BLUR The main problem with Parklife, of course, isn’t the accents. Peter Margasak has written about the lurking tendency in American music journalism to praise “any British band capable of not sucking (no mean trick, granted), especially if they’re doing something just a touch different.” But despite the hyperventilating praise it’s drawn from certain segments of the press, Parklife isn’t doing anything different. The album does evoke the down-market sleaze of British seaside resorts like Brighton and Blackpool quite effectively, but it does it by imitating bands who’ve done it before....

BRUTALITY OF FACT Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Sometimes this sameness works to Reddin’s advantage, as in Big Time, where the blandness of the characters becomes a wonderful comic critique of superficial, amoral white middle-class professionals during the last anxious years of the Reagan “recovery.” At other times it interferes with Reddin’s artistic ambitions. He falters whenever he tries to plumb his characters’ emotional depths simply because there are no depths to be plumbed....

New Zealand’s underground music scene is known for its incestuousness: sooner or later everyone plays with everyone else. Perhaps that’s one reason why Graeme Jefferies has chosen to base his band the Cakekitchen in Europe. He shares with fellow New Zealanders Roy Montgomery, Alastair Galbraith, and his brother Peter Jefferies a penchant for leavening brooding melodies and harsh instrumental textures with indelible hooks, and like them he’s a fan of four-track recording....

LONELY PLANET Northlight Theatre Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Lonely Planet is written with compassion and concern; Dietz has known his unfair share of young people who died well before their time, and his sorrow clearly motivates the play. But he’s failed to transform his thoughts into believable or compelling dramatic action. Fatally, this two-person character study is populated not by real people but by oratorical alter egos who represent the writer’s conflicting impulses; they speak in tidily crafted, unspontaneous mini- essays posing as conversation....

Lonnie Shields is one of the Delta region’s most popular young bluesmen, a unique guitarist whose stylistic development followed the opposite of the expected pattern: he was a funk player until veteran drummer-guitarist Sam Carr, an alum of Sonny Boy Williamson’s aggregation, turned him on to the blues. Since then he’s developed a style that’s an endearing mix of influences–raw guitar solos that could be straight out of one of the jukes that still populate the countryside around his native West Helena, Arkansas; rough-edged contemporary funk-soul rhythms; brash horn charts that make up in passion what they might lack in finesse....

Mad Scene’s music neatly reconciles apparently incompatible elements. Led by the husband-and-wife team of guitarist-vocalists Lisa Siegel and Hamish Kilgour, the New York City-based quintet takes a loose, shambling approach similar to that favored by Scottish popsters the Pastels and New Zealand’s Clean (cofounded by Kilgour in the late 70s), but the horn-laced arrangements on the Scene’s new album Sealight recall the baroque rigor of Love’s Forever Changes. Sealight’s lighthearted pop songs skip along on breezy rhythms, but dark drones and dissonances shade their brightest moments....

There’s plenty of noise on Medicine’s second album, The Buried Life–all the hissing, whirring, crashing, and scraping make it seem as if the record were recorded in a large, disturbing shop class–but it also reveals a delicious pop sensibility. Band leader Brad Loner’s guitar playing ranges between killer riffing (“Something Goes Wrong”), air-raid-warning dramatics (“I Hear”), and the triumphantly arching guitar solo on “Live It Down.” Vocalist/songwriter Beth Thompson’s harmonies with Loner are a pleasure, lush on “The Pink,” sunny on “Never Click,” and resolute on “Live It Down....

“I want to make it easier for people to discover that there are things happening in music and the arts outside of what’s covered by radio and the other media,” says composer and musician Gene Coleman. He’s developed a reputation in recent years for arranging performances of new and avant-garde music in such unconventional venues as lofts and nightclubs. His monthly “Face the Music” concerts celebrate their third anniversary April 9 at HotHouse....

NANCY HILD: STILL LIFE A set of nine paintings separately framed in heavy dark wood, Conjunctions: Past Present/Present Past, seems to hold a key to Hild’s project. The objects in this lottery grid or set of tarot cards are named, which gives the viewer an idea of why they’re important to the painter, and possibly to us. The top row includes a chicken leg (Sustenance), a human heart tied and hanging on a rope (Love), and a black-and-white satin high heel (Seduction)....

Next Generation Project The first half of the evening featured three dark dance-theater works, haunting narratives suggested by costumes, movement, and a spare, graceful transformation of the stage. These pieces felt very urban, reflecting the starkness and shifting connections of city life in issues of isolation, illness, and violence. The vibrations of the nearby el, rocking at random through each piece, added a gritty dimension: these works didn’t feel sealed off from city life but exposed and vulnerable to it....

Lead Story In March President Clinton invited sidewalk protestor Todd Ouellette, 27, into the Oval Office for a meeting. Ouellette had requested the meeting on February 19, 1993, after returning from a seven-month walk across the U.S. during which he’d collected signatures demanding action on Vietnam War POWs and MIAs. After a five-minute chat with the president, Ouellette announced he was satisfied and was ending his 25-month protest and moving on to other issues, such as the war with China that “will be coming up around the year 2000....

Last season my two favorite shows were The X-Files and Homicide: Life on the Street–safe favorites, I thought, because nobody else ever watched them. I could go on and on about how great they were without anybody snickering at me. But now I feel betrayed: neither show was canceled. They’ve both somehow managed to claw their way onto the fall schedule, and both look the same as they did last year–same casts, same plots, same styles–but to me, they’ve been taken over by the pod people....

Penn and Teller’s strange method of entertainment (their Obie was awarded to them for “whatever it is it’s called they do”) is basically self-conscious performance art that happens to have its roots in magic. This makes their shows at once more fun than your average performance art and more thoughtful than your average evening with a magician. Contemptuous of the hoary shuck and jive of most magic shows, they insult the audience, do nasty things onstage, and densify their show to the point where some of the most impressive stuff is contrapuntal to the main action; dismayed at how simple most magic tricks are, they share their dismay by letting the audience in on the secrets....

IT’S SHIFTING, HANK The Goat Island performance group is obsessed with process, yet their shows–however eccentric, obscure, or oddly structured–are solid, rich, and resonant, as moving as the best of Chicago theater. Their insistence on process is not a defense mechanism used to ward off criticism but a genuine act of faith, a willingness to follow wherever their artistic whimsy might lead. And they continue this process long after the “finished” show has been performed for the public....

Archers of Loaf In the tradition’s standard formula the singer alternates fast and basic rock ‘n’ roll raves with tunes so melodic you can hum along the first time you hear them. The band’s job is to send these vocals tumbling into a current of anarchic guitars, alternating the tidal waves of brittle leads and distorted chords with occasional respites of sweet counterpoint so you can gulp some air. When executed well these layered contrasts can work each other into a pitch of frenzied excitement....

ROSANNE CASH Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » With 1990’s Interiors Rosanne Cash made a break with Nashville, leaving behind astonishing success as a singles artist in favor of a more self-determined folk-rock direction. Since then she has released two albums, moved to New York, left Columbia Records for Capitol, divorced Rodney Crowell, and married her producer, John Leventhal. Her latest offerings–the album 10 Song Demo and her first fiction collection, Bodies of Water–are her most striking....

One week after the local debut of African Portraits, Hannibal Lokumbe’s uncategorizable orchestral ode to his ancestry, comes a chamber counterpart, also written by a multifaceted composer and instrumentalist trained in the jazz tradition. According to the 64-year-old David Baker, who chairs the jazz department at Indiana University, his piano trio Roots II draws from a wide pool of pop styles, including “work songs, field hollers, blues, ragtime, boogie-woogie, rhythm and blues, spirituals, gospel songs, calypso, rock ‘n’ roll, rap, and of course jazz,” though it’s in a venerable classical form, as if it were striving for concert-hall respectability....

PETER CASE 6/17, SCHUBAS Peter Case has had a career racked with strange twists; few others have opened for both the Germs and Jackson Browne. An important progenitor of west-coast punk-pop (with the Nerves and, more significantly, the Plimsouls) before his erratic traipse through singer-songwriter turf, he’s currently touring in support of Peter Case Sings Like Hell (Vanguard), a thoroughly off-the-cuff, mostly solo collection of blues, folk, and country standards, from Blind Lemon Jefferson’s “Matchbox Blues” to traditional tunes like “Lakes of Pontchartrain....

Making its debut so soon after the demise of the International Theatre Festival of Chicago, this brand-new project seems to challenge the notion that the Windy City isn’t hospitable to events of this kind. Producers John T. Mills and James Ellis hope to succeed where others have failed by offering a more sharply defined image implied by the word “fringe,” more concentrated programming (more than two dozen acts in just 11 days, all in one venue with three different performance spaces), a special outreach to family audiences with its weekend “Kids’ Fringe” (marked KF in daily listings below), low prices, and the inclusion of Chicago artists alongside visitors from around the English-speaking world....

To the editors: Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » First of all, he begins the article with the story of his pilgrimage to New York and spends about three nauseating paragraphs waxing rhapsodic over the East Village and pining for the good old days when he was spending “many a delirious youthful summer night running with a pack of hard-core punks and drag queens”–just to let the reader know that he used to be hip....