Gallery of Skewered Swine was released on November 5, 2022. This second full-length album release finds musicians Pit Lord in their Davenport stronghold: a forbidding, unwelcoming, cyclopean structure looming over the industrial stench of the West End. They glare from their thrones, two heads of a table gouged with countless blade and stained by sauces unknown.

Our 1,004th print edition of the River Cities' Reader will be our proverbial last printed words for 2022. Some of the most important words will come from Whitney Webb and Iain Davis expressed in the first of a series of articles: “Sustainable Debt Slavery.”

An inventive and riotous improv-comedy troupe that has been performing in the Quad Cities for more than a decade, Wisenheimer will both celebrate its 11th anniversary and bid adieu to the long-running "Late Nite Shows" series in the ensemble's December 16 performance, a Black Box Theatre event boasting the wild comic imaginations of group members Jeff De Leon, Jen Kuhle, and Leslie Mitchell.

The winners of a Country Music Association Award, three CMT Country Music Awards, and an Academy of Country Music Award citation for Vocal Group of the Year, the chart-topping touring artists of Sawyer Brown headline a December 15 concert at East Moline's The Rust Belt, the group's 41 years of performance boasting such career highlights as a Star Search championship win and three number-one singles on the Billboard Hot County Songs chart.

Best known as the founder and lead vocalist/guitarist for the alternative-country and Americana ensemble American Aquarium, singer/songwriter BJ Barham plays special solo sets at Davenport's Raccoon Motel on December 16 and 17, the artist's 2016 album Rockingham lauded by No Depression for its artist's “ability to capture depth and emotion that is on par with few others.”

Before discussing the very, very Bad Santa at the heart of director Tommy Wirkola's Violent Night, I want to address this grisly action comedy's other heroic perpetrator of bloody mayhem. Because despite the commitment that David Harbour lends to his portrayal of a jolly old elf by way of The Northman, seven-year-old Trudy Lightstone (endearingly enacted by Leah Brady) is easily the film's more interesting figure, largely for being the only movie character I can think of to truly call out the insidious irresponsibility in that holiday “classic” Home Alone.

The state legislative debate last week over amending the Pre-Trial Fairness Act provisions within the controversial SAFE-T Act featured many of the same obfuscations and outright misinformation that characterized the fall campaign by Republicans and many of the same insufficient answers by Democrats. One of the problems that the super-majority Democrats have in both chambers is that when they know their bill is going to pass, they usually don’t take the Republicans’ objections seriously enough to fully engage with them. But on bills like this, misinformation can spread when points aren’t adequately rebutted.

Continuing the organization's run of exhilarating Third Sunday Jazz Workshop & Matinée Series concert events held in Bettendorf's Rivermont Collegiate, Polyrhythms presents a December 18 engagement with the gifted Midwestern musicians of the Saul Lubaroff Quartet, with saxophonist and Eastern Iowa mainstay delivering jazz hits and seasonal tunes alongside guitarist Andy Parrott, bass player Scott Barnum, and drummer Paul Cunliffe.