Kirsten Lambert

Update: This concert has been postponed until Saturday, September 30. It’s no easy feat to capture the energy of Tank & the Bangas’ live shows on vinyl, but the New Orleans-based band’s third studio album, last year’s Red Balloon (Verve), comes…

Aimee Mann pairs her exquisitely crafted lyrics with unforgettable melodies, but her tunes often aren’t what you’d call light romps. The singer-songwriter started her musical career in the 80s as front woman of post-new-wave dance-pop band ’Til…

When Garbage broke out with their self-titled debut album in 1995, their alluring but abrasive sound—dark power-pop melodies topped by Shirley Manson’s alternately growled and whispered vocals—enticed listeners like sweet pink candy with a messy…

When New Orleans band Tank & the Bangas invited their friends and family to help them cover Hal David and Burt Bacharach’s pop classic “What the World Needs Now Is Love” in January, they embraced the song’s earnest call for kindness, sprinkled in…

Songwriter, multi-instrumentalist, and producer Xavier Dphrepaulezz, better known as Fantastic Negrito, takes us on a trip through his consciousness on his latest album, Have You Lost Your Mind Yet? (Cooking Vinyl/Blackball Universe). He confronts…

Beyoncé has her Beyhive and Taylor Swift fans call themselves Swifties, but no current pop fandom rocks ski masks or face paint quite like the Skeleton Clique—the devotees of Twenty One Pilots, the Columbus-based duo famous for obscuring their faces…

When Chicago drummer Gerald Dowd released his first full-length album, Home Now, in 2014, he threw a daylong release party with the tongue-in-cheek name Day of the Dowd. Over the course of 13 hours, Dowd sat in with 16 of the artists he’s accompanied…

The thought of publicly airing painful events from your past may make you cringe, but soul baring can also be cathartic or even necessary. Brittany Howard, the guitarist and front woman of Alabama Shakes, shares a glimpse into some of the challenges…

After Dave Grohl broke his leg early in the Foo Fighters’ 2015 tour, he performed the rest of the dates with his leg in a cast, sitting on a throne of his own design. Singer-songwriter Barns Courtney took Grohl’s shtick up a notch after breaking his…

Good luck slapping a label on Gary Clark Jr. The Austin native won a Grammy for Best Traditional R&B Performance in 2013, but his music cuts across genres, including blues, rock, and hip-hop. In the 2015 Rolling Stone mini documentary Gary and Eve,…

Peter Frampton’s got a right to sing the blues. The versatile guitarist recently revealed he has a degenerative muscle disorder called inclusion body myositis, which means his fingers might eventually stop letting him play his treasured instruments,…

This year’s New Orleans Jazz & Heritage Festival seemed beset by bad juju: the Rolling Stones begged off due to Mick Jagger’s heart surgery, and Bob Seger bowed out, blaming a scheduling conflict. But Diana Ross, fresh off her “Diamond Diana”…

You never know who might show up at Hot Stove Cool Music Chicago, an annual benefit concert that brings the city’s baseball and music communities together to support nonprofits helping urban youth and families. In past years, Eddie Vedder has…

Listening to some of the tracks on the new Act Surprised (Dangerbird/Fire), Sebadoh’s ninth studio album, you could almost imagine yourself back in 1992. But though the band’s signature lo-fi sound remains, their lyrics place them squarely in the…

Europe was way ahead of the United States with Alice Merton: Her 2016 single “No Roots” made it to number two on the German charts in 2017 and charted all over the continent—including in France, Italy, Belgium, and Poland—before finally hitting the…

You wouldn’t be alone if your first response to a Squirrel Nut Zippers concert listing was to wonder, “Are they still around?” Ardent fans excepted, listeners mostly lost track of the Zippers after their late-90s heyday—but the show ain’t over yet.…

If you’re a fan of Pink Floyd’s most iconic albums, such as Animals and The Wall, you may have plunked down some cash to see Roger Waters in his solo show or caught David Gilmour the last time he was in town. But if you’ve got an appetite for Floyd’s…

For a brief time in the 90s, Chicago’s music community took its turn in the national spotlight—Billboard magazine dubbed the city “cutting edge’s new capital” in 1993, as artists like the Smashing Pumpkins, Urge Overkill, and Liz Phair rose to fame.…

By early February, many Chicagoans don’t wanna do anything more adventurous than curl up under a blanket with a book and a mug of something hot. But Metro, WBEZ, Vocalo, and Young Chicago Authors could lure even the most cold-weather-averse hip-hop…