On his first solo album, 2000’s Muddlin Gear (Warp), Jamie Lidell hid behind walls of squelchy noise and dirty beats–it was the sort of in-your-face postelectronica record that a California nutjob like Lesser or Kid606 might release. Working with fellow producer Christian Vogel as Super Collider, he let his vocals peek through: on their 1999 debut, Head On (Loaded), his weirdly soulful voice was eviscerated by rubbery electronic tones and jagged, disjointed beats, and on 2002’s Raw Digits (Rise Robots Rise) it cut through more cleanly....

Lance Friedman’s nine sculptures at Habatat inject an organic messiness into the world of collectible glass, which at its worst consists of sterile baubles designed to adorn upscale interiors. In Reentry a glass bullet seems to have cut a path through a bed of artificial grass, adding a disquieting note of danger. Seven glass bricks imitate blocks of ice in Shrine for the Cold Hearted, each containing an irregular bright red heart; the differences between the hearts suggest the variety of humankind....

At Ravinia’s 1999 gala opening 18-year-old Lang Lang made his stunning Chicago debut as a last-minute replacement for an ailing Andre Watts–playing Tchaikovsky’s First Piano Concerto with the CSO–and became an instant star. Audiences and critics around the world were mesmerized by his phenomenal skills and musicality, thrilled by his exuberance and obvious love of playing. He’s now 22, and some of the same critics who were once dazzled by him find his flamboyant mannerisms increasingly affected and his expressiveness increasingly schmaltzy, verging on Liberacean....

To the editor: Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » I found John Dugan’s article “He Has Built It. Will They Come?” [May 7] a poorly framed and unresearched view of our profession. While I wish Dan Dietrich and Wall to Wall the best of luck in this difficult business, I cannot overlook the numerous errors, editorial speculation, and basic lack of fact-checking in this piece....

All over Wrigleyville vendors are selling T-shirts that read “Chicago Cubs,” “Wrigley Field,” “2003 Central Division Champions,” and “Sox Suck.” But none of them is getting as much for a shirt as Blue Marlin, a San Francisco clothing manufacturer that’s honoring one of Chicago’s best-known neighborhoods with a T-shirt that says “Wrigglyville.” They’re selling it for $27 at department stores all over the country. Best of Chicago voting is live now....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » The story quotes the report: “’There appears to be a tendency for public stations to discourage music programming in favor of news/talk broadcasts as a way to draw larger audiences,’ the NEA study says. But because it receives tax dollars, ‘public radio has an obligation beyond maximizing audiences.’ The NEA concludes that public radio ‘should balance its drive for audiences and revenues with a commitment to cultural programming and services that are not necessarily profitable....

Andrew Morgan was ready to die. He was nearly finished with Misadventures in Radiology, the orchestral pop album that had consumed his life for nearly five years in four different cities, and he’d gone so far as to prepare a will with instructions about how the album should be completed after his death. In the early evening of May 8, 2003, that decision came to seem eerily prescient. Best of Chicago voting is live now....

On Girls Can Tell (2001) and Kill the Moonlight (2002), Spoon’s previous two full-lengths, front man Britt Daniel and drummer Jim Eno stripped classic rock, funk, and soul verities to their bare essentials, layering elliptical bits of noise and truncated riffs over the taut, lean grooves that remained. Their latest album, Gimme Fiction (Merge), is a refinement of that formula: the songs are still fairly minimalist, but there’s more flesh on the rhythmic armature (including the best-used hand claps I’ve heard this year) and strings and horns augment the compact guitar and keyboard figures....

Subtitled “Art and Rock and Roll Since 1967,” this exhibit often captures the cultural force of the music’s delirious, anarchic promises. The conceptual and sensual center is British artist Douglas Gordon’s installation Bootleg, which even without music suggests the essence of rock–its ephemerality, intensity, transgression, and physicality. Set up in a dark room are two adjacent monumental video screens, canted and at a right angle to each other, showing bootleg tapes; these engulf the viewer....

Light Opera Works breathes new life into Franz Lehar’s 100-year-old Viennese operetta, about a fictional Balkan state whose financial future hinges on whether its wealthiest inhabitant marries a native or a foreigner. (In a comedy, of course, a proper wedding solves every problem–even in the Balkans.) A new English libretto by Gregg Opelka and Reader contributor Jack Helbig tends to drag through the expository parts, but at the top of the second act it finds its rhythm and bounces merrily along the rest of the way....

Chicago is the intellectual hometown of Milton Friedman, the influential free-market economist who developed many of his libertarian theories at the U. of C. But you’d never guess that based on the city’s recent intervention to help the Chicago Mercantile Exchange in a bidding war for the Chicago Board of Trade. Hailing the deal, Mayor Daley visited the Board of Trade on October 31 to meet with Carey and Duffy and offer his blessings....

The +/- set I caught at CMJ a few weeks ago tore my asshole a new asshole. I was never a big fan of Versus (singer-guitarists James Baluyut and Patrick Ramos’s old group), and I mainly thought earlier +/- albums were mildly clever revisions of Unrest’s eclectic postpop. But the band’s songwriting and chemistry have–and I know this term is thrown around loosely–matured dramatically. They opened their set with “Fadeout,” a slow-burning fuse of a song from the new Let’s Build a Fire (Absolutely Kosher) that showcases their greatest strengths: complementary riffs that interlock so tightly the guitarists could be joined at the hip, deliberate and tasteful deployment of neato pedal noises, and the ingenious drumming of Chris Deaner, who not only wallops a standard kit but uses laptop-connected pads to trigger a variety of vivid punches and sequences....

Not even Anna Lauris’s showstopper–she single-handedly performs an entire operetta–can salvage this uninspired assemblage of dated novelty songs by playwright-songwriter-bon vivant Noel Coward. A coproduction with Geva Theatre Center in Rochester, New York, A Marvelous Party offers only disconnected epigrams and a pastiche of 30s tuxedo-movie moments involving elegant tipsiness (The Thin Man) and sinuous dancing (Flying Down to Rio). In David Ira Goldstein’s staging, Lauris, Carl Danielsen, and Mark Anders try to conceal the material’s weakness by mugging and indulging in overdone English accents....

This Seattle five-piece came up on the proggier end of screamo, a style of emo hardcore characterized by throat-shredding vocals, bad hairstyles, and the capacity to provoke scorn from nearly every listener over legal drinking age. But after releasing their third full-length, Burn, Piano Island, Burn–which may have been the genre’s peak–the Blood Brothers decided to reinvent themselves, combining glam’s prissy swagger and no wave’s aggro noise on 2004’s Crimes. They’re pushing forward on the new Young Machetes (V2)–if the songs on Crimes were refined, these are epic–but also reaching back, playing with the same self-immolating energy they had when they were wrecking it in all-ages clubs....

Pop punk is a pretty ubiquitous commodity these days, but this trio from Durham, North Carolina, delivers it with a controlled urgency. Singer and guitarist Kaia Wilson (formerly of groundbreaking Portland dyke-punk band Team Dresch, as is drummer Melissa York) has a frankly pretty voice that starts high and frays into a squeal when she pushes it. She conveys excitability–and excitement–without sounding like she’s straining for effect. On the new Make Yr Life (Yep Roc) she swoons and cracks notes but never loses her composure: listen to the second verse of “Send Me You” or the tremulous, rising “ah, ah, ah!...

Laughter is what powers the four clownlike characters in Marta Carrasco’s 2005 work Ga-Ga, named after a fictional place; laughter is described as their oxygen, their food. But don’t expect a barrel-of-fun approach–Carrasco’s Mira’m, presented at the Goodman Latino Theatre Festival in 2003, was surreal and often violent. An eclectic score jerked the mood this way and that, and the performers’ doll-like masks distorted their humanity. Though that work was reminiscent of Pina Bausch’s dance theater, critics have insisted Ga-Gˆ is movement or circus theater....

Is Gardening an Art? Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » According to Kelley, the Park District, at the direction of naturalist Shirley McMayon (who last year pleaded guilty to pocketing kickbacks for Park District contracts), ripped up his artwork without notice. In the fall of 2004 he filed a lawsuit seeking $10 million in damages plus legal expenses and restoration of the garden. He says Wildflower Works, planted at no cost to the city, maintained by volunteers, and requiring almost no watering, made Millennium Park’s multimillion-dollar Lurie Garden, with its caged trees and automatic sprinklers, look bad....

Los Amigos Invisibles made a brief stateside splash back in 1998, when the hype for rock en espanol was at its loudest, but this group from Caracas, Venezuela, has always been less concerned with cultural politics than having a good time, insouciantly blending house, funk, acid jazz, disco, bossa nova, and various Afro-Cuban styles into musical settings for their Spanish-language come-ons. Since moving to New York the group has gravitated toward club beats, and The Venezuelan Zinga Son, Vol....

Detroit soul singer Nathaniel Mayer hit the Top 40 at age 18 with his 1962 single “Village of Love,” but his career languished soon after; Fortune Records, the would-be Motown that signed him, failed to capitalize on his early success, and he began a struggle with substance abuse. Aside from the occasional oldies show in his hometown, he abandoned the biz, but his performance at one such revue caught the fancy of ex-Detroit Cobras guitarist Jeff Meier, who’s currently in the Shanks....

Some of Theater Oobleck’s best work has come about when the creators have gone with their gut–and that’s the case with Dave Buchen’s simple, wistful survey of the world’s history since mankind started mucking about. A kranky displaying Buchen’s drawings of insects, elephants, constellations, and catastrophes scrolls throughout, accompanied here by a set of songs in English based on original Spanish-language songs by Sebastian Paz. The intro is from Pliny the Elder, but there’s nothing dusty or pedantic–just a meditative handmade valentine to the glories of nature, an elegy for what’s been destroyed by human civilization, and the expression of a vague hope that maybe, somehow, it’s not too late to turn the ship around....