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.…Read More
Though it came out in mid-December, too late to make most “best of 2020” lists, Megalophobe’s Music for Resistance Fantasies (Nefarious Industries) deserves to be remembered as one of the most iconic and painfully lovely summations of the year. Megalophobe is the New York-based solo project of Benjamin Levitt, and he recorded the album to accompany a dance performance choreographed by Marion Storm for the 2019 Brooklyn Exponential Festival.…Read More
When I heard that the lone surviving Bee Gee, Barry Gibb, was releasing a country album, I didn’t bat an eye. Though the band are best known for the falsetto-laden hits of their disco years, and secondarily for the baroque psychedelia they played in the 1960s (which music snobs like me love), Gibb’s musical life is peppered with precedents for this rootsy turn.…Read More
Music discovery has changed a lot in 50 years, but the Reader is still around—and so is Bonnie Koloc.
In 1971, Richard J. Daley won the fifth of what would ultimately be six Chicago mayoral elections (he died of a heart attack during his sixth term, in 1976).…Read More
Chicago indie singer-songwriter Nayla Jungheim knows that putting her own needs first is the best defense against a cruel and indifferent world. She made her new debut album, the lively and big-hearted This Might Be Healing (self-released digitally and available on cassette via Solidarity Club), using largely acoustic instrumentation as a retort to people in her circle who consider such stripped-down music to be trad, staid, and unremarkable.…Read More
Over the past dozen years, White Suns have created a perfect marriage of folding-table harsh noise and streamlined punk, and the New York trio’s latest full-length, The Lower Way (their first for Decoherence Records), asserts their hybrid style more strongly than ever. By layering assaultive electronics, circuit-bent synths, atonal prepared guitars, fried stomp boxes, musique concrète collages, tortured vocal caterwauling, and minimal scrap-metal plinking, the band make an aching, disorienting, eerie mess of noise.…Read More
The Chicago Bears are approaching Sunday’s playoff game with the right mentality. Quarterback Mitchell Trubisky made it clear the Bears will play free because as he put it, everyone is overlooking the Bears and they have nothing to lose.
While that’s a wonderful sentiment, and probably the right one to have entering a very difficult matchup on the road against the New Orleans Saints, it probably isn’t accurate.
Chicago Bears face another litmus test on Sundayon January 7, 2021 at 4:00 pm Read More »
For the last four years, Chicago Bears fans have primarily argued over one thing — quarterback Mitchell Trubisky. More specifically, that conversation has centered around trading up to select Trubisky while passing on Deshaun Watson and Patrick Mahomes, each of whom look like they are on their way to the Hall of Fame.
Well, it appears general manager Ryan Pace may have an opportunity to right his wrong, and fix the colossal error he made when he passed on two generational talents in favor of a quarterback whose fifth-year option was declined, and whose success is dependent on cutting the field in half with one or two reads against terrible defenses.
