Friday 4 Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » ICY DEMONS The latest art-damaged pop outfit fronted by Bablicon bassist Griffin Rodriguez is far and away his best band. Icy Demons’ debut album, Fight Back! (Cloud Recordings), has the plethora of coloristic detail and overlapping guitar and keyboard lines you’d expect from Rodriguez (aka Blue Hawaii). But Bablicon always sounded like an unruly mess, and this combo arranges its instrumental arsenal to create some semimemorable songs; Rodriguez sings in a falsetto that traces singsongy guitar and keyboard parts, suggesting a more raucous, less lyric Robert Wyatt....

Since moving to New York from Brazil in the mid-90s, guitarist and singer Vinicius Cantuaria has been messing around with bossa nova. On his first American album he stripped the instrumentation down to the essentials, then for the next two recruited a slew of downtown jazzers–including guitarist Marc Ribot and drummer Joey Baron–to add their own idiosyncratic textures. The brand-new Horse and Fish (Bar/None) contains its share of beautiful straight-ahead bossa, but on much of the record Cantuaria continues to crossbreed it with introspective jazz....

The Walkmen’s third album, the new A Hundred Miles Off (Record Collection), starts off with “Louisiana,” which sounds like Dylan doing a south-of-the-border romantic standard, complete with mariachi horns. It’s a bold statement from a band that started off its previous disc, 2004’s Bows and Arrows, with “The Rat,” a song that heaves with disgust and fury but is still so relentlessly hooky that whenever I DJ it people yell for me to play it again....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » James Falzone’s Allos Musica, Lamentations @ Chicago Cultural Center : Falzone is one of the city’s most focused and inquisitive clarinetists, and his compositions favor a rigor and precision that’s rare. He uses the Allos Musica name as an umbrella for several distinct projects, including the fine sextet that performed on the impressive The Sign and the Thing Signified earlier this year....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » “There is undoubtedly something perplexing about the apparent lack of American combat-effective troops at a time when the U.S. population is growing at 1.25 percent per annum, unemployment is proving stubbornly resistant to economic recovery, and the American prison population exceeds 2 million–1 in every 142 American residents. If one adds together the illegal immigrants, the jobless, and the convicts, there is surely ample raw material for a larger American army....

High-profile outdoor festivals rarely bring out a band’s adventurous side; even the Didjits, who were plenty obnoxious at Touch and Go’s shindig a few weeks back, seemed like they were just giving the people what they wanted. But Yo La Tengo one-upped everybody at this July’s Pitchfork fest by raining on the prevailing summer-barbecue vibe. Instead of serving up the requisite set of old favorites and typically witty cover tunes, the trio opened with a ten-minute feedback jam and proceeded to play nothing but songs from a record that wasn’t out yet....

On You Can’t Imagine How Much Fun We’re Having (Rhymesayers Entertainment), the fifth Atmosphere full-length, Slug remains as self-conscious and conflicted as ever, undercutting his battle-rap blasts (“Whoever put your record out must have needed write-offs”) with disarming insecurity (“Don’t worry, someday I’ll be nobody too”). Sex is still a major theme, but the narratives seem to suggest that short-term hookups can be tenderly productive and emotionally instructive. Slug might just screw his way to enlightenment–or, as he puts it on “Get Fly,” “I’m coming, I’m coming, I’m coming of age....

Masculine Feminine The Girl From Monday But the curse of influential work is that it becomes dated after its innovations have been absorbed. Here and there the film’s style and content are still too flinty to prompt imitation, but other aspects have become all too familiar. And much of the original charm of the film, showing in a new print at the Music Box, has evaporated. Best of Chicago voting is live now....

This concert celebrates Pierre Boulez’s 80th birthday with works he composed or was influenced by. The musical ideas in his slow-moving, hypnotic Rituel are carried by long sequences of instrumental and percussive gestures that are repeated with only subtle variations, evoking the ancient Japanese court music known as gagaku. It’s written for solo oboe, clarinet duo, flute trio, violin quartet, woodwind quintet, string sextet, woodwind septet, and 14 brass players, and each of these eight configurations is led by a percussionist, often on a non-Western instrument, and positioned around the hall so that the music seems to move around the listener....

You could forgive Dave Holland if he had decided to rest on his laurels instead of forming even one of his three current bands: by the 70s he had a well-established rep as the most versatile double bass virtuoso in jazz–and that was after he played electric bass on Miles Davis’s Bitches Brew in 1969, when he was just 22. But since the 70s Holland has also proved himself a bandleader nonpareil, first with his quintet–which debuted in the early 80s and starred saxist Steve Coleman and trombonist Robin Eubanks–then building on that group to form his 13-piece big band in 2000....

This show about surveillance opened the day before the U.S. House of Representatives approved expanded information-gathering powers for the executive branch. Among the sculptures, photos, drawings, and other works on exhibit is a beautiful, disturbing rug conceived by local artist Noelle Mason and woven by Mexican artists Jose Antonio Flores and Jonathan Samaniego. Made of red and green wool, Ground Control takes its dynamic pattern from a map of the U....

At their U.S. debut here in February of 2004, the Norwegian duo Fe-mail brilliantly demolished the worst stereotypes about noise music–that it all sounds the same, that anybody can do it, that it’s an expression of brute masculinity. For Maja Ratkje and Hild Sofie Tajford, noise isn’t a way to voice nihilism but a kind of celebration, a place where music making runs amok but not afoul of pleasure and purpose....

It looks like business as usual up in the 48th Ward. Just two weeks before the filing deadline for February’s Democratic primary, state senator Carol Ronen resigned her seat, opening the way for a handpicked successor to assume her office. One candidate did. Within a couple days of Ronen’s announcement, political fund-raiser Heather Steans, scion of a prominent North Shore family, had her petition sheets printed and volunteers out gathering signatures....

From a distance I saw the racer coming, and somehow I knew it was her. She was alone, just as she’d said she’d be, pedaling with her arms, pumping rhythmically–three brisk strokes and a rest, three brisk strokes and a rest–in the manner of a seabird making its way across a vast expanse of water. As she approached, people began to clap and cheer, then cheer louder, realizing at the last moment that it was a woman in this wheelchair....

Last September the Museum of Contemporary Art had to postpone its first-ever participation in the Hip-Hop Theater Festival, which organizes showcases nationwide. But the varied lineup of local and national talent scheduled now suggests the wait was worth it. Thursday night features festival founder Danny Hoch in Till the Break of Dawn, which unites a love of Cuba with hip-hop politics, Marc Bamuthi Joseph (whose solo Word Becomes Flesh played at the MCA earlier this year) in a new piece, Scourge, and Will Power (who wrote a hip-hop take on Aeschylus’s Seven Against Thebes) in Flow, directed by Hoch....

This weekend tribute to the late director runs Saturday and Sunday, August 11 and 12, with screenings at the Chopin Theatre, 1543 W. Division. Unless otherwise noted, tickets are $7; a $20 pass admits you to all screenings. For more information call 773-278-1500 or visit www.chopintheatre.com. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » RSawdust and Tinsel A major early feature by Bergman, also known as The Naked Night (though the Swedish title apparently means “The Clown’s Night”)....

John McLean has played taut, tortuous guitar on a slew of discs by his fellow Chicagoans, including vocalist Grazyna Auguscik’s new The Light (GMA). Auguscik and violinist Zach Brock–whose own new disc, Chemistry (Secret Fort), features his band the Coffee Achievers–both play in a charismatic septet that McLean has led a couple of times at the Green Mill. And McLean himself is about to release Better Angels, his second album and the first featuring the septet....

Ken Stringfellow’s new Soft Commands (Yep Roc) marks a significant if subtle shift from his last solo effort. 2001’s Touched found the silvery-voiced Posies front man hunkered down in producer Mitch Easter’s North Carolina studio trying to distill the essence of his old band’s decade-long career into a single disc. Soft Commands, written and recorded in a series of globe-trotting sessions that took Stringfellow from Seattle to Stockholm to Senegal, replaces Touched’s ambition with a lovelorn simplicity....

One of the most arresting records I’ve heard this year is Bring Me the Workhorse (Asthmatic Kitty), the debut album from My Brightest Diamond–aka New Yorker Shara Worden, who pits her restrained, pitch-perfect singing against churning, magisterial rock grooves. She’s studied opera and her range and intonation prove it, but she also understands rock just fine, and she can wail with the best of them; her vocals remind me of LA folkie Mia Doi Todd with a touch of Polly Jean Harvey’s anthemic roar....

The comic characters Nancy Friedrich plays in her one-woman show aren’t that original: a garrulous drunk girl, a stilted woman auditioning for a musical, a flustered administrative assistant eager to communicate her edginess. But she gives each of them a richly nuanced portrayal. With her charisma, physical control, and willingness to be silly to get a laugh, even her silence can speak hilarious volumes. Too bad that director Laura Forbes didn’t push her to develop odder, more creative characters, because she’s strongest when playing a role–her stories about herself simply aren’t entertaining enough to have an impact....