Rock and roll is coming to Ravenswood, and the children of the neighborhood will be the beneficiaries of this sleepy area’s wake up call. The Raven, an indie rock-heavy weekend festival, invades Chase Park August 16 and 17 with all proceeds going to the renovation and expansion of the park’s playground. Melissa Lagowski, founder of festival planners Big Buzz Idea Group, said the neighborhood, the city, and the arts community have rallied around the cause.......

It's the end of the line in our pre-coverage of the Tomorrow Never Knows festival, which can only mean one thing: you're well-prepared for the weekend rockness. The Walkmen keep throwing it back to the original foundations of rock music: gravel-coated riffs, fuzzy ballads, and lots and lots of sweat on stage. While they have yet to come up with anything as strutting, ballsy, and soul shaking as 2004's Bows and Arrows (and especially first......

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......

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,......