This year’s Taste of Chicago, which kicked off last week with performances from soul greats Stevie Wonder and Chaka Kahn, has opened its doors for the next generation of soul and R&B performers. And the fact that Chicago is in the running for the 2016 summer...
Aimee Mann's @#%&!Smilers is arguably thoughtful, melodic songwriting, but also a puzzling mix of bland metaphors and stoned, lethargic production. At 14 songs, @#%&!Smilers but would have been better off without the tracks not mentioned here but is a...
Crushable ingénue Lykke Li makes prommy, kissy slow jams and hip-hoppity feel-good dance tracks while revealing a few too many pages of her journal. While she thinks the music scene in her resident city of Stockholm could use "more people, and more heat,...
In an effort to boost awareness for the August 19 release of the long-awaited album, Fourth, The Verve thought it would be a good idea to give fans a free mp3 that isn’t actually off the album. It’s called “Mover,” and apparently it was recorded...
Over the last fifteen years, Chicago’s The Sea and Cake have cemented themselves as one of the most innovative, talented and ambitious groups ever to grace our eardrums. With their unique style of pop and arrangement, stemming all the way back to Nassau and The...
Leave it to a writer to know exactly how to get the attention of other writers. As a whole, the members of the press corps tend to be a fairly predictable lot; there typically tends not to be a single one that won’t get a twisted little smirk at a dick or fart...
This is the album which made me a committed David Bowie fan. I bought my first copy, a bootleg, in a little record store in Mexico City in the summer of 1974. I was exploring the city, and stumbled into this record store with a box of bootlegs on the counter. As...
Rushing home from the airport after flying in from a business trip from Albuquerque, my focus had been getting back to my wife and our newborn so I could see him before he went down for the night. With that accomplished I flashed back to the plane ride into LAX where I...
People generally seem to have a pretty strong reaction to Ted Nugent, and judging by the mustache and mullet-sporting crowd who were hoisting their Bud Lights and blurting out their battle cries of "Nuuuge!" well before Uncle Ted even hit the stage, the show...
For the second album in a row, notoriously road shy David Berman is taking his Silver Jews on tour. In support of Lookout Mountain, Lookout Sea, the Joos will undertake a six week road trip across the face of this great nation, and will probably find some characters to...