A synth-driven instrumental duo, Zombi make somewhat strange bedfellows with most of Relapse Records’ roster–home to Mastodon and High on Fire and death-grind acts like Necrophagist and Skinless. But the match makes sense in light of their obsession with classic horror films of the 70s and 80s and those films’ pulsing, nightmarish electronic sound tracks. Taking their cues from John Carpenter’s Halloween scores and the collaborations between Dario Argento and the band Goblin (and their name from Argento’s Italian revision of George Romero’s Dawn of the Dead), they manage to sound both heavy and atmospheric on the new Surface to Air....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » On Saturday, November 4, the Hacienda Brothers play FitzGerald’s in support of their recent album, What’s Wrong With Right (Proper), which was produced by Memphis legend and obvious band hero Dan Penn. In fact, the group covers a couple of Penn classics — the Box Tops gem “Cry Like a Baby” and Percy Sledge’s “It Tears Me Up” — but as hard as they try, this band can’t reach the heights of their inspirations....

Three years ago Jimmy Callahan, just out of college and living at home, started getting severe headaches. Two weeks later doctors found a brain tumor and gave him two weeks to live. “Well,” he thought, “I guess I don’t have to go to work tomorrow.” Black comedy anchors this piece about Callahan’s experience, which consists of interspersed monologues and vignettes. Sometimes the mix of over-the-top humor (the three supporting actors display great range caricaturing hospital staff, coworkers, and family members) and heartstring tugging (Callahan does a lot of sobbing and praying) is awkward....

THE BAD NEWS is that the glory days of Chicago house are history. There’s no more Shelter, no more warehouse raves, and fewer venues willing to let in under-21s, which has pretty much meant the end of club-kid culture. The good news is that none of this has stopped Chicago from growing a world-class danceclub scene. Pull out Section 3, flip to the “Dance” portion of the music listings, and you’ll find DJs spinning a couple dozen different kinds of music at name-brand clubs, dive bars, and a range of spots between the two....

JULY Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Sun-Times music critic Jim DeRogatis strikes a blow against the ossification of rock with his new book, Kill Your Idols: A New Generation of Rock Writers Reconsiders the Classics. DeRogatis tapped 34 writers to tackle canonical rock albums that they think suck donkey dick (DeRo’s pick: Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band). Tonight he and coeditor Carmel Carrillo (who’s also his wife) will read from and discuss the book, along with local contributors Dave Chamberlain, Allison Augstyn, Chris Martiniano, Bobby Reed, Chrissie Dickinson, Anders Smith Lindall, and the Reader’s Bob Mehr–whose bete noire is U2’s The Joshua Tree....

Greetings from the Toronto Film Festival, where I’ve seen more interesting movies in the last 24 hours than I often see in the course of a month in Chicago. NEW PARAGRAPH. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Two of the most buzzed-about features so far are Eastern Promises, David Cronenberg’s follow-up to A History of Violence, and Juno, Jason Reitman’s follow-up to Thank You for Smoking....

In “Borderlands,” a series of lush, almost surreal large-format images at the Museum of Contemporary Photography, Eirik Johnson presents urban and near urban areas that have largely been abandoned to nature. Often one wonders about the story behind what’s shown. In Untitled (Sweater), an orange sweater and a brown shirt are tied together and stretched between trees. It turns out Johnson found them in a creek used by urban hobos, with the shirt covered in moss....

Forget the top hat and tails–the performers in Barcelona’s Tapeplas troupe look like Frampton-era rock musicians. In the hour-long BoomBach, live percussionists and several dancers tapping mostly in unison are occasionally accompanied by recorded music, including a Bach piece and Yaron Engler’s original compositions. Dramatic colored lights play over them in what artistic director Sharon Lavi calls the piece’s “abstract stories”; it opens with stripped-down, almost Beckettian movement and culminates in a propulsive tribal ritual....

Henry Grimes’s recent return to music after an absence of more than three decades made for a marvelous story, but the really great news is that the bassist’s talents remain intact. In the 50s and 60s Grimes’s gift for apposite abstraction made him the first-call bassist in New York’s free-jazz community, while his impeccable accuracy and vibrant tone made him a valued contributor in more straight-ahead contexts: he could fit in with leaders as unalike as Benny Goodman and Albert Ayler....

James Murphy has generally led by example, releasing stuff from brainy acts like Black Dice on his label DFA (cofounded with Tim Goldsworthy of U.N.K.L.E.) and refusing to stoop to the level of anyone not smart enough to get it. Then LCD Soundsystem blew the whistle on cool-kid electro culture with the 2002 single “Losing My Edge,” in which front man Murphy served notice that he’d been there first, man, and the rest of us could go suck it....

Rule number one: no creepy-looking dudes. Number two: no fat chicks. Otherwise, anything goes at Wicker Park’s Jerkstore, HQ for Johnny Love’s frivolous, slightly depraved parties. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » While walking to Daddy’s Goodnight Blowjob last Saturday night (girls were required to wear pigtails, guys had to have mustaches, everyone in pajamas) my two girlfriends and I passed a woman with spiky black hair at the corner of Damen and Division....

A new album from this Danish quartet, now based in London, is always a real occasion. Their fourth full-length, And the Glass Handed Kites (released in the States by Columbia), further perfects the rarefied pop of 2003’s Frengers: the music is icy and prismatic, like crystals growing in a time-lapse film. It’s hard to say just what differentiates Mew from groups like Radiohead and Sigur Ros, which shoot for similar effects by similar means....

I’ve just started dating a guy who is into being dominated. He also has quite the foot fetish. Problem is, I have zero experience with any sort of kinky sex. He’s 35 and has been around the block; I’m 24, and all I’ve ever had is sex with guys who claimed to have no fantasies. I really want to please him, but I don’t know what to do. He says that he’s not really into pain and that it’s more centered around being mentally and emotionally toyed with....

The three episodes of Hou Hsiao-hsien’s exquisite 2005 feature, his best in many years, are set achronologically in Taiwan, in 1966, 1911, and 2005; each is about 40 minutes long and stars Chang Chen and Shu Qi. The structure may make the film sound like Hou’s greatest hits, echoing not only his trilogy about Taiwan in the 20th century (City of Sadness, The Puppet Master, and Good Men, Good Women) but the nostalgia about adolescence in A Time to Live and a Time to Die, the ritzy period bordello in Flowers of Shanghai, and the contemporary club scene in Millennium Mambo (which also starred Shu)....

FINDING IRIS CHANG: FRIENDSHIP, AMBITION, AND THE LOSS OF AN EXTRAORDINARY MIND Paula Kamen But Kamen’s book, unlike, say, Truth & Beauty, novelist Ann Patchett’s controversial memoir of her thorny friendship with the late writer Lucy Grealy, relies very little upon navel-gazing rumination. Instead it offers the same meticulous attention to detail and thorough immersion in primary sources that distinguishes Chang’s exhaustively researched books, Thread of the Silkworm (1995), about an accused Chinese spy; The Rape of Nanking, published in 1997 to mark the massacre’s 60th anniversary; and the 2003 narrative history The Chinese in America....

A Perfect Paradox Rich was the more rousing of the two writers. “No reporter went to jail during Watergate,” he declared. “No news organization buckled like Time. No one instigated a war on phony premises. This is worse than Watergate.” Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » But Kinsley’s argument, like Rich’s, was strewn with potholes. While Rich excoriated Time for surrendering Cooper’s notes after the Supreme Court refused to step in, Kinsley applauded....

Fences Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Fences hasn’t been professionally staged in Chicago since 1986, when the Goodman Theatre gave it a pre-Broadway tryout starring James Earl Jones. It’s anyone’s guess why, but the good news about the 20-year delay is that A.C. Smith is now old enough to play the middle-aged Troy. Court Theatre’s production, beautifully directed by Ron OJ Parson, allows this longtime local actor, who’s never gotten roles that fully exploit his powerful physicality and quicksilver instincts, to tear into a character with gusto, rage, and joy....

The improvisations by Chris Aiken and Angie Hauser–life as well as dance partners–that I watched on DVD were naturally marked by intimacy, by the fundamentally dramatic polarities of imitation/opposition and approach/retreat. But these informal pieces also showed a strong sense of composition, developing a theme and using the entire space creatively. That’s not surprising considering the dancers’ backgrounds: Aiken has performed with all-star improv artists Steve Paxton and Nancy Stark Smith, and Hauser is a member of the Bessie-winning Bebe Miller Company....

Over the past three years these local noise pirates have gone highfalutin the way self-educated art-school dropouts sometimes do–without cleaning up a bit. The three girls and three boys in the Coughs still dress like they crawled out of a Dumpster and explode onstage like a tin can filled with firecrackers, but on their latest release, a split seven-inch with Night Wounds on the Not Not Fun label, there’s a cool, muffled distance to what used to feel more like an everybody’s-invited crash-punk party....

In this self-consciously contemporary adaptation of the protofeminist 1879 classic, Rebecca Gilman offers Ibsen by way of Ann Beattie: the script is peppered with references to phenomena like Enron, Vicodin addiction, and stem-cell research. But Gilman never makes a convincing case that her Nora, a Lincoln Park trophy wife who somehow doesn’t have her own ATM card, could actually exist today. Elizabeth Rich as Nora’s smart single friend and Lance Stuart Baker as her husband’s chronically ill pal deliver stunning performances rich with nuance....