Sheep & Goats returns from an unexpected paternity leave! (The paternity was expected, but the need for leave was not.) If anyone has any wise words about why I should like the new Craig Finn album, or anything else, have at it in the comments! A brief reminder of the grading scale: A “Sheep”...

If you’re not familiar with the Broadway musical The Book of Mormon, beware: what follows contains heresy and spoilers, and I’m not sure which is worse. As a straight white 30-something Christian, I’m required by law to be a U2 fan. Over the summer my wife and I cheerfully paid a large sum of money...

Then I took a good look at everything I’d done, looked at all the sweat and hard work. But when I looked, I saw nothing but smoke. Smoke and spitting into the wind. There was nothing to any of it. Nothing. (Ecclesiastes 2:11, The Message translation) Death by Borders On occasion, working at Borders...

In Chicago radio news that sort of affects you, my Sunday morning drive-to-church jam, “Street Sermonz With Keno”, has been cancelled. Week after week, Keno Greer has been playing a mix of gospel, Christian R&B, and holy hip-hop that’s musically equal to any other three-hour block...

I’m shamefully late to Dan Bejar’s latest album, but since it’s recently been overrated on a bunch of mid-year best-of lists, and since I like how it looks next to the equally listless Moby album — Destroyer and Destroyed together again! — I stuck it in. You can point out what I’m...

Lady Gaga Born This Way (Interscope) “Is a dream a lie if it don’t come true, or is it something worse?” – DA BOSS, from “Da River” What he doesn’t consider is that it might be something better. 1. At Burnside I’m a rock critic. If I said I was a theologian I’d be fooling myself,...

Not many Christian Sheep this month, give or take a couple “singles”, a faint-praise pop album, and some 30-year-old songs sung in Yoruba. Great music continues to appear in all genres, though, and you’ve no doubt heard things I haven’t. So use the comments to recommend away!...

In the spirit of the world’s greatest salsa label, let’s get right to it! SHEEP OF THE MONTH: Various Artists Fania Records 1964-1980: The Original Sound of Latin New York (Strut) What do cities sound like? Horns and clatter, mostly. So when music geeks call Fania Records “the Motown...

New albums by Gregg Allman, Cake, the Strokes, and Radiohead sound pretty much how you’d expect: no alarms, no surprises, as my droopy-eyed sainted auntie once put it. But that doesn’t mean they’re not good! On the contrary, they’re all the work of people who know what they’re doing, doing...

Admit it: you’ve made fun of hair metal. Maybe you went over to a friend’s house and hurled gay slurs at their Poison album covers, or dressed up “ironically” as Dee Snider for Halloween. You youngsters have probably been fed the line that Nirvana saved us from hair metal’s excess and ...