The listed events were chosen by the editors of Chicagoist and brought to you by the 2009 Toyota Corolla. Music Tonight's Gutter twins show at Metro tonight is easily our most anticipated concert so far this year. The paring of Mark Lanegan and Greg Dulli was electrifying when they Lanegan toured with The Twilight Singers last year, but the time the two shared on-stage was far too brief. The group's long-awaited first disc, Saturnalia,......

Time to lock and load this week's list of hometown shows, SXSW style. Monday 3/3: Catfish Haven, Brighton, MA, Tall Dark Stranger at the Empty Bottle, 9:00 p.m., FREE! Catfish Haven have the distinction of being the subject of one of our great music debates here on Chicagoist, but offline one constant has always been the loyal following of their frenetic, stomp-along swamp folk throwdowns. Catch one of Chicago's most recognized indie acts for free......

Photo by Andy Sternberg/LAist A posthumous tribute wall dedicated to singer/songwriter Elliot Smith sat defaced by graffiti for months on end -- LAist said enough, so did the fans and city council.SFist was surprised to learn that chronic presidential candidate Ralph Nader picked former San Francisco Supervisor Matt Gonzalez as his running mate.Phillyist explored the possibilities of green cleaning.In the latest edition of Reel Toronto, a bi-weekly feature looking at films shot in Toronto......

It's a Bottle edition of Local Options to reduce, reuse, and recycle this week. Wednesday, 2/20: Speck Mountain and Box of Baby Birds at Empty Bottle (with Arms and Sleepers), 9:00 p.m., $7 Much buzzed-about Chicago dream-pop trio Speck Mountain are joined by Box of Baby Birds to bring ethereal, experimental folk to the Empty Bottle mid-week for a shoegazey, acoustified romp with Boston's Arms and Sleepers. MP3: Speck Mountain - Stockholm Friday, 2/22: Moxie......

SXSW just released their full band list and the number of Chicago bands is really encouraging as far as supporting the national impact of our little scene. It's also a good indicator of just how genre-less Chicago is, since the bands range from punk, hip-hop, pop, math-rock, metal, and good ol' fashioned "college rock." It could haave easily been predicted that bands like OFFICE, The Redwalls, Sybris, and The 1900s were in, but big ups......

The addition of soul crushing songwriter Bon Iver makes tomorrow's TNK show a must see for Chicagoist. Taking over headlining duties from Cloud Cult are reborn local retro rockers The Redwalls, and we're ok with that. The northern suburban foursome have been "the Chicago band that coulda shoulda woulda" since signing to Capitol Records in 2003, but all of that precocious promise never quite came to fruition on the major label. Dropped last year amidst......

All week, Chicagoist will be breaking down the Schubas Tomorrow Never Knows Festival by day to take a look at the sometimes raw, always promising talent that's creating some of most deafening buzz on the independent music horizon. TNK kicks off this Wednesday. San Francisco's John Vanderslice is as regular a presence at Schubas as an out-of-towner can be, and his borderline-quirky yet still genre-appropriate, moody songs have carved out a place amidst the venue's......

LAist listed a top ten list of sorts: things they hope not to see in Los Angeles in 2008. (one example, pictured above). Shanghaiist was surprised to learn that "godless," "atheist," and "commie" China is soon going to be the world's largest supplier of Bibles! Torontoist picked some of their favorite photos of 2007. Londonist was relieved to hear the fire at the Royal Marsden hospital didn't harm any of the patients even though......

Girl Talk, aka one Greg Gillis, has been wowing audiences from the Empty Bottle to the Pitchfork Music Festival with his wildly popular brand of mash-up wizardry. Just try to hold a stoic cool-kid pose when Gillis brings his one-man jammin' train through town in January, with newly minted prince of the hipster dance party Dan Deacon in tow. Metro, January 26, 7:30 p.m. (all ages) and 11:30 p.m. (18+), $16. On sale Saturday.......

Marnie Stern may look like a bookstore clerk or a Starbucks barista, but this Brooklyn guitar virtuoso has little else to do with lit or lattes. She's a metalhead through and through, having mastered such thrash-god techniques as finger-tapping, shuddering time-signature shifts, and balls-to-the-wall shredding that would make Eddie Van Halen blush. So what's this obvious shred-head doing on venerable punk rock shock shop Kill Rock Stars Records? She's carefully bridging the gap between the......

Every year at SXSW, we check out at least one band based on their wacky name alone. In this manner, we've discovered some great acts (I Love You But I've Chosen Darkness, Get Cape, Wear Cape, Fly) and some bizarre ones (Here Come Old Vodka Tits, My! Gay! Husband!). Locals Casiotone For The Painfully Alone fall far closer to the former category than the latter, and the vulnerable songcraft that has garnered them national attention......

We got the privilege of attending last weekend's Blogher conference, and in an ironic twist of fate, our two computers went on the fritz. However, it was an experience we still wanted to share with you. Blogher is a conference geared directly toward women bloggers. It was filled with lots of interesting and useful sessions aimed at helping women in the blogosphere. Whether you hadn't yet started a blog or you were looking to really......

White Rabbits are doing something right, because the Brooklyn sextet has gone from a band we checked out at SXSW because they are friends with a friend of ours to one of the buzziest bands in the blogosphere. No surprise, really – these kids can bring the good times rocknroll, and an 8.1 album rating from Pitchfork didn’t hurt either. As we’ve mentioned before, Chicagoist first caught these guys in a Lakeview loft last......

If we were one of the poor souls to pay a couple hundred bucks for a ticket to last night's Amy Winehouse show, we imagine we would be pretty fucking pissed off right now. It's never a good sign when a performer's pre-show prep includes stumbling in the street in search of non-existent paparazzi, dinner at Subway, and a trip to Walgreens for sweets (that you will later use to pad your set as giveaways......

Richard Swift is feeling low. "But Chicagoist, he is a singer-songwriter on an indie label." Point taken, but the real story here isn’t Swift’s state of mind or how many pages of palpable insecurities he can fill in one of those black-and-white spotted composition books – it’s the style and grace with which he yanks a real showstopper out of a sound that could easily teeter on the brink of cliché. His 2007 release,......

What Made Milwaukee Famous is the quirky kid with the dorky name in the back of the class whom no one notices until he gets his braces off, gets into MIT, and scores a summer internship with NASA. Kicking around the Austin scene since 2004, WMMF has put together a kind of indie-rock dream team: management through Fourth Floor, a division of powerhouse promoters Capitol Sports & Entertainment (Lollapalooza, Austin City Limits), booking through Monterey......

Chicagoist has a nice variety of friends who provide myriad viewpoints on myriad subjects, including new music. Our college friends, for instance, hit us up for tickets to the Daughtry show at the Double Door a few weeks back, while our snobby (geeky?) hipster pals were trying hard not to get caught enjoying themselves at Lily Allen in Austin during SXSW. Chicagoist’s good-times party-gal sister likes anything with a “fun beat,” from commercial country to......

Chicagoist still has the Mew sticker we were handed outside the Auditorium Theater after one of Radiohead’s epic sets there last June. Now, normally we’d greet this kind of obvious marketing machine swag with a swift hook shot into the nearest trash receptacle, but the stick figure drawings of cats were whimsical, and we were on a post-show high, so into the back pocket went the sticker. Turns out first impressions for rock bands are......

While the deluge of bands making their way through town after SXSW remains strong, we decided this week we would focus on some hometown heroes. All Smiles is Jim Fairchild, stepping into the spotlight after play guitar in the now defunct Grandaddy. Fairchild crafts just the sort of lush pop you would expect, given his pedigree, but it's missing his previous group's willful quirks. Fairchild adopts a more direct approach with earnestly pleasing results. We're......

It seems like, all across the network, folks were up to no good. Maybe it was all the green beer from last weekend... Gothamist spent the week writing about New Yorkers behaving badly: at the post office, at the Garden, and at the fertility clinic. Calvin Klein may not be misbehaving, but he's just a little dirty, and in a completely different way than some NYC kitchens. SFist had its share of misbehave-rs, too, like......

We're guessing most of you are hungover from St. Patrick's Day. We are too. But still, we're going to muddle on through our green haze and give you (drum roll please...) this Week In -ists. We start with SFist which broke the -ist record for comments with nearly 500 comments on a post about our Mayor's girlfriend. She responded back on charges that she's not a "girl's girl" and, whoo boy-- the floodgates? They......

Ah, SXSW. Yup, it's the time of year when industry flacks, up-and-coming bands, under-the-radar hopefuls, and drunken journalists all descend upon Austin, Texas, for a few days of shmoozing, boozing, and live-music grooving. Chicago bands are being well represented this year, and a few of them are even traveling in style after Hideout's fundraiser last weekend. (We were told that the event raised over $10,000 in donations to send the sixteen bands that participated down......

The jaunts will be short this week as most of us get out and enjoy the sunshine. We were walking around this morning and people just seem happier. Which is all the more reason to get out tonight for some good music. We plan on getting intimate with Ambulette and Maura Davis' intensely mesmerizing voice at Schubas, 3159 N. Southport. Davis splits her time between Richmond and Charlotte and comes to Chicago to rehearse with......

We weed through the week's live-music high points so you don't need to waste your time getting newsprint all over your fingers as you dig through the concert calendars found in your local newspaper. Plus, we give you room to pipe in with your own suggestions. Awesome, no? Knife of Simpson have long been local favorites of ours, and since they don't play that often we try to catch 'em any chance we get. They......

Spring appears to have, er, sprung, at least temporarily, in most of the Ist-A-Verse, so naturally, we're all feeling pretty good. (Yes, we know that spring doesn't officially start till later this month. Just let us enjoy our weather!) And that makes us that much more eager to share all of the nifty things we're up to... Over at Sampaist, spring has more than sprung: it's sweltering! But, as everyone knows, museums are an ideal......

For those of us stuck in the Four Star City while all our great bands head to the Lone Star State, the Hideout has the perfect idea — a SXSW-style showcase before the event. It’s the perfect event to remind us of how much fun the Block Party was last year. It also lets us give a little back to those bands that many times travel down to Austin with nothing but hope in their......

Austinist gets arty with an interactive guide to SXSW, loved some local art galleries and a new art exhibit and lamented the possible loss of "Friday Night Lights" production to New Mexico. Bostonist was happy they finally found an Anna Nicole Smith connection to their fair city and that an Apple Store was opening up. They were less happy that new rules have been established limiting underage shows and that their Governor is spending......

Hm, mid-February means two things: it's starting to warm up a titch outside, and the city is beginning to simmer in expectation of all those gazillions of bands that will be sweeping through town leading into and out of this year's SXSW next month. This week has a few groups matching that migration pattern as well as some locals (and local labels) just releasing new material for public consumption. Honestly, we've always been slightly suspicious......

Valentine's Day is only a few days away, and we here across the Gothamist network wanted to express would like to tell you, in the spirit of the holiday, just how much we love you, our readers. Don't let it get to your heads, though. There are plenty of things we love, you included. Just be glad you're not amongst the things we hate. SFist saw their beloved mayor enter rehab, and they loved the......

Between fake terrorist alerts and scandals big and small, this just might be the best Best of the -ists ever. We're exhausted just thinking about it. First up, SFist, who saw their little 'ole site be the center of what was a nice little scandal (even getting their editor on TV) only to find their scandal dwarfed by the even bigger scandal caused by their Mayor boffing one of his aides' wife. We're not......