I just realized I’ve loved Pallbearer for eight whole years, starting the moment I first heard their debut album, Sorrow and Extinction. Since at least their third full-length, 2017’s Heartless, the best ever doom-metal band in Little Rock, Arkansas, have openly indulged their love of prog and classic rock, and I’ve stayed cool with that. Over the years they’ve also tamed a bit of their blown-out, barely-in-tune graveyard murk and adopted a relatively lucid approach to their vocal production, and I didn’t get off the bus on account of that either....

The Portland Cello Project was created in 2006 to bring the cello into new spaces and pair it with unlikely source material, and it’s since juxtaposed a wide variety of reconfigured pop, rock, and rap songs with Western classical arrangements—contrasting Kanye West with J.S. Bach, for instance, or Pantera with Arvo Pärt. The group tweaks its instrumentation from show to show, adding horns, guitar, bass, drums, vocals, and more, but whatever its lineup, it makes for a sight to behold and a sound to relish, often with more than ten cellists onstage together....

Fox Matt Dillon and Juliette Lewis in a strange land This second golden age of television we’re living in is cool and all, but I’m especially excited about the resurgence of the miniseries. As shows become more cinematic, it makes more sense for them to achieve an arc during the course of a single digestible season. Two of the best things on TV last year—the first season of True Detective and HBO’s four-parter Olive Kitteridge—were effectively miniseries....

The pandemic has kept many of us from leaving the house, but honestly, why would you want to? There is too much TV to watch to go outside. Outside doesn’t have Hulu or Netflix or HBO Max. To encourage you to stay home and stay safe, comedian/writer Rima Parikh and myself (two people who watched just as much TV in the before times) will be diving deep into the shows we’re loving or lovingly hate-watching, social-distance-style, over Google chat....

As groundbreaking and fascinating as the television show Twin Peaks was when it ran in the 90s (and was again during its recent resurrection), it’s doubtful that the David Lynch-directed surrealistic murder drama would have reached its iconic status without its drop-dead-gorgeous soundtrack. The sparse, mesmerizing opening sequence, a collaboration between the chilly cool compositions of Angelo Badalamenti and the breathy innocence of singer Julee Cruise, set the atmosphere of the sinister Washington logging town from the very beginning....

Last month Polo G‘s major-label debut, Die a Legend, ranked number 46 on the Billboard 200 while Chance the Rapper’s The Big Day sat at 58. Chance’s “debut” album had arrived at the end of July, nearly two months after Die a Legend, but Polo G outlasted it on the charts with just a fraction of the publicity. And I understand why so many people have continued to stream Die a Legend all these months later, because I’m one of them....

There are plenty of shows, films, and concerts happening this week. Here’s some of what we recommend: Wed 6/27-Thu 6/28: History resonates through Suzan-Lori Parks’s Civil War drama Father Comes Home From the Wars. 7:30 PM, Goodman Theatre, 170 N. Dearborn, 312-443-3800, goodmantheatre.org, $10-$40.

To start: a shout out to friend-of-this-column and Chicago actress and teacher Sidney Miller for her recent appearance in the “Press Play” PSA for the federal Department of Health and Human Services. Sidney’s the main character here, taking life off pause and encouraging us to get vaccinated and resume our celebration of life.

Khudejha (Kauser Mohamed) has a problem. She’s wearing too much clothing—or rather the wrong type of clothing. Upon arriving at a sex party that she was invited to by a friend, she’s told her “power shirt” is in fact lame and that she should undress appropriately. We learn through her friend Natasha (Aasia LaShay Bullock) that it’s been a while since Khudejha got some (or any) and this kink party is going to be a reset....

Welcome to the Reader‘s morning briefing for Friday, May 27, 2016. Have a wonderful Memorial Day weekend! Rauner slams Madigan budget passed by state house of representatives The budget battle continues in Springfield. Governor Bruce Rauner slammed the budget house speaker Mike Madigan got through as “more of the same” and “unrealistic.” The deadline for the spring legislative session is Tuesday, and Rauner hopes a deal can be reached by then....

When elegiac doom band Warning take the stage at Reggie’s Rock club on October 26, it will be their first and last time playing in Chicago. The UK-based band, which formed in 1994 and disbanded for three years in the early 00s before breaking up for good in 2009, are on a brief and final return for a number of festival appearances along with this US tour. Vocalist-guitarist Patrick Walker had been fielding reunion offers for some time, but as he recently told Revolver, this year was an “appropriate and convenient time” to reunite; his current outfit, 40 Watt Sun, had just completed their most recent album, 2016’s Wider Than the Sky....

Since 2004 Plastic Crimewave (aka Steve Krakow) has used the Secret History of Chicago Music to shine a light on worthy artists with Chicago ties who’ve been forgotten, underrated, or never noticed in the first place. Older strips are archived here.

As a young Buddhist monk in Phnom Penh, the capital of Cambodia, during the 1960s, Kompha Seth studied the Brahmi alphabet and Magadhi—a root language of modern Khmer—which had been preserved and passed down for generations. Today, he’s one of only a few Cambodians in the world who understands these dialects and their links to modern Khmer. In 1976, Seth cofounded the Cambodian Association of Illinois, where he serves as executive director....

Founded in 1990, the Chicago Film Critics Association is the only critics’ group in the U.S. to mount its own film festival, which offers its nearly 60 members the dubious distinction of reviewing an event they’re simultaneously promoting. (This is the sort of thing that makes two-thirds of Americans distrust the news media.) I haven’t belonged to the CFCA for years, and because this puts me in a small minority of local critics who can comment on the festival impartially, I’d be remiss if I didn’t weigh in....

As anyone who regularly visits this space knows, I’m a huge fan of the music created by the LA jazz musicians John Carter and Bobby Bradford, whether together or on their own. In the summer of 2013 the great Chicago reissue label International Phonograph put the classic 1969 Flying Dutchman release Flight for Four (performed by a quartet led by Carter and Bradford) back into circulation, featuring a beautiful restoration of the original artwork within a lovely cardboard package....

One evening at Honey’s, in the Fulton Market district, chef Charles Welch appeared at my table to drop off the mains: a spit-roasted pork chop and half rotisserie chicken. After the former Sepia executive sous chef ran down the dishes’ respective attributes, he bid us good eating, and then spun around into a support post with a startled “Whoa!” It was a harmless spot of slapstick that rendered the genial chef all the more genial....

At 5 PM Saturday, March 21, Governor J.B. Pritzker’s COVID-19 Executive Order No. 8, aka the Stay at Home order, took effect. Here’s a daily-ish journal of how Reader staff, our friends, family—and our pets—are spending our time. Amerie’s 1 Thing K.E’s Last Night (feat. WolfRockstar) Kandi’s Don’t Think I’m Not DripReport’s Skechers Cookie Kawaii’s Vibe Maggie Rogers: NPR Music Tiny Desk Concert What we’re ordering:

ARTIST: Andy Burkholder SHOW: Pedestrian Deposit, Hide, and No Dreams at Hideout on Wed 11/8 MORE INFO: andyburkholder.com

A small group of Jewish teenage girls in Chicago believes in a promised land. “When it came to rape culture, a lot of my students had never heard that term,” says Stephanie Goldfarb, director of youth philanthropy and leadership at the JUF and the director of RTI. “But we would ask, ‘What’s keeping you up at night?,’ and they were describing what rape culture is without knowing there was vocabulary for it....