijuanahercules.com

Carnival of Killers, the first album by south-side heavy-music pioneers Macabre in nearly a decade, is pretty much exactly what I hoped it would be. The trio, who haven’t had a lineup change since forming in 1985, have built a global following with what they call “murder metal”—that is, songs about serial killers and other heinous criminals. For all their morbid subject matter, Macabre also provide welcome reassurance: even in these troubled times; you can count on them to create a solid product....

Chicago is nothing if not a food city, and nothing encapsulates the city’s diverse culinary scene like Chicago Restaurant Week. Over the course of two weeks (1/22-2/4), more than 350 restaurants offer a series of multicourse prix fixe menus at $22 for lunch and $33 or $44 for dinner. That’s a lot of choices to, um, digest, so here are nine of our favorites to help you narrow it down....

When I wrote about prolific Chicago three-piece Dark Fog last winter, the trippy psych voyagers were releasing three albums within a three-month span. It’s nice to know that, even in these uncertain times, some things you can still rely on: Dark Fog dropped the EP Escape Into This on April 6 and followed it up with Escape Into This 2 on April 20 (as if there were ever a chance they’d let that date go by)....

It took nearly 20 years for composer Jake Heggie and librettist Terrence McNally’s powerhouse of an opera, Dead Man Walking, to make it to Lyric Opera of Chicago. In the interim, it’s been Chicago Opera Theater that gave us a chance to see any of Heggie’s work, including last spring’s Moby-Dick and 2010’s Three Decembers. So, it’s about time, Lyric. And this gut-punching production, directed by Leonard Foglia (and almost as old as the opera), is not to be missed....

Greg Skidmore Rand Paul don’t need no education. Reader staffers share stories that fascinate, alarm, amuse, or inspire us. • That Phi Kappa Psi says it will “pursue all available legal action” against Rolling Stone for its retracted story of a gang rape at the University of Virginia? —J.R. Jones • That after their beloved Badgers lost to Duke in the NCAA men’s college basketball championship game, University of Wisconsin fans took to harassing a prized high school recruit on Twitter?...

Whimsical, brutal, and evocative of The Secret of NIMH, First Love is the Revolution is a modern fable and one of the more interesting plays I’ve seen. It’s the story of Rdeca, a young fox who allows herself to be tamed by a human teenager, Basti, and the consequences of that choice. In the dramaturg’s notes, we learn that playwright Rita Kalnejais was inspired by an unspecified international dispute. Fortunately, Kalnejais did not write a direct allegory, which saves this from becoming a morality play....

Tony Quartaro has an impeccable pasta pedigree going all the way back to all-day suppers at his Grandma Joyce’s house in upstate New York, where he learned to shape gnocchi for the Sunday gravy. Quartaro stepped up at the Bristol as Pandel stepped away to open Balena, which became its own pasta powerhouse, and where he moved over a year later to work under Joe Frillman, now of Daisies (another juggernaut)....

In his 40 years of making music, Jon Langford has earned a reputation for not doing things by the book. That applies most notably to the Mekons, a band the Welsh native cofounded in Leeds in the late 70s, whose sound has evolved over the decades from rudimentary punk to a dark, strange melange of rock, folk, country, and even reggae. In 1984 they played a series of benefits for striking coal miners, whose communities were being starved by Margaret Thatcher’s decision to close many UK mines—a burst of activity that produced their early masterpiece Fear and Whiskey....

Over the past decade, it’s often felt like everyone in Chicago’s underground-rock subscenes was legally required to have multiple projects, and Jeff Kelley certainly cleared that bar. He fronted frazzled art-rock group Vaya, mathy indie-pop outfit Dick Wolf!, and ragged new-wave band New Drugs. When he wasn’t making music, Kelley helped document the scene as cofounder and creative director of Chicago Singles Club, a hybrid music-journalism outlet and record label whose activity sadly tapered off in the late 2010s (the site stopped posting monthly artist profiles in 2016, but continued to host events for about another year)....

Osa Obaseki, aka rapper-singer Osa North, grew up in Uptown, but in 2006 his parents sent him to live with his aunt and uncle in the capital of Nigeria’s Edo State, Benin City. He was 11 when he arrived, and he lived there for five years, soaking up Nigerian culture as he came of age—he took a particular liking to Afrobeat. North returned to Chicago in 2011, and within a year he’d recorded his first rap song, working with his younger brother....

The death of John Prine on Tuesday from complications of COVID-19 is a cruel blow to anyone who favors decency, empathy, community, and good jokes—you know, all those things that once defined the American character but in the face of the federal malfeasance surrounding this pandemic feel like sentimental niceties from a bygone era. I hope I’m wrong. Folk music has always denounced scoundrels—only the names change. Today they’re called “deplorables....

Jamie McCarthy/Getty Images A few of the celebrities who stood awkwardly on stage during yesterday’s Tidal press conference Reader staffers share stories that fascinate, alarm, amuse, or inspire us. • About Rahm Emanuel’s response to Jake Malooley’s post on the time he appeared shirtless in Marquette Park to protest Nazis? —Mick Dumke