Italians Do It Better Records played Lincoln Hall this week during the Tomorrow Never Knows Festival. more ›

Home is where the heart is so they say, and being that many of us grew up here in the big city, or have transplanted and now consider it home, we stay on our own turf when the holiday season rolls around. Luckily for us there are a merry myriad of magnificent musical events taking place over the holiday weekend. Take a gander at some of our favorites and spread the holiday cheer accordingly: more ›

We’re delighted to hear that local pop project Clip Art is kicking off 2012 on a strong note—the band is scheduled to headline a weekly residency at Schubas in January and will bring along a host of local supporting acts. more ›

We reviewed The Features latest album and shared a track of theirs with you a few months ago, so it's no secret we're fans of the band's blistering approach to rock and/or roll. Well they're back in town tonight to play the super cozy confines of Schubas and man oh man believe us when we say this is the setting you want to see them in. It'll singe your eyebrows and bring a smile to your face. more ›

Get your credit cards ready. Here are the best upcoming concerts to go on sale this week. more ›

Van Hunt's new album What Were You Hoping For? is just fabulous. It's a challenging weird mixture of twisted R&B and psychedelic guitars. It's easily the best Prince album in almost two decades. It's not a particularly easy listen but once you break through it's barriers -- at times Van Hunt seems to be almost daring you to keep holding out for a hook and some payoff -- you get irretrievably lost in its tangled grooves. So we entered his sold-out show at Schubas last Friday with high expectations and were just waiting to be blown away. more ›

Pork, booze, and record bins. These are a few of our favorite things. The folks from Schubas are bringing all three together at their first annual Pig, Swig and Record Dig. more ›

While a number of our correspondents are already converts to the house of YAWN, this critic is a relative latecomer to their party. Descriptions of the band being favorably compared to ethereal psychesters Animal Collective did not exactly send us rushing to consume YAWN’s earlier work, and we admit it colored our perception upon hearing their EPs as they were released. But upon hearing their full-length debut Open Season we are humbly reminded that we should not judge a musical group by a critic’s attempt at comparison. more ›

Look at the guy above. Doesn't he look kind of like an acid casualty? Not an acid casualty Julian Cope style, he's certainly not that damaged, but there is a buzziness that come through just looking at Adam Granduciel's face that leads you to believe he might be operating on a slightly different place than you or I. more ›

Van Hunt's What Were You Hoping For? isn't out until late September, but tickets for his show at Lincoln Hall on October 7 go on sale tomorrow at noon so this is as good a time as any to try and get you excited about him. We're big fans of folks who push against boundaries and manage to concoct thick stews of sound with conflicting influences. It's the ability to bring all those separate pieces together into a singular rhythm that separates the merely sonically experimental from the gifted alchemist of melody. more ›

There are many ways a watering hole can work its way into the hearts and psyches of a city and its denizens. Sometimes it is an atmosphere or a vibe that reflects the soul of its environs. Others, it is the characters in the crowd that call themselves regulars. Schubas may lack the quaint, hokeyness that was everyone's favorite sitcom bar, but it is every bit as representative of the Windy City as Cheers was of Boston. It's got our grittiness, our gregariousness, and our lust for life and good time. As this is a restaurant review, we are also happy to say that it offers some damned good food too. more ›

Tonight at 6:30, the best deal we've seen in ages is going down. Tres Generaciones tequlia has joined up with Schubas to offer a four-course meal with tequlia pairings for each course. The dinner takes place in Schubas' Harmony Grill, and the price has been reduced at the last minute. If you buy tickets now, it'll cost you just $25.50 per person, half off the original price. Wow! more ›

Norwegian-born singer/songwriter Sondre Lerche has been making music nearly half his life. As he comes up on the tenth year since his debut album, Faces Down, and his two-night engagement in Chicago supporting his latest effort, Sondre Lerche, the talented--and talkative--Lerche took some time to chat with Chicagoist about Norway versus the Midwest, being a lonely writer, and why he waited ten years to release a self-titled album. more ›

We gushed about U.S. Royalty when they passed through town a few months ago, and in the time since then their album has only grown more satisfying the more we play it. One reason for this is that the songs are richly layered, incorporating so many different eras of rock and/or roll it's easy to just lose yourself in the endlessly shifting layers. There's also a precision at work here, shades of mid-'70s AOR are unavoidable, punched up by a bright melancholy to add greater heft even in U.S. Royalty's more delicate sonic moments. more ›

Eight months since the release of their sophomore album, Mirror Mirror, Unicycle Loves You have announced their third release. Failure won’t be dropped until early 2012, but the band has been writing new material for the past six months. And in anticipation of the upcoming album, they’ve shared a demo of a new track, “Magic Marker Blackout.” more ›

Patrick Stump, former Fall Out Boy and a future Soul Punk, covers Kanye West at Schubas. Rolling Stone is there to document the whole thing. more ›

Owen Ashworth, the man behind Casiotone for the Painfully Alone, is back with a new project, Advance Base. They play at Schubas tonight. more ›

We've heard NPR is turning into quite the juggernaut when it comes to promoting music, but now they're causing people to create bands too? The Broken West's Ross Flournoy entered an online songwriting contest sponsored by Carrie Brownstein's Monitor Mix blog for NPR and the end result was the driving guitar pop of "Under The Gun" and the formation of Apex Manor. His debut, The Year Of Magical Drinking fleshes out the skeleton laid by "Under The Gun" with nine other tunes ranging from fuzzy to friendly to simply delicate. more ›

Now that we've officially taken the SXSW filter off of all of our news and social media sites, we're kind of relieved to be presented with a band that doesn't necessarily bang us in the head with a hammer, but gently soothes us with more of a textural whimper. Jason Quever, the leader of the San Francisco dream pop collective known as Papercuts, doesn't necessarily seem to wow you upon a first listen with his quiet, yet complex melodies. His modus operandi is more focused, engulfing this listener in a sea of fuzzed out guitars, whispered vocals and carefully etched out melodies that takes a couple listens for most music fans to appreciate. more ›

It's a certainty you may not have heard of Orgone. If you've found yourself listening to a Horseshoe Casino ad on the radio lately, you've heard their music. Horseshoe licensed the West Coast funk band's song "Sophisticated Honky" for its radio ad locally and the opening guitar riff and staccato horns have a way of getting under your skin. For us, in a good way. more ›

Telekinesis is the brainchild of Michael Benjamin Lerner and his sophomore album, 12 Desperate Straight Lines, is bubbly, effervescent and capable of cutting you until you bleed because the song craft is so sharp. While he records everything by himself in the studio, he expands the group into a three piece on the road including Chicago's Jason Narducy (ex-Verbow) on bass and Cody Votolato on guitar. Lerner rounds out the trio tackling singing duties from behind the drum kit. And it makes sense that the band's tunes are written from the perspective of a drummer since each one is propelled along by a seriously right-on rhythmic piston underneath melodies that attract foot stomping, hand clapping and wide smiling responses from all exposed to them. more ›

We like that Head of Femur attempts to play a Brian Eno track now and then, like this cover of "The True Wheel" from an April 2008 performance at Schuba's. Hope you do, as well. more ›

We've probably reached the point of saturation when it comes to "new" anthemic rock and roll bands, but pray tell give a listen to Washington, D.C. quartet U.S. Royalty. Treading the path recently blazed by grandiose, vocal- and rhythm-driven outfits like Band of Horses, Local Natives and Fleet Foxes, U.S. Royalty finds a niche by incorporating the kind of big, major-chord song structures you would expect from a band hailing from our nation's capital. more ›

Scattered Trees are in the midst of a resurgence. The band grew up just outside Chicago, playing music together casually before forming Scattered Trees and garnering attention locally for their warm, upbeat harmonies about love and life. But progress tapered and the band almost broke up in ‘09, as members started drifting apart to pursue their own endeavors. It was the death of lead singer Nate Eiesland’s father that pulled them back together - Eiesland’s mourning took the form of songwriting, and the rest of the band flew in last February to record the tracks, which would become the bulk of their upcoming album Sympathy. more ›

Sound like this would only happen in an absurd alternate universe? Not so, since it could be you sampling bourbons over a four-course feast, sharing conversations with the "Whiskey Professor" and the great-grandson of Jim Beam on Tuesday, Jan. 18 at Schubas. more ›

Chicagoist is a sponsor of the Tomorrow Never Know 2011 music festival held at both Lincoln Hall and Schubas. What does this mean for you, of loyal reader? Over the next couple of days we'll be giving away a pair of tickets to each of the festival's shows at Lincoln Hall to one lucky winner! Today we kick off the giveaway with a pair of tickets to the Thursday, January 14 show at Lincoln Hall featuring Mister Heavenly, Screaming Females, Title Tracks, and The Dig. Enter by 5 p.m. today for your chance to win! more ›

Chicagoist is a sponsor of the Tomorrow Never Know 2011 music festival held at both Lincoln Hall and Schubas. What does this mean for you, of loyal reader? Over the next couple of days we'll be giving away a pair of tickets to each of the festival's shows at Lincoln Hall to one lucky winner! Today we kick off the giveaway with a pair of tickets to the Thursday, January 13 show at Lincoln Hall featuring Chicagoist favorites The Besnard Lakes, Frankie Rose & The Outs, Lia Ices, and A Lull. Enter by 5 p.m. today for your chance to win! more ›

Chicagoist is a sponsor of the Tomorrow Never Know 2011 music festival held at both Lincoln Hall and Schubas. What does this mean for you, of loyal reader? Over the next couple of days we'll be giving away a pair of tickets to each of the festival's shows at Lincoln Hall to one lucky winner! Today we kick off the giveaway with a pair of tickets to the Wednesday, January 12 show at Lincoln Hall featuring The Helio Sequence, Sun Airway, Houses, and California Wives. Enter by 5 p.m. today for your chance to win! more ›

Chicago is an alt-country kind of town. From dearly departed, then suddenly reunited groups like The Blacks, to well-known alt-superstars like Wilco, to adventurous up-and-comers like Judson Claiborne and Tom Schraeder, the Windy City has seen more than its fair share of troubadours and chanteuses donning an acoustic guitar in one hand, and a bag full of post-modern production tricks in the other. Whether or not they successfully update country-and-western musical formulas to the 21st century is a post for another day. The point is, to get your foot in the (barnyard?) door with this crowded bunch, you have to stand out. Local sextet Dastardly may mockingly bemoan the fact that they’re neither pretty enough for the mainstream nor weird enough for the underground on their new EP, May You Never. But, based on the seven-track collection of jaunty, steadily satisfying tunes, they’ll soon have to ward off attention from both music factions, whether they’re ready for it or not. more ›

After a bit of time away from the local music scene, skuzzy garage-rockers Mannequin Men are releasing new material. Along with a new 7-inch, which will be available for purchase at the veteran quartet’s Dec. 4th show at Schubas, the group posted a new demo, “Don’t Grow,”; on their Soundcloud page. more ›