Big, Wet Kiss
With its soundtrack stockpiled with songs of romance and Christmas, and a screenplay by the man who wrote Bridget Jones’s Diary, Four Weddings and a Funeral, and Notting Hill, it’s appropriate that Love Actually feels less like a brand-new movie than a greatest-hits compendium. It offers nothing new and instead makes do with presenting the…
Headbangers Ball Tour
Old-school thrash meets new-school post-hardcore meets metalcore on this fairly impressive road outing. MTV2 has done a hell of a job of reanimating the Headbangers Ball. Sure, they play some dross (Powerman 5000, Static-X), but they blast plenty of serious stuff, too (Hate Eternal, Slayer). It’s the show the modern metalhead needs, and the three…
Ghost Hunters
The train station at Indigo Lake is a fake. It has a gabled roof and an old-timey, black-lettered sign, true. But it has only two walls and was actually built in 1999 as a rest stop for the Cuyahoga Valley Scenic Railroad. It does make a fine place for Ken Summers and his group of…
Tights Fit
“Tis the season” and all that jive; beneath the tree this first week of November, you will find two films set during the final week of December, when sugarplums and candy canes go on sale at the concession stand, for the parents of all the good little girls and boys to buy in bulk. While…
Oneida
Brooklyn, New York’s Oneida is one of the few psychedelic-rock groups that could convincingly score the battle scenes in Fight Club. The band’s sixth album, Secret Wars (Jagjaguwar), finds Hanoi Jane, Fat Bobby, and Kid Millions not quite so full of law-breaking energy as they were on last year’s outlandish Each One Teach One double…
Try This at Home
When the mailman arrived at Josh Piscura’s home one October day, he came bearing a copy of the new PlayStation 2 game Backyard Wrestling: Don’t Try This at Home. Piscura quickly ripped into the package and found his own image staring back at him. Piscura, you see, is the star of Backyard Wrestling. The game’s…
Skin Deep
A few words of advice for those fortunate enough to have seen the original The Singing Detective miniseries that aired on the BBC in 1984: If you plan on seeing the new movie, also called The Singing Detective and also written by the late Dennis Potter, try to forget about the TV show. It’s all…
Dougie Maclean
Folk music doesn’t get much more soothing, or beautiful, than Dougie MacLean’s. And few artists capture the essence of their homelands better than MacLean does his native Scotland. The silken voice and lilting guitar of the man from Dunkeld have the desolate appeal and calming power of a soft day in the Highlands. But MacLean,…
Rob Tongren, Consumer Action Hero
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Uniformly Fine
A few years ago, as we watched Colin Powell stride about Washington, D.C., as the highest ranking military officer in the land (with the exception of the commander-in-chief), it was easy to forget that back during WWII, things were a whole lot different. In the ’40s, high-achiever Colin would likely have been stuck in a…
Kristin Hersh
When Kurt Cobain was acting as midwife to the Alternative Nation that Hersh and her band, Throwing Muses, helped conceive, she stayed home and had babies. Better that she missed all the fuss; Muses split while they were still pretty good, and her solo material, generally acoustic, has been even better. As a Muse, she…
Abercrombie & Filth
With the city and state in deep economic trouble, with a power company that brought us perilously close to a nuclear meltdown, and with a slew of public officials cozying up to people they’re supposed to regulate, you’d think Channel 5’s ace investigator Duane Pohlman would have plenty of big game to hunt. Instead, Pohlman…
Tantalizing Tidbits
Oldsters in our culture have to put up with a lot. When they’re not crowding onto Greyhounds to journey to Canada for affordable medications, they’re dealing with a U.S. society that marginalizes their very existence. But the elders among us have much to say, if anyone will stop to listen. And that’s what J.E. Franklin,…
The Twilight Singers
Three years isn’t an unusually long time for fans to hold their breath between albums by a favorite artist, but for members of the cult of Greg Dulli, it’s felt a lot longer than that. Never mind that the former Afghan Whigs frontman’s 2000 release, Twilight as Played by the Twilight Singers, was a thing…
Meet the Cavs’ Best Player
As Cleveland celebrities go, it’s pretty easy being Carlos Boozer these days. Klieg lights and TV cameras follow your every move — but only if your jersey reads No. 23. LeBron James appeases hungry reporters after each practice and game, a bouquet of microphones greeting his every move. Nobody much cares to hear from Darius…
Free Will
Even when people were watching Will Ferrell on television every Saturday night, they weren’t seeing Will Ferrell. They saw no more than a glimpse of him, beneath wigs and behind glued-on beards and buried under characters who became almost better known than he during his seven years on Saturday Night Live. There were, among so…
Wyclef Jean / Ja Rule
Whether you’re a would-be messiah or a wannabe thug, you must get respect. Thus, the latest offerings from Wyclef Jean and Ja Rule are but two sides of the same wooden nickel: ‘Clef has been engaged in a career-long quest to prove his “ecleftic” talent transcends his chosen genre(s), and gruff gangsta Ja Rule, after…
Slaughter in Summit
Slaughter in Summit Legal doesn’t make it right: Kudos to Scene for having the courage and the enlightenment to write an excellent, very revealing story on a subject that needs exposing: the horrors at the Summit County Animal Slaughter [“House of Horrors,” October 22]. It mystifies me why County Executive James McCarthy has chosen to…
Home-Chef Heaven
Whether you sneer or salivate over their upscale chain eateries, the new Legacy Village in Lyndhurst and the renovated Eton, on Chagrin Boulevard in Woodmere, contain parcels of gourmet paradise. At Eton, for instance, food fans are flocking to Trader Joe’s, a California-based grocery store cleverly conceived to appeal equally to gourmets, health-foods fans, and…
Sarah McLachlan
The saddest thing about Afterglow is that it completes Sarah McLachlan’s metamorphosis into exactly the type of bland female artist she once railed against. In her earliest days, the Canadian was a Kate Bush-modeled firebrand, who helped folk-pop shed its snooze-fest image with ornate, haunting songs such as “Into the Fire” and “Possession.” She then…
Eternal Fame
Who knew, when Irene Cara first belted out “Fame! I’m gonna live forever,” that her words would be so prophetic? Fame, the 1980 movie about a performing-arts high school, spawned the Emmy-winning TV show of the same name. Then its soundtrack was reissued earlier this year. Then it was resurrected as an NBC reality show.…
Pleasure Theory
Warning: A critical and unbiased review of an excellent restaurant could be an exercise in brevity. In the case of Theory, business partners Doug Petkovic and Gretchen Hyland’s young restaurant in Tremont, it might go something like this: “While the astringent arugula salad will appeal primarily to those who enjoy sucking on lemons, everything else…
Plaid
Since their start in the late ’80s as two-thirds of the influential electronic outfit Black Dog, Plaid’s Andy Turner and Ed Handley have been pegged as thinking man’s artists. Unfortunately, they’ve also fallen victim to some lazy terminology — like IDM, meant to describe an amorphous genre called “intelligent dance music,” which is really just…
This Week’s Day-By-Day Picks
Thursday, November 6 There are reasons to dislike Third Eye Blind: the derivative alt-rock sound (circa 1997), the songs’ single-minded simplicity, and singer Stephan Jenkins’s misogynistic arrogance, for instance. Then again, it’s also hard not to like them. The guys write super-catchy songs, they never reach beyond their limited ability, and they seem pretty damned…
Boy Wondering
Prescience is usually a curse. And today, the day the world has just found out about Elliot Smith’s suicide, Badly Drawn Boy Damon Gough is feeling very — and very unfortunately — prescient. “The thing about making music is . . .” Gough starts, then stops for an uncharacteristic pause. “The thing is, that you…
Steve Earle
Steve Earle is against the death penalty and for the United Mine Workers. His heroes include Joan Baez and Senator Patrick Leahy. And his new live double disc, Just an American Boy (the companion to a soon-to-be-released film), yields enough stage patter to render these and other political leanings crystal-clear for those who can’t be…
All-Pat Jazz
Pat Metheny’s long career has woven through many styles, genres, and forms, but never included a solo acoustic album. And he didn’t plan to make one when he retreated to his home studio two years ago and started to play — and then record — a batch of songs on baritone guitar. Last year, he…
Cheese Wizards
Since 1999, the last time the universe heard from Primus, frontman/cartoon character Les Claypool has kept busy with side bands that would make any musician drool. There was Oysterhead — which paired him with Phish guitarist Trey Anastasio and former Police trapsman Stewart Copeland — and Frog Brigade, which reunited the original 1986 Primus lineup.…
Kolar’s Horror Rock
Equally indebted to Yngwie Malmsteen and Satan, The Grand Guignol hisses and haunts like The Exorcist soundtrack cranked through Marshall stacks. It’s a mix of subtlety and speed, with Cleveland guitarist Kolar paying tribute to deceased Savatage great Cris Oliva with one screaming solo after the next. But what separates Kolar from so many other…
Clubland’s Clothier
FRI 11/7 Cleveland fashion designer Drue has already displayed her druewho? line of clothing in a Sundance film, the Rock ‘N Wrestling pay-per-view series, and Q-Tip’s video for “Vivrant Thing.” If she keeps this up, nobody will be asking Drue who? She admits she started sewing under peculiar circumstances. “I was a bad little girl,”…
Queer Eye, Straight Guy
With the ostentatious sweep of a Louis Vuitton ensemble, the five tastemakers of Queer Eye for the Straight Guy have simultaneously popularized and pigeonholed gay culture. Queer Eye’s fabulous fashion, food, and furniture choices gave many in the mainstream their first glimpses into the lives of real! live! gay! people! But the way the quintet’s…
American Werewolves
Deeply indebted to horrorcore legends the Misfits, American Werewolves plays atomic-powered ’50s-style pop at punk speed. (Fiends who have been bitterly disappointed with recent efforts from the Misfits pantheon note that . . . We Won’t Stay Dead is stronger than Project 1950 and everything from ‘Fits friends Balzac.) Structured around choruses that consist of…
Waddle Walk
SUN 11/9 If a gobbler is actually spotted at Sunday’s Turkey Trek, it’s gravy to Sarah Bogdanski. “We might not get to see any turkeys, but we’re going to [see] turkey tracks,” says the Hampton Hills Metro Park naturalist. She’ll look high and low for the reclusive birds, which are somewhat easier to find now…
98 Degrees and Rising
It’s taken two years for Jeff Timmons’s ears to stop ringing. As a member of platinum popsters 98 Degrees, the Massillon native spent most of his 20s in arenas full of panting teens, deafened by more screams than you’d hear in a thousand slasher flicks. “It was so loud and so overbearing that you couldn’t…
Fertile Minds
SAT 11/8 The new HealthSpace Cleveland museum features a cradle-to-grave joyride on the “Road to Good Health,” a 10-stop display that starts with a three-story theater shaped like a human head. Kids can touch a hand-held computer and “talk” with animated characters about health issues such as seat-belt safety and the dangers of smoking. But…
That Club Is a Tramp
Downtown hotspot Funky Buddha just split in half, making room for Tramp on the street-level floor. Tramp’s red motif suggests a Moulin Rouge-style burlesque show, and the scantily clad barmaids complete the image. “It’s primarily a dance club,” says general manager Nicole Giglio. “It’s a different atmosphere than you’ll find anywhere else in Cleveland.” Tramp,…
Ancient Edibles
11/6-11/9 Stan Hywet’s Madrigal Dinners are feasts fit for a queen. And sure enough, guests are greeted at the front door by Buckingham Palace-style guards. A trumpet fanfare then ushers the hungry into the dining room, where Queen Elizabeth I and her royal court make their grand entrance to the head table. Madrigal singers and…
Elliott
It’s usually a positive thing when overripe bands recognize their expiration dates and break up before inflicting self-congratulatory farewell tours or lukewarm albums upon audiences who stopped caring years ago. But when a group splits in the prime of life — as the Louisville, Kentucky indie veterans of Elliott are doing, despite releasing the best…
Foot Soldiers
11/6-11/9 In honor of the 300th anniversary of the founding of St. Petersburg, Russia’s Kirov Ballet is touring the U.S. for the first time in more than a decade. “There’s been a generation change and a concept change,” says spokesperson Sergei Danilian. “The ballet’s gone back to its history.” The company — which is more…
DJ Odi
He’s not bullet-ridden like 50 Cent, but premier NYC drum & bass DJ Odi did get his musical start in lock-up: When he was nine, Odi’s baby-sitter tossed him in a room and left him to his own devices. He found a turntable — and his calling. By 18, he was cutting his teeth at…
Matrix Is for Kids!
A not terribly long time ago, in an uninhabitable galaxy called Burbank, a generally astute movie studio founded by four Polish siblings alienated a young hotshot filmmaker. The studio was Warner Bros., and the project was a cold, disturbing, highly stylized vision of a mechanized future titled THX-1138 — not wholly original, but pretty cool…
Rock the Vote
During the era of voodoo economics and supply-side subterfuge, the Reagan administration was a catalyst for some of the most galvanized punk and hardcore America has ever produced. “Eighties hardcore was basically all political,” says Disengage frontman Jason Byers. “That’s what I grew up to. That’s what got me motivated; listening to those bands got…
