Poet Thax Douglas has long been described as a polarizing figure in the local music scene, but after viewing the recent documentary on Douglas, Thax: The Movie, we've decided that viewpoint is skewed and incorrect. While there are a number of incredibly vocal critics who deride Douglas' presence at shows, the overriding majority of musicians and concert attendees appreciate his contributions to the community. Luminaries from Ted Leo, to Josh Caterer, to Jeff Tweedy sing......

Jesse Thorn, Host of The Sound of Young America ...

Each morning we're going to highlight five bands playing at Lollapalooza that we think are worth seeing. Some will be popular, some less known, but we believe they're all worth your time. And for those not making it to the festival itself, we'll round it out with an additional show going on after the grounds close down for the evening. The Switches We are sure we'll be cursing this band from England throughout the day.......

Ted Leo gives it his all. He proved that last summer with blood streaming down his forehead after an overly exuberant lunge at the microphone to deliver his vocals, and didn't miss a beat. He proved it at Touch & Go's 25th anniversary party when he delivered one of the strongest sets in a legendary line-up and capped it off with a searing version of "Suspect Device." And he proved it by delivering yet another......

The talk of the "indie rock diet" that's been tossed around the blogosphere this week is ripe with irony; any of us who have hung out with a band for even a night know that the stereotypical indie rocker replaces food with alcohol whenever given the chance. And when on tour, anything goes. A friend of ours, who happens to drum in a band coming to Chicago next week, once told us about how the......

Living with the Living is the latest from Ted Leo & The Pharmacists. It has an obvious, impassioned, political edge that's easily discerned from reading the song titles alone. Ted has always been one to speak his mind and encourages others to do the same with a contest at Threadless. The goal is to design a t-shirt that relates the themes of Leo’s latest album. It’s not meant to be a Ted Leo marketing vehicle......

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......

Time to get that credit card out of hibernation and spend away, my friends! This week must mark the proper amount of time between on sale dates and concert dates that corresponds to warm weather coming back to Chicago. Kaiser Chiefs will be out in support of their soon-to-be-released album Yours Truly, Angry Mob off which the single “Ruby” we were told sounds like Morrissey fronting Cheap Trick. While this image still has us reeling,......

Wishing to extend our summer fun by one more weekend, Chicagoist headed down to the Live Music Capital of the World for the 5th Annual Austin City Limits Music Festival. The lineup was similar to that of Lollapalooza and gave us a chance to see a couple of bands we missed there, as well as enough new ones to keep us running from stage to stage. The ACL Music Fest is set up in Austin's......

A scene of warehouses and industrial grit served as the stage backdrop during this weekend’s Touch & Go 25th Birthday Party and we can’t think of a better visual fit for the label’s aural aesthetic. Many of the bands performing over the weekend fit perfectly within the visual suggestion set about by the mega-urban “City That Works” setting, thus setting this festival apart from the lush environs experienced during Intonation / Pitchfork / Lollapalooza earlier......

Touch & Go finally released the set-times for this year's big ol' anniversary show/Hideout Block Party. Saturday is THE day to go, but all three days have got stellar acts. Come to think of it, while Saturday hosts the heavy-hitting legendary bands, Friday night is the one to don the ol' dancing shoes and get your groove on. We are so psyched for this. Friday, September 8 9:00pm !!! 8:00pm Ted Leo + Pharmacists 7:00pm......

Chicagoist, as we’ve always said, is for the children.* So when we heard that the 10th Annual Hideout Block Party a.k.a. the Touch and Go 25th Anniversary Celebration was donating all its profits to three youth-focused organizations, we put any excuses aside and snatched up some tickets. But we wanted to do a little more, so we bought a few extra passes to (potentially) give to you, dear reader. Chicagoist is giving away three weekend......

As the group Liars droned on with their less-complicated-than-it-looks brand of noise rock, they repeatedly intoned the words “the weather is fierce.” It was a lyrical aside that would define the weather, if not necessarily the atmosphere, of the second Pitchfork Music Festival in Chicago’s Union Park. Though Pitchfork was instrumental in creating last year’s Intonation festival, a split with some of last year’s organizers led to two separate events this summer. So the site......

Approximately 17,000 indie rock fans now have tans thanks to the 2006 Pitchfork Music Festival in Chicago’s Union Park. With temps in the 90s all day long and plenty of humidity radiating off the bodies of a sold-out crowd, Day One was a sweat-filled celebration of some of the best indie rock has to offer, including Chicago groups like Hot Machines and Chin Up Chin Up. Many attendees lined up to enter the park as......

Yesterday local record label Touch and Go announced its plans for a "This Is Your Life"-style 25th Anniversary show that will coincide with the Hideout’s tenth anniversary and its annual block party in September. From September 8th through September 10th, 25 past and present Touch and Go artists will play at the Hideout. So far, nine artists have been announced including Didjits and Scratch Acid (each with all their original members), Enon, Shellac, Calexico and......

Yesterday, we learned that Lollapalooza sold 3,000 tickets without even announcing a single band. Today, not to be outdone, Pitchfork announced six of their thirty-six slated acts for the Pitchfork Media Festival. Here are the six acts that are supposed to get us all excited and ready to buy tickets on Monday. That's right - in three days these one- and two-day passes go on sale. No word yet on exact sale time, but......

Attention music snobs: if your parents have been after you to come out to the ‘burbs for a visit, may we suggest the third week of March? The final roster for South by Southwest’s music conference is out, and since most of your favorite bands will be out of town at that time, Chicagoist thinks it’ll be a good time to bring home some laundry. The full list of Chicago bands is here. We noticed......

Chicagoist loves contributing to a good cause because it makes us feel all warm and fuzzy inside. That’s a given. However if our contribution might also net us something unique and fun we’re totally okay with that too. Local booking powerhouse Flower is celebrating their 15th anniversary with a slew of concerts featuring heavy hitters like Tortoise, Ted Leo + Pharmacists, Local H and Jimmy Eat World as well as reconvened “legends” like The Promise......

There are a few questions on our lazy, yet caffeinated, mind this morning. Why is tonight’s Ted Leo show at Logan Square Auditorium NOT sold out? It seems like everyone we’ve talked to recently has said they’re planning on going and yet tickets still remain. Has he fallen off? Did we miss a Rock Snob memo? Someone please explain this contradiction! If this announcement leads to a run on tickets then we’ll be just as......

It�s summertime in Chicago and that means (at least) one thing: street fairs! That�s right, rub elbows (often literally) with your Windy City brethren and �enjoy� over-priced, reheated food and watered down beer, all for the measly price of a �suggested donation.� To you and Chicagoist, that means free. (There was a great article in the Reader last year about how, no, you don�t have to pay for street fairs because they�re on public......