News

OMbres, let's hear it for these Advaitic Songs! The big double LPs (produced at 45 RPM for maximum bass frequencies) and CDs shipped out across the planet last week, deeply thumping your friendly record shop with low tones and chanting moans sure to make it rain on this global drought we call summer. If this is news to you and your internet, hop on over to the Drag City shopping network to grab a copy! Meanwhile, outside your cool, darkened bedroom, OM celebrate... (read more)

Another party's just over, for all you unawares - we're done cleaning up and damn it looks good... good enough to party s'more! So come on, puhleeze join us for our current exhibition's closing reception and performance on July 24th from 7-10pm, at our very own Soccer Club Club! No, that ain't no typo, Limpia, the first solo exhibition from Lisa Alvarado in Chicago, featuring process-based paintings that recall rituals of folk healing and remnants of psychic artifact (interweaving pattern and decay, natch)... (read more)

Lost tunes from a secret room at The Parsonage, we've got seven inches of Six Organs of Admittance. The mega-band Six Organs of Admittance, bro! This ain't your papa's School of the Flower, no! The "Parsons' Blues" 7" is made up of apocalyptic stop and stammer, garbled and atmosphere-choked like a graboid from hell, right through your helmet. Perhaps an early warning sign for something bigger? That is, bigger than Ben Chasny as new OTO president? Wow, nothing gets by you, the... (read more)

It's magical, this thing we call summer; in February, streetwalking without draping ourselves in layers of animal skins and furs was merely a dream-like memory from some distant planet where people comfortably stood in tandem with nature, with toned skin and sun-kissed hair kindly coexisting with gentle warmth and light breezes. That meteorological oasis is nowhere to be found in present-day Chicago, but perhaps the spell of Mira Billotte and her White Magic will shroud us with an aural sense of it this Saturday, July... (read more)

Whoa, we always knew we were visually, musically and hilarity oriented all of our long, incredible lives, but wow - Dirty Three video, where have you been all this endlessly boring time?!? It's... well, let's start with words that have already been invented: the song is called "Rising Below," and it's from the album that brought Dirty Three to all the illegitimate children of their original fan base ("bastard rock," we call it), plus whoever of that diseased old fan base is still kicking (literally... (read more)

How does time work anyway? Did you know that 2008 is as much yesterday as yesterday is? 2008, that was when it began – a sweat young thing boiling up out of the mythical swamps of ooze and grooves. Ty Segall was just getting started, his need to rock was ordering itself into existence. Now it’s just four years later, a mereness in terms of evolution, and already, there are singles everywhere, plus a couple comps, a live album and mostly, five swinging, smashing studio... (read more)

Cheeky monk, London's gone Galactic! Indeed, the man behind the mask behind the pen behind our (back) pages of the very own Galactic Zoo Dossier, Plastic Crimewave, has arrived in the United Kingdom and is helplessly allowing his speech to the drift into Queen's finest posh London accent while kipping out beneath the London Dungeons. Crimewave, a.k.a. Jolly Steve Krakow, then carries his quill to the jolly confines of Gosh! Comics on Thursday, July 12, for a wonderful evening filled... (read more)

After another blistering Independence Day here in America, leave it to the good ol' Silver Joos to shout out to our not-quite-as-free-as-we neighbors up north. You remember "Canada?" So do we, and so do David Berman, "Honkin' on" Bob Nastanovich, and little Stevie Malkmus, circa 1991. Remembering their salad days like the middle-aged mensa they claim to be, Early Times is a testament to the longevity of their unstudio sound, a carefully realized primitivity that required careful positioning of the trio in... (read more)

For years, The Lowbrow Reader has made sporadic leaps off the printed page and onto the stage, but never once outside the dolorous (but friendly) confines of old New York city. But this time, fuck New York! Aw, don't be so sensitive, Big Appleites! All we are saying is that this l'il bit o' news really only concerns the heavenly bodies of the greater Chicagoland area! Because see, on Thursday, July 5, the Lowbrow Reader Variety Hour takes a giant leap for mankind into the... (read more)