Remastered 1985 debut release from Mojo Nixon and Skid Roper. The start of it all for the legendary late Mojo Nixon. August 2, 1957 — February 7, 2024 Mojo Nixon How you live is how you should die. Mojo Nixon was full-tilt, wide-open rock hard, root hog, corner on two wheels + on fire… Passing after a blazing show, a raging night, closing the bar, taking no prisoners + a good breakfast with bandmates and friends. A cardiac event on the Outlaw Country Cruise is about right… & that’s just how he did it. Mojo has left the building. Since Elvis is everywhere, we know he was waiting for him in the alley out back.

After more than a dozen years as an entity, Expo’76 rolls on — impossibly fresh in each performance, their reputation as the Chicago area’s most reliably potent and unpredictable cover band firmly established. Their secret all along has simply been remaining true to themselves, playing the music they want to play. Their set list is a far-flung assortment of hits, forgotten classics and deep cuts.

The Chris Greene Quartet - led by the Evanston saxophone colossus - played its first gig in 2005 and has since become one of the most highly visible, award-winning and critically lauded bands in the Chicago area. While honoring jazz's tradition, the band incorporates elements of funk, hip-hop, rock, Afro-Cuban, the blues and reggae, reflecting their diverse backgrounds. CGQ is celebrating the release of "Conversance," the first ever jazz release for Chicago's longest-running indie rock label, Pravda Records.

On Steve Dawson’s new album, Ghosts, his sixth as a solo artist, the Chicago-based musician and songwriter, well-known for the impassioned alternative country of the band Dolly Varden, crafts ten songs that find reasons to believe – in music, in human connections, in desert vistas – even as the ghosts move all around him, all around us. These ten songs combine intimate confessions and tightly constructed narratives. Their ghosts are often personal, but they intersect enigmatically with a broken world. “‘Is this really happening?’” he asks on “Walking Cane.” But there’s no clear answer to the violent changes. “Have we learned nothing? Here we go again.” But sometimes those ghosts leave gifts – of wisdom, of wonder – and sometimes living with them is also a kind of hope. “I am glad to be alive,” Dawson sings with his partner Diane Christiansen. Recorded live in-studio with a “dream band” of Chicago all-stars, the musicians suffuse these songs, some of the finest Dawson has ever written, with harmonies, rhythms, and textures that make them come alive and imbue them with hope. Dawson says, “Many of my favorite albums were recorded live in the studio. The arrangements on this new album were created on the spot, and rather than a collection of overdubs, the album is a performance.”

Brian Krumm, front man for Chicago’s tortured Americana artists The Great Crusades wrote the songs on his debut solo release, Just Fade Away (Pravda Records), during the 2020 shutdown. In an effort to stay sane during the first days of the pandemic, Krumm would drink a shot of whiskey each evening and try to write a song. Twenty-five days later, he had 25 songs. Krumm enlisted his bandmates to record the tunes, as well as a who’s who of Chicago music scene standouts. His influences, such as Robyn Hitchcock, the Jayhawks, Warren Zevon and Dylan, shine through on Just Fade Away and Krumm’s captivating, taleteller lyrics are again at the forefront. The record gives listeners a sonic snapshot of remembrances from Krumm and a life lived observing a perplexing yet utterly inspirational world.

What began as a chance encounter on an airplane between Brian McSweeney and Shawn Rios 22 years ago grew into a decades long friendship which ignited the inevitable musical partnership that formed Chicago’s MIIRRORS. They reverse-engineered the usual process of becoming a band by prioritizing album creation over live performance while at their own pace, morphing the duo into a cohesive quintet of seasoned multi-instrumentalists along the way- veterans Dmitri Rakhuba, Andre Miller, and Patrick Riley completed the lineup and they evolved the collective sound quickly, momentarily trading the stage for the tracking room. Recorded in Studio B at Electrical Audio along with sessions in Los Angeles and Nashville, their upcoming debut LP Motion And Picture is a cinematic soundscape of honest lyrical introspection and reactive abrasion, a personal timespan of disillusionment, resolve and return of hope. Waves of cascading textures blur the sonic lines between synthesizers and guitars a la My Bloody Valentine and Slowdive as Rios’s atypical rhythms anchor the songs while McSweeney’s voice ascends beyond Miller’s/ Riley’s/ Rakhuba’s expanding colors.

Soaking up a multitude of experiences for more than four decades, Ivan Julian, who has notably distinguished himself as guitarist and writer for (Richard Hell and The Voidoids, The Clash, Shriekback, The Outsets, etc.), releases his new album, Swing Your Lanterns, on PRAVDA Records. With songs that reflect experiences over the past five years and beyond that follow one another like a series of novelettes recounting both past and present..  To help make this possible, we find Florent Barbier of Elliot Murphy’s band on drums, Keith Streng of The Fleshtones on percussion and backing vocals-  from Chicago, Nicholas Tremulis on guitar and backing vocals, Derek Brand also from Chicago plays bass, as well as bassist James Burke, and Jared Michael Nickerson, (Burnt Sugar Arkestra) to name just a few.