For years composer and guitarist RHYS CHATHAM has labored in the shadow of his onetime colleague Glenn Branca, whose name is practically synonymous with symphonic music scored for massed electric guitars. But Chatham was doing it first, and thanks to an ongoing series of reissues and new releases from Table of the Elements, he’s finally getting his due. He created huge, flowing washes of sound whose monolithic surfaces belied their densely detailed depths, which swarmed with overtones produced by cranking up oddly tuned electric guitars–just three players could sound like a full orchestra....

Queen meets Judas Priest meets Def Leppard, say the detractors. Queen meets Judas Priest meets Def Leppard, say the defenders–and there are plenty of them. Justin Hawkins’s crushed-testicles falsetto and his brother Dan’s arena-size guitar hooks won the Darkness a handful of Brit Awards last month, not to mention a promise from Queen’s Brian May to buy enough copies to send their Permission to Land (Atlantic) to the top of the charts....

Like everyone else he knew who’d heard it, Drag City publicist Zach Cowie was obsessed with Gary Higgins’s 1973 LP Red Hash–an obscure psych-folk masterpiece in a class with hippie-era rarities like Skip Spence’s Oar, Linda Perhacs’s Parallelograms, and Vashti Bunyan’s Just Another Diamond Day. In 2003 his friend Ben Chasny, leader of the band Six Organs of Admittance and guitarist for Comets on Fire, had given him a copy of the album, and Cowie spent most of the next two years tracking Higgins down....

Friday 16 SPINTO BAND, LOVELY FEATHERS Delaware sextet the SPINTO BAND streamlines the cluttered, expansive grooves of Clap Your Hands Say Yeah (with whom they share an assured geekiness) into concise and perky guitar jingles. They sing better too. The lyrics on last year’s Nice and Nicely Done (Bar/None) address matters of love and like among the young and attention-deficient with a good-heartedness that suggests the songs’ protagonists may well be worth dating a few years down the road....

Re: Oprah/James Frey [Hot Type, January 20]. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » First of all, one of the other people on the couch or by remote said, on the show, that they commended Frey for coming on the show, that a “PR person” would have told him to do nothing and wait for it to blow over. I would have told him to write the truth and then release it via e-mail to the media–but not to go on Oprah, since it was going to be a kangaroo court, which it was....

The musical version of Was beginning this weekend as the first offering of Northwestern University’s new American Music Theatre Project isn’t the first theatrical version of Geoff Ryman’s origins-of-Oz novel to be developed on the campus. In 1994 a student production of Was with a script by NU professor Paul Edwards opened to an admiring audience; it was followed in ’96 with a professional production by Roadworks that won critical acclaim....

Rock, Pop, Etc. AMY ARMSTRONG & FREDDY ALLEN perform and host the “Chicago Collegiate Pride Idol” talent competition as part of the Gay/Lesbian Pride Fest. Sat 4/17, 6:45 PM, Chicago Illini Union, University of Illinois at Chicago, 828 S. Wolcott. 312-413-9862. EDIE BRICKELL, KYLE RIABKO 18 & over. Tue 4/20, 8 PM, Park West, 322 W. Armitage. 773-929-5959 or 312-559-1212. CHICAGO GAY MEN’S CHORUS performs “Low-Hanging Fruit.” Fri 4/23, 8 PM, and Sat 4/24, 5 and 8:30 PM, Athenaeum Theatre, 2936 N....

The title of Vasti Jackson’s most recent album, the self-released No Borders to the Blues, serves as a sort of mission statement for the Mississippi guitarist. On the turbocharged “No Border to the Blues” he insists that the genre transcends race and class, and he calls on a variety of influences–R & B, soul, blues, and blues-rock. Yet he manages to sound consistently southern throughout; there’s not much church in his voice, but his vocals adroitly fuse leather and sandpaper, and the fuzz-edged vibrato in his guitar playing recalls the style of blues-fusion renegades like Johnny “Guitar” Watson....

Was It Something He Painted?; Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » A talented painter with muralist roots, Portillo has developed a cartoonish body of work that is merciless in its critique of America, which he portrays as greedy, soulless, and perverse. Chicago art dealer Aldo Castillo says the deportation made him suspicious; he’d included Portillo’s painting America-War–which shows an American soldier tonguing an Iraqi prisoner while Lynndie England looks on–in an exhibit at his gallery last year, and worried that “something like that might compromise his welcome....

We’ll Call It Short Attention Span Literature Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » The last time we talked to Gina Frangello, a little more than a year ago, she’d just finished editing a short-story anthology for a new press, Hourglass Books, operating out of suburban Lindenhurst. Falling Backwards was a collection of works by various authors on the theme of fathers and daughters, and its publisher, Bill Scheurer, was bent on revitalizing the market for the short story....

Dear editor: Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » “The collective that maintains the CIMC website can hide posts if the material is far outside of, or in conflict with, the principles of the project and this website. Examples of material that may be hidden include newswire posts that are racist, sexist, homophobic, or that clearly fly in the face of our mission to serve as a space for the exchange of news, dialogue, and opinion that advances economic and social justice....

Chris Rose Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » For the past year Rose has issued regular dispatches from New Orleans’s pain centers, describing up close the wonders and horrors of post-Katrina life. “I started covering the story the way it unfolded to me,” Rose says. “I’m not Mike Royko; I’m not pretending to be everyman here. I’m just wandering through neighborhoods on foot and bike, trying to get flat tires fixed, dealing with the suicides of my friends....

Timothy Frerichs Several of Timothy Frerichs’s tender, allusive mixed-media works on paper at Roy Boyd memorialize visits he made to Virginia when his brother was dying of cancer. Frerichs would bike with his seven-year-old nephew down to the Potomac River, where they’d find shells, seeds, and pods. Frerichs suggested drawing their specimens, which they did together. Chestnut 14 is a large-scale drawing of a chestnut he found–actually three rotated views of the same chestnut superimposed on one another....

Luc Moullet remains an unsung hero among the Cahiers du Cinema critics who turned to filmmaking, and this 1975 feature, part of a monthlong retrospective of his work at the Gene Siskel Film Center, provides a succinct introduction to his special brand of low-budget cinema. A restaging of his abortive sexual relationship with Antonietta Pizzorno (who cowrote and codirected but, unlike Moullet, appears only in the finale), it’s painfully, hilariously, and graphically honest, and its willful rejection of technique is an implicit critique of slickness....

I am susceptible to the call of the womb. I am prone to escapism and very fond of comfort, and in a world that’s increasingly ugly, oppressive, and abrasive, I can’t deny my longing to tune in, turn on, and drop into something rich, dense–and OK, a little abrasive. Having added a fourth member, guitarist Cory Shane, Dead Meadow has just put out its fourth album, Feathers, on Matador. I gushed over the D....

In jazz, blues, and R & B some folks still appreciate the art of interpretation, but the notion persists that to be a great rock or pop artist you have to write your own material. Bah. Practically every song on the Detroit Cobras’ three LPs is a cover–most are shoulda-been-classic soul and R & B numbers–but they all come out coated in the band’s trademark greasy, smoky, old-fashioned rock ‘n’ roll....

Steven Dietz’s 2001 play, directed with a heavy hand by James Pelton, substitutes aphorism for dialogue and archetypes for characters in a pointless exploration of the painter’s life and work. The action moves back and forth between the contemporary studio of Patrick, a Van Gogh-despising blocked painter whose art-school mentor devoted his life to finding the artist’s legendary lost self-portrait, and Van Gogh’s own tormented last days. Patrick has agreed to create a fake of the lost painting for reasons that are less than convincing, and the two-act play devolves into a pseudo-intellectual exercise where actors fire off strained metaphors about Art and Passion and Color and Light at high volumes....

Last summer Stephen Magnusen and Franz Zwergel celebrated the launch of their new product, Uberlube, by drinking a toast . . . of lube. They filled shot glasses with the stuff, a cocktail of high-grade silicones and vitamin E, and downed it. Gross, yes, but it was also something of a testament to their deeply felt conviction about the product: that it’s not just for sex. “I mean, the name is lube, but we actually didn’t design it to be just lube,” Magnusen explains....

Jeanne Bishop, This Is Your Life Post wasn’t asking Bishop. He was filling her in. “In my efforts to create a timely drama,” he wrote, “I have drawn from the public record. But I have also gone out of my way to fictionalize my story creating a new location, new people, composite characters, actions which never occurred, and events pulled completely from my imagination. Best of Chicago voting is live now....

Former wunderkind Mark Morris, now approaching 50, made his reputation with L’Allegro, il Penseroso ed il Moderato in 1988, when the Mark Morris Dance Group had just become the resident company at the Theatre Royal de la Monnaie in Brussels. But despite making appearances here since the mid-80s (originally at the tiny MoMing Dance & Arts Center), he and his troupe have never brought L’Allegro to Chicago until now, under the auspices of the Ravinia Festival....