Last Wednesday’s Dillinger Escape Plan show at Chicago’s Subterranean featured none of the band’s legendary moments (fire blowing, running over people’s heads), but it did have a killer opener (Genghis Tron) and a crowd going completely ape shit. (more…)

Juno, the latest of this year’s films about unexpected pregnancy, is not yet in wide release but is already being called the female answer to Knocked Up. (more…)

LaShonda Katrice Barnett (shown left), a professor of Africana Studies at Sarah Lawrence College and a musician in her own right, never intended on becoming a historian of black female songwriters. Instead, the calling found her. (more…)

If the stylish, slickly produced goth-metal style of musician-producer Waldemar Sorychta is your cup of tea, you’ll probably enjoy Faith, the debut album of the producer’s new project Eyes of Eden. (more…)

Romances, the 2004 collaboration between Norwegian composer John Erik Kaada and vocal maestro Mike Patton, was what one could expect from an alliance of the two genre-busting musicians: a sound collage of moody, noirish elements. (more…)

Following their never-ending tour cycle in support of Lullabies to Paralyze (2005), Queens of the Stone Age became frustratingly predictable in concert. The band would pound through a repetitive mix of songs; bandleader Josh Homme would make frequent references to drinking, pot smoking, and fucking, and then get pissed off at a random heckler in the crowd. (more…)

Music fans that overdosed on Chicago-based festivals this summer had a final event to mark off their checklists on Sunday; the organizers of Intonation Music Festival decided to eschew their outdoor concert set-up in order to partner with the Museum of Contemporary Art (MCA) for a one-day event called Rock/Art. (more…)

According to IMDB.com, there have been two films called Outsourced released in the past year — with a third planned for 2008. If anything, it indicates that vanishing jobs and resentment among US workers provides fertile ground for filmmakers. Surprisingly, director John Jeffcoat’s take on the topic comes as a modest romantic comedy. (more…)

In Wasted Orient, documentary filmmaker Kevin Fritz attempts to avoid aesthetic pitfalls while following the regionally famous Beijing-based punk band Joyside during a multiple-city tour across China. The result is a frenetic glimpse into the daily life of a young punk band trying to break out in the country’s small and struggling rock scene. (more…)

The commercial success of Al Gore’s An Inconvenient Truth broadened mainstream discussion of environmental issues. The 11th Hour, a documentary produced and narrated by green poster boy Leonardo DiCaprio, continues where the former vice president ended, but further leans on the crisis button. (more…)