Fresh Dough Nuts
Like sawdust in a carpenter’s workshop or metal filings on the floor of a jeweler, a thin layer of flour is starting to settle in the corners of On the Rise, Adam and Jennifer Gidlow’s nine-month-old bakery in Cleveland Heights (3471 Fairmount Boulevard; 216-320-9923). The sight of the fine white dust is a reminder of…
Boys in the Attic
Here’s an example of a morbidly unattractive man (and the only shorthair on this list) who knew the formula of a great gimmick: primitive drumbeat + incessant handclaps + gold lamé jumpsuit = Insta-Legend. He’s also been a dirty old man since the day he was born, but unlike stars as brazen as, say Eminem,…
Moorer Better Blues
“I don’t think I’m a cynical person. I don’t think I’m a pessimistic person,” Allison Moorer says. “It’s just that I’m not an idiot. When was the last time you tripped through the daisies?” Okay, so Moorer, who just released her third album, Miss Fortune, may not be the sunniest singer-songwriter to come down the…
Guitar Solo
The curse has cost Jon Hill a lot of things. Today, it’s the phone in his Tremont home, which was disconnected this morning. “I gotta take care of that,” he sighs. The curse is Hill’s obsession with guitar making, which has alternately served as an artistic outlet, a rewarding career, and a path to the…
Bow Wow/B2K
Two letters and one number are all you need to answer the critique that today’s teen pop is purely about the white theft of black culture: B2K. Black music’s distinctive rhythmic and harmonic teen-pop tradition has been raided by every white teen act to hit the charts since New Kids on the Block. But on…
Battle of the Blowhards
As another summer morning crawls toward noon, the sun bakes the Cleveland air to a salty stew. What better time to bitch about Larry Dolan? He’s cheap, they’re crying in Chardon. He’s dumb, they’re yelling in Euclid. And he’s not even the worst problem, Greg Brinda tries to explain. “The problem,” he says, leaning into…
Playing Enemy
Math-core seemed like a wild, wide-open field when it first emerged, with such bands as Cave In, Coalesce, and Botch taking hardcore in blisteringly complex new directions. Of course, as with any genre, limitations were present from day one, and eventually they became apparent. Over time, clichés began to take hold: Indecipherable screaming vocals, caffeine-fueled…
Love in 3 Minutes
Some 60 people have gathered at the Little Bar downtown. These are not the beautiful ones, to be found a half-block over in the nightclubs of West Sixth. They’re everyday Clevelanders, a mix of eagerness and big smiles, anxiety and cautious scoping of the room. Such is the nature of romance. It’s called speed dating,…
Spoon
Austin, Texas rockers Spoon are low-concept. So low-concept, in fact, you’d think they adhered to some Dogme 95-esque set of musical principles, such as: song title must be taken from the song’s chorus; handclaps and “ooh-ooh-oohs” mandatory; must jangle. Of course, it’s unlikely that Britt Daniel and his Spoon cohorts have actually articulated any of…
Stumbling Toward Greatness
This fall, barring revelations that she secretly harbors a lifelong affinity for Pittsburgh or — worse — has become a Republican, Stephanie Tubbs Jones will win a third term in Congress. Victory over her challenger, Patrick Pappano, is likely to be more lopsided than the last time Tubbs Jones was on a ballot, when she…
John Sinclair
“I’m just getting warmed up,” says John Sinclair. “I just got a record contract.” The signature ’60s radical is talking by cell from the Memphis Amtrak station, about to board a train to Clarksdale, Mississippi, to perform at the Delta Blues Museum and a club called Ground Zero. His mission: promoting Fattening Frogs for Snakes:…
Rhymes With “Coma”
Every Sunday night at the Kamikaze Coffeehouse, you can listen to other people read their bad love poetry for $5. The poems themselves are not especially illuminating, but if you tilt your head a certain way, the reflection of the overhead lighting on cups of espresso can seem like smeary stars. This has the effect…
Gerald Levert
If neo-soul is about uplifting the R&B — above the booty, where it’s been for quite a while — then Gerald Levert’s sixth solo album falls below this year’s most refined male discs, Musiq Soulchild’s pleasantly polite Juslisen and Raphael Saadiq’s subtly brilliant Instant Vintage. In fact, if anything, Levert has maintained his impressive chart…
Temptresses Beware
Mob behavior takes the fun out of flaunting sexuality: I read Sarah Fenske’s article on Put-in-Bay [“Fantasy Island,” August 14]; you covered it well. You pointed out that the women tease, rub, grab, and flash their boobs at these frat boys who hunt in packs, until things turn serious, and then they run back to…
Doug Martsch
As captain of the good ship Built to Spill, Doug Martsch wears a lot of hats, and he wears ’em well. One most becoming cap reads “Resident Guitar Genius.” That’s the one Martsch sports most prominently on Now You Know, the first side maneuver released under his own name. But rather than cut through the…
Broadway Buddha
The Tibetan Book of the Dead is a text traditionally read aloud at the time of a Buddhist’s death. The words supposedly guide the deceased through a transitional realm, where the soul either finds enlightenment or is reborn. It’s sacred. It’s complex. And it sure as hell isn’t material meant to be performed on a…
Clipse
Three tracks in, Clipse tells listeners where it comes from: “In Virginia, we smirked at the Simpson trial/Yeah, I guess the chase was wild, but what’s the fuss about?/See plenty of my partners feeling like O.J./Beat murder like the shit is OK/That’s what our dough say.” When, say, Ja Rule drops something similar, you know…
Look Who’s Chalking
Rain and wind are not friends of sidewalk chalk artists. A gentle breeze can transform a footpath Rembrandt into an inadvertent Picasso. If Mother Nature’s kind, sidewalk art from both seasoned artists and first-timers will be seen Saturday and Sunday at the Cleveland Museum of Art’s Chalk Festival. “We just work out in the open…
Swans
This is the sound of drowning in your own lung secretions. This is the long stare into tired eyes as you marvel at still being alive, despite the self-inflicted damage. This is the horrific splendor of Swans during the dying days of the ’80s, when the group’s members were killing themselves to create something beautiful.…
Cut Rate
For those with any kind of pop cultural memory, it’s more than a little surprising to see Ice Cube in a movie like Barbershop. Not because it’s a light comedy — Friday was too, and that was certainly in character. What’s odd about Barbershop is its seeming embrace of positions that the former N.W.A. rapper…
Generic You
In a band e-mail recently sent out to promote an upcoming show, the members of Generic You quip, “Come and see it before it’s all over — our singer might be jumping out a window soon.” That singer would be Timmie Boose, formerly of the underappreciated Critikill, and indeed, Boose’s up-and-down emotions are painted all…
Bad Help
Given the bloody excesses of French history, the 1933 murder of a bourgeois woman and her daughter in the quiet provincial town of Le Mans wouldn’t seem to merit much attention, but to this day, “l’Affaire Papin” remains one of the most notorious and sensational crimes in Gallic history. The case involved two sisters –…
Sketchy Treatment
The 21st-century eye is hard to impress. It’s accustomed to paintings as realistic as photographs and computer-generated movies that render Buzz Lightyear flesh and blood. The eye forgets — or maybe never realized — that today’s visual wonders are the fruits of centuries of pictorial and technical innovation. Not surprisingly, attracting our attention is an…
Hometown Thai
On the coasts, enthusiasm for all things Asian has long since become old hat. Koi ponds? Common as rain puddles. Feng shui? Incorporated into everything from day-care centers to dog kennels. And sushi? It might as well grow on trees. But here in the Rust Belt (where, mind you, we were eating pierogi way before…
