Best Buddies Illinois has teamed up with Small Bar to serve up a special brew from Metropolitan Brewing. more ›

Red Bull Music Academy - Chicago Sessions kicks off tomorrow, at Metro/Smart Bar, 3730 N. Clark St., 10 p.m.,, $5, 18+ (21+ for Smart Bar) more ›

Italians Do It Better Records played Lincoln Hall this week during the Tomorrow Never Knows Festival. more ›

Tiger Bones is calling it quits, and they’re saying farewell with one last show tonight at the Metro. more ›

Home is where the heart is so they say, and being that many of us grew up here in the big city, or have transplanted and now consider it home, we stay on our own turf when the holiday season rolls around. Luckily for us there are a merry myriad of magnificent musical events taking place over the holiday weekend. Take a gander at some of our favorites and spread the holiday cheer accordingly: more ›

Tickets for these shows go on sale Saturday, Dec. 10. more ›

Somewhere around the mid-point of Fitz and the Tantrums exhilarating, sold-out show Sunday night at the Metro, the band's emotionally-charged performance hit the audience with the intensity of a blast furnace. more ›

We've already outlined why we think Friendly Fires are nifty, so that should be reason enough to get your butt to The Metro this Saturday, but the additional twist of Theophilus London on the bill makes this a must-see show. more ›

Last week we shared a video Portugal. The Man shot backstage at Double Door during their last trip to Chicago. Today the band moves down the street to perform "You Carried Us (Share With Me The Sun)" in a furniture store that will be familiar to any who walk along a certain stretch of Wicker Park's segment of Milwaukee Avenue. more ›

Get your credit cards ready. Here are the best upcoming concerts to go on sale this week. more ›

St. Vincent's Annie Clark didn't quite thrill. And she showed that the darkest part of her nearly 90-minute set was…the stage lighting. more ›

We've got to teach them all a lesson more ›

Last night at Metro, Blake could have hummed his way through the 90-minute set and still exited to the roar of a thrilled audience. more ›

A brief history of The Rapture: the band was at the forefront of the dance-punk movement in the early aughts and was DFA records' -- you know them as the label that the dude from LCD Soundsystem helps run -- first signing, then they released an awesome if somewhat bristling first album, then they signed to a Major and released a somewhat pedestrian and overly-glossy second album, then they almost called it quits, then one of them found God, the band got (mostly) back together to record a thrilling third album that they decided to put out on , yes, DFA records. more ›

Post By: Bonnie Page more ›

At sixty bucks a pop, you really had to be a fan to buy tickets, but at two and a half hours in a mid-size venue, this was a concert that was really worth it for a hardcore fan. more ›

The last time we saw the Foo Fighters was their first show at Metro (playing with Mike Watt and Eddie Vedder's (then) wife's band. It was awesome. And now we hear they're playing there again on Saturday. Tickets are on sale in fifteen minutes. Good luck. more ›

Controversial rap collective Odd Future Wolf Gang Kill Them All have announced their first North American tour, which includes a stop at Chicago's Metro. Music writers, start your think pieces! more ›

The first time we heard about Peter Silberman's project The Antlers was when they released the lineup for the 2009 Pitchfork Music Festival. That year alone, we were inundated with releases from an army of fellow Brooklyn indie-hipster bands like Dirty Projectors, Real Estate and Bear In Heaven, and, really, we just had it up to our eyelids with that particular scene. When we had the opportunity to catch them at the Fest on that cold, rainy Saturday afternoon underneath that canopy of of tall, slender birch trees that dot the landscape of the C-Stage, we were taken a-back by the unadorned, yet complex beauty of their performance. The combination of Silberman's willowy falsetto and warm, glowing electric guitar and the rain falling ever-so-gently upon us seemed to transcend the hipster the electro-afro-beats that dominated that year's sound aesthetic. more ›

In which we take a quick look at a few recent or upcoming musical releases. more ›

Scott Bradley and Jonny Stax of the Scooty & JoJo Show have been crafting musical parodies for years now. They’re the guys behind Carpenters Halloween, the yearly Halloween show that parodies the classic horror flick Halloween set to the musical stylings of the Carpenters. Last winter, they premiered another mash-up - Alien Queen: A Sci-fi Rock ParOdyssey, a musical that combines the movies Alien (1979) and Aliens (1986) with the epic rock hits of Queen. And now that its first run is over, they’re transforming the musical it into a concert. more ›

Whether this tour means something for the future of Godspeed! You Black Emperor remains to be seen. We're willing to bet that they'll recede again, go about their business, all while their music and performances live on with their devoted fan base. Their third and final Chicago show tonight at The Vic will surely be a treat. more ›

Wonderful news from the Madina Lake camp: Matthew Leone is set to rejoin Madina Lake on stage for the first time since suffering a horrendous beating coming to the aid of a battered woman. more ›

If the frigid temperatures have you bundling up and hibernating next to your furnace on these biter, arctic nights, it is really tough to find a viable reason to leave the comfort of your abode. Though the promise of spring is just around the corner we here at Chicagoist have even dusted off our old Jimmy Buffet records just to try and remember the sun-drenched days, sandy shores of Lake Michigan and of course, what life is like without four-layers to guard our ever-so-vulnerable pasty skin. One such artist that has kept the hope of spring alive and conjures memories of long days with a Corona in one hand and a Frisbee in the other is the music of Justin Townes Earle. more ›

Chicagoist is a sponsor of the Tomorrow Never Know 2011 music festival held at both Lincoln Hall and Schubas. What does this mean for you, of loyal reader? Over the last couple of days we've been giving away a pair of tickets to each of the festival's shows at Lincoln Hall to one lucky winner! Today we're switching things up. Enter below for your chance to win a pair of tickets to one of the following shows.

• Freddie Gibbs, Rita J, and Shad at The Metro on January 14
• Handsome Furs, Jaill, Oberhofer, and Cloud Nothings at Lincoln Hall on January 15
• Tanlines, Reptar, Young Empires, Yawn, and Kid Color at The Metro on January 15
• Little Dragon, Alex Winston, Billygoat, and Mister Joshua at Lincoln Hall on January 16
more ›

Chicagoist Mix No. 6, contributed by Chris Widman, has had a few days to settle in and the response has been solid. It's quite the journey, that mix, and if you took a liking to it then we suggest you take a trip to Metro/Smartbar this weekend for Subfix Massive III, a showcase of all the tunes that comprised it. As in the past, Subfix Massive III will be an all-building event between Metro and Smartbar (which is 21+ to enter). Widman himself will be there, as will a cacophony of other dubstep and techno gurus, including Flying Lotus-endorsed Eskmo and the ever-so-awesome Martyn. more ›

The swing dance and jump blue revival lasted a lot longer in Chicago than it should have, truth be told. But tending bar for Yoko Noge's Jazz Me Blues at HotHouse for nearly eight years paid the rent, especially if you could throw music to dance to in between sets for the kids. more ›

Superchunk played to an enthusiastic crowd at Metro last night, even if the median age meant many a knee was cracking under the strain of non-stop bopping and dancing to the band's thinking punk. The set-list drew material from all corners of the band's long career and ended with an amazing one-two punch covering Naked Raygun's "I Don't Know" and then slamming into a vicious rendition of their own "Precision Auto." Uh-MAY-zing. more ›

In the band’s earlier days Superchunk wrote unbelievably catchy melodies and then sped them up so quickly that singer and guitarist Mac McCaughan often seemed in danger of actually overshooting the versus and choruses with his vocals. Their frenetic energy was the sort of thing that caused people of a certain age (read: me) to now say, “Now THERE was a band that played as if their lives depended on it, they could show the kids a thing or two.” Of course as the years went on, the band’s music slowed, age set in, and while their songwriting skills were still formidable we feared Superchunk was headed for the alt-rock oldies circuit, a theory not helped by the band’s near decade of minimal activity. Count on Superchunk to come back and remind both us AND the kids that they still know what it takes to rock out with this year’s Majesty Shredding, their first full album since 2001. more ›

RJD2 is the moniker of Philly-based turntable wizard, multi-instrumentalist, and record producer Ramble John (RJ) Krohn. Many know him for supplying the theme song for AMC’s Mad Men, but he’s been making music professionally for more than ten years, starting as a DJ for Columbus rap group MHz back in ’99. Of course, he’s departed from the group since, and in the past few years has been on a voyage of sonic exploration. more ›