Kid Sister On Saturday there’s plenty of opportunity to catch a lot of great performances for free thanks to Record Store Day—check out the Reader‘s RSD listings to fill your afternoon with live music. There are plenty of other great shows to see that aren’t associated with Saturday’s retail “holiday.” “John Cale is revered thanks to his years in the Velvet Underground—possibly even more so since the passing of Lou Reed last fall—but he earns our continued attention with his new music,” writes Monica Kendrick....

When my friends and I walked in here recently to the strains of the Buzzcocks’ “Harmony in My Head,” I imagined that we were making a triumphant entrance. In truth, no one looked up from their drinks. This is a place that can politely be described as understated—stucco walls, ball games on muted TVs in the corners, beer by the can and bottle only, bartenders who’ll offer an extra shot just because it’s 7:47 PM on a Thursday, cases of High Life and Old Style stacked in the hallway to the john....

Last week after demonstrators gathered in Millennium Park and the South Loop to protest the Chicago Police Department’s delayed release of the video of officer Jason Van Dyke shooting Laquan McDonald to death, members of the activist communities in Chicago and across the nation proudly posted photos of the marchers and speakers on social media. “As an organization rooted in a Black queer feminist framework, we take reports of sexual assault extremely seriously,” BYP100 leaders wrote on the group’s Facebook page Saturday....

Courtesy of Dueling Critics Jonathan Abarbanel and Kelly Kleiman Last June I told a melancholy tale of economic retrenchment at WBEZ. Because revenues were falling programming was being overhauled; the station was giving the brush-off to paid contributors who’d been rounded up for their expertise, and giving its audience—bright, engaged, and happy to contribute gratis—new opportunities to call in and sound off. Among the experts to bite the dust were WBEZ’s Dueling Critics, Kelly Kleiman and Jonathan Abarbanel, who’d been discussing theater for the station in one format or another—on air, podcasts, blogs—since 2007....

Chicago singer-songwriter Owen Ashworth has left behind the border­line twee indie-pop of his best-known project, Casiotone for the Painfully Alone, but his current output as Advance Base remains modest, earnest, and even sweet. The second Advance Base album, Nephew in the Wild, which comes out this Friday on Ashworth’s own Orindal label, is a quiet record, filled with serenely luminous electric-piano melodies and gentle, sashaying percussion. But evil lurks beneath the surface....

Brian Jackson/Sun-Times At least one person in this photo has a definite challenger (hint: it’s Alderman Pat O’Connor). I got a call the other day from a political junkie I’ll call Tom Keane—in honor of one of my favorite alderman. Anyway, my friend the political junkie said he had something really cool to show me, so . . . In any event, my friend, Mr. Keane, has spent the better part of the last few weeks steadfastly surveying the Internet, keeping track of press releases, Facebook postings, and other announcements by anyone thinking of running for alderman in our 50 wards....

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Last month Genius chief content officer Brendan Frederick spotted something funny in Soundcloud’s streaming rankings. “Love that all the millennial Hot Topic rappers tag their songs as ‘Alternative Rock’ on Soundcloud,” he posted to Twitter, including a screenshot of the top 11 slots on Soundcloud’s alternative-rock chart—every one of them filled by a rapper. I can’t get behind the use of “Hot Topic” to describe someone’s music, but I’ve seen the same thing—young MCs, among them Lil Uzi Vert and Lil Peep, are making melodic, sometimes lo-fi songs that bear the influence of 1990s/2000s pop-punk and emo and then uploading them as “alternative rock....

A few weeks ago I went to an afternoon party at Experimental Sound Studio to celebrate the weekly Option series organized by Ken Vandermark, Tim Daisy, and Andrew Clinkman. The series focuses on improvised music, but the entertainment for this event consisted of Vandermark, Daisy, and occasional Reader contributor John Corbett lined up behind a row of laptops, a CD player, and a turntable in ESS’s outdoor garden, spinning just about anything but improvised music....

Stand-up comedian Beth Stelling, who got her start in Chicago, revealed details of a past abusive relationship on Instagram earlier today. In a post that included photos of her bruised arms and legs, she wrote that an ex-boyfriend had raped her, and that he had physically and verbally abused her. Same girl in all of these photos (me). I’ve had an amazing year and you’ve seen the highlights here, so these photos are an uncommon thing to share but not an uncommon issue....

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Milwaukee Avenue is for suckers. Sure, I bike on it almost daily, but on the rare occasions when I take Elston I’m struck by how much nicer it is, free from the crush of car and bike traffic that you find on Milwaukee when the weather is nice. Milwaukee’s protected bike lanes (between Chicago and Kinzie) have been torn up for most of the last year, whereas the stretch of Elston is recently repaved and, frankly, a joy to bike on....

The Lady Eve Each Friday, we recommend seven Old Movies to Watch Now, all of which come recommended by one of our critics and can currently be screened online. Read the review, watch the movie, feel accomplished. • Richard Pryor Live on the Sunset Strip, the classic stand-up concert film.

Making a Murderer, the compulsively watchable Netflix series that ate up a big chunk of the holidays for many of us, has a couple of major Chicago connections. The future of his intellectually challenged nephew—who was 16 years old when he confessed to raping Halbach while she was chained to his uncle’s bed, slitting her throat, and helping torch her body—rests in large part with Northwestern University’s Center on Wrongful Convictions of Youth....

Gossip Wolf isn’t the biggest fan of Emo Nite LA. The widely publicized DJ monthly doesn’t seem to be good for much except using nostalgia for 2000s emo to sell gimmicky shirts (maybe you’ve seen their “Sad as Fuck” tees). The series’s organizers are bringing their laptops to town on Wednesday, April 19, but why spend $10 to watch mass marketers sing along to old Billboard hits when you can go to a homegrown emo night for free?...

Given that artist and bartender Greg Shirilla bartends at Humboldt Park 4 AM spot the Continental, where he serves rowdy revelers into the wee hours, it’s remarkable that he’s still one of Chicago’s friendliest dudes—dealing with humanity at its drunkest tends to make a person surly! Shirilla needs a hand, and Gossip Wolf is happy to pitch in: On June 28, he fell three stories while cleaning windows at another job, breaking his wrist and ankle and cracking two vertebrae....