Chicago Reader

Susie Mccollum I first met Susie McCollum at a recording studio, where she was assisting an audio engineer behind a massive mixing board, making minuscule tweaks to a rock ’n’ roll record. I didn’t realize she also made her own music, so you can imagine my surprise a couple weeks later when I was casually scrolling Instagram and came across a reel of McCollum singing a beautiful rendition of Carole King’s lovelorn ballad “So Far Away” a cappella in an empty room with unreal acoustics.

Revocation Revocation have been blasting out fiendishly intricate technical death metal for more than a quarter century. Led by guitarist and lead vocalist David Davidson, the Boston band was formed in 2000 by high school friends as Cryptic Warning, and then in 2006 disbanded and immediately re-formed as Revocation. Since 2015, Davidson has been the sole remaining founding member, and Revocation haven’t just gone through lineup changes but also stylistic evolution.

Russian Circles A new Russian Circles album is always something to look forward to. The instrumental metal trio’s most recent album, 2022’s Gnosis, was a hard act to follow, but their upcoming ninth full-length, Nine (Sargent House), surges forward ferociously.

Orange County duo the Garden make punk rock like they were raised on the Internet. Wyatt Shears plays bass and guitar, his twin brother, Fletcher, plays drums, and they both contribute vocals and program electronics. Their stripped-down, energetic music is plenty eclectic, but they come across like digital natives less because of what they play and more because of how they play.

Sun Ra Arkestra Surveying the mess that the best human minds had made of the world, the bandleader, pianist, electronic musician, composer, and philosopher known as Sun Ra took a dim view of consensus reality. His outer space–themed music—which he began to present with a variably sized big band known as the Arkestra in Chicago in the mid-1950s—was a vehicle to make a case for transcending the merely possible.

Barney & Friends premiered in April 1992. By September 1993, Charles Barkley was whooping Barney’s ass in one-on-one basketball on Saturday Night Live, and by October 1994, someone at the University of Alberta launched the Barney Fun Page, a still-active online flash game that lets you torture the purple dinosaur with knives, guns, or a cannon. Anti-Barney humor has its own Wikipedia article, completely independent from that of the TV show.

If nothing else, Ridley Scott can usually be counted on to swing big. The connecting tissue between the visionary sci-fi of Blade Runner (1982) and the world’s first movie to be racist toward Italians, House of Gucci (2021)—two works with four decades and a vast gulf in quality between them—is Scott’s sense of scale and ambition. It’s surprising, then, how small his newest film feels.

Children’s movies have long held subtext that gives the parents something to chew on while the kiddos stare at eye-popping imagery. Coyote vs. Acme isn’t quite that. Buried as a tax write-off by a transitioning Warner Bros. before it was sold off to indie distributor Ketchup Entertainment, Coyote vs. Acme is a by-product of decades of Hollywood cynicism, featuring the once-lauded Looney Tunes as disposable accessories the entertainment titan brushed off in the hopes of lifting its sinking ship.

It’s easy to generalize what makes Chicago’s theater and film scenes unique: Steppenwolf-style ensemble mentality, City of Big Shoulders work ethic, midwestern authenticity over everything. It’s another thing to prove it, tucked away and toiling on a quiet block in Bowmanville, with an improbably self-funded and locally crewed indie rom-com.

W.I.T.C.H. Zambia’s W.I.T.C.H. (We Intend to Cause Havoc) began life as a funky, fuzzed-out rock band in 1972, eight years after their country threw off British colonial rule. Their founding vocalist, Emmanuel “Jagari” Chanda, has said that hearing the Rolling Stones, Black Sabbath, and Grand Funk Railroad on the radio led him to record music that blended heavy rock with traditional African rhythms.