WBEZ 91.5 Chicago

My Bloody Valentine’s Loveless is the most innovative and influential rock album of the last 25 years—more so than Nevermind, that other record that shook the music world to its very foundations in 1991, or any other effort that anyone could name constructed more or less entirely from guitars, bass, drums and vocals.

Kevin Shields’ quartet never came to the definitive and dramatic end that Nirvana did, but the music world nevertheless long since gave up on the Valentines ever releasing a full set of new music. Scattered tracks through the years didn’t offer much promise: Dwarfed by the pressures of topping his own masterpiece, the band’s songwriter and auteur had become one of the most infamous cases of arrested development since Syd Barrett or the driving force of the Beach Boys.

In fact, the latter was a name Shields himself evoked when we last spoke in 1995: “Too often when people make good records, there’s an aftershock effect, and they collapse psychologically and emotionally. Brian Wilson is a classic case of that.” That wasn’t the case for him, he assured me.

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Whether you celebrated his head-butting antics, his exhortations of “Rock over London! Rock on, Chicago!” and his Casio- powered odes to the voices in his head, or found his embrace by some fans and sectors of the music industry verging on exploitation (as this critic did), you can’t deny that Wesley Willis remains an indelible memory of the local rock scene in the ’90s.

The hulking Willis died in August 2003 at the age of 40 after a battle with chronic myelogenous leukemia. But he lives on not only on Chicago scenesters’ mental hard drives, but in the unlikely home of DC Comics’ newest incarnation of the venerable Wonder Woman comic book.

In 2011, DC revamped its entire line of monthly superhero comics, a project dubbed “the New 52.”

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If you listened to the first two efforts from Solange Piaget Knowles, Solo Star (2003) and Sol-Angel and the Hadley St. Dreams (2008)— not that many people did—you heard little more than the hollow echoes of pop nepotism. But the star-making machinery at Interscope Records was stifling untapped creative reservoirs and a broad musical curiosity in Beyoncé’s kid sister, and both come to the forefront with impressive results on her powerful new True EP.

The now 26-year-old Solange has not only moved to the indie-label ranks with her new seven-song release, but she’s embraced many elements of the indie aesthetic circa 2013, championing sensitive Brooklyn rockers Grizzly Bear (whose Chris Taylor co-owns her new label Terrible Records) and covering the Dirty Projectors. More importantly, however, she’s joining many a Brooklyn muso in taking inspiration from the early days of the post-punk/New Wave dance music emanating from Soho lofts in the early ’80s (think Liquid Liquid) with a touch of the slightly slicker sounds coming from the U.K.

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On June 13, 2008, Robert Sylvester Kelly, the most successful pop star Chicago ever has produced and the dominant voice in R&B for the last two decades, was acquitted by a jury of his peers on 14 counts of making child pornography.

But as any prosecutor or defense attorney will tell you, that doesn’t mean he was innocent.

In a series of investigative reports for The Chicago Sun-Times that began in 2000, which eventually numbered more than a hundred stories and which remain unchallenged to this day, this reporter, his former partner Abdon M. Pallasch, now a top spokesman for Gov. Quinn, and numerous other colleagues at the newspaper consistently documented that Kelly abused his position of wealth and fame to pursue illegal sexual relationships with underage girls, leaving dozens of ruined lives in Chicago’s African-American community in his wake.

That seems to matter not a whit to the promoters of Chicago’s Pitchfork Music Festival, who have booked Kelly, along with Bjork and Belle and Sebastian, to headline the annual music festival in the West Side’s Union Park from July 19 to 21.

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Gearing up for the April 2^nd release of their new album The Terror, their 13^th in a long, strange career, the Flaming Lips are priming the commercial pump by debuting a tune called “Sun Blows Up Today” in a car commercial set to air during Super Bowl XLVII on Sunday.

The 60-second spot taps the formerly freaky favorite sons of Oklahoma City to add a bit of hipster cred to Hyundai’s Santa Fe, a crossover SUV marketed at young and growing families.

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The profound difference between rock music that’s intimate and sounds that simply are quiet is that the former grows with every listen, while the latter all too easily slips into mere background music.

Long-running Hoboken, N.J.-based indie-rock heroes Yo La Tengo have been growing increasingly hushed over the last few releases, at least in comparison to ferocious mid-’90s guitar-skronk classics such as Painful and Electr-O-Pura. While still impossible to ignore, the thrill was beginning to… well, fade. But on album number 13, the more muted trio ups the level of intimacy, as well as adding unexpected touches such as strings, horns and acoustic guitars.

The result is that Fade is the band’s strongest album in the new millennium, and as well as its best in this more genteel mode since 1990’s still-beguiling acoustic covers effort, Fakebook.

This isn’t to say that the band has entirely abandoned that beloved Velvet Underground/Can six-strong drone and hypnotic jam. In fact, both the opening “Ohm” and the closing “Before We Run” are epics of the type.

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Warning: Parquet Courts’ Light Up Gold will induce uncontrollable ear-to-ear grinning—at least for anyone who prefers their rock ’n’ roll snotty, hard-driving, tuneful, simultaneously sloppy but controlled and above all gleefully stoopid.

With roots in the rich psychedelic garage-rock scene of Denton, Texas, but now based at the center of the hipster universe in Brooklyn, the quartet issued its first recorded tunes strictly on cassette in 2011. A follow-up album, Light Up Gold, got a bit wider distribution and started the underground buzz. Now it’s getting the proper release it so richly deserves. And if you care at all about the sort of sounds described a moment ago, you need to catch up now.

In stark contrast to much of the current Brooklyn scene, these boys are old-school slackers. They eschew electronica and fauxhawks, foodie blogging and Tweeting.

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