Sex, Lies, and Audiotape
1/21-2/6 In Tape, two high school pals meet 10 years later in a motel room. One is a filmmaker, the other is a drug dealer, and both walk into the reunion with accusations and confessions (which are secretly recorded). “It’s about perception,” explains Adrienne Moon, who’s directing the Night Kitchen production opening Friday at Dobama…
Azita
Azita’s latest, Life on the Fly, is an eccentric pop-jazz hybrid that owes little to any specific forebears, but can probably best be described as a post-punk answer to Blue-era Joni Mitchell — or perhaps a cockeyed midpoint between Steely Dan and the Fall. On playful, toe-tapping numbers like “Just Joker Blues” and “Miss Tony,”…
Unlucky 13
Assault on Precinct 13, the sluggish remake of John Carpenter’s grungy 1976 movie of the same name, starts off with a bang — and never lives up to it. In a smoky den of iniquity, his hair shorn close to his sweaty skull, Ethan Hawke’s trying to close a drug deal. With his girl splayed…
H20
December 30, 2004, marked the 10th anniversary of H20’s first show. It’s an impressive milestone, especially for a group that’s fronted by a former roadie and hasn’t released an album in more than three years. Despite its recent hiatus from the recording studio, H20 still draws decent crowds — probably a karmic reward for being…
Is It Over Yet?
“Twenty-four hours. Three hundred fifty miles. His girlfriend’s kids. What could possibly go wrong?” In the case of Are We There Yet?, here’s the short answer: a flaccid screenplay, bratty kids stripped of depth and personality, a single joke replayed in every scene, unearned attempts at sentiment, and a bizarrely whitened backdrop, presumably designed to…
The Hard Lessons
The Hard Lessons are the latest in a seemingly endless line of fantastic Detroit groups with a knack for merging timeless mod, soul, garage, and hard-rock influences into something that’s uniquely theirs. Having paid their dues in the college town of Lansing, the band made the move south and is now setting the Motor City…
Run, Dick, Run
You have to hand it to Sean Penn. Okay, you don’t absolutely have to, and if you’re a Red Stater through and through, you certainly won’t want to, but give him some credit. After having been pilloried in the press for visiting Iraq under Saddam’s reign and torn apart by house cats in a puppet…
Bo Diddley
What would rock and roll be without a little posturing? Okay, more than a little. And every purported cool cat who ever brandished a mic or guitar onstage owes a little something to the Mississippi-born Elias McDaniel, aka Bo Diddley. In addition to his unique signature sound and easily identified guitar figures, Bo could always…
Heaven Can Wait
Maybe you’re one of the many who went to see Hero and were blown away. The historical Chinese setting, the attention to detail, the fights — who could blame you? There’s a better than average chance you may be thinking to yourself right now, “Self, that flick totally kicked ass. Wouldn’t it be great if…
Straylight Run
The origins of Straylight Run have more musical melodrama than a high school production of West Side Story. At the height of Taking Back Sunday’s ascent to the top of the emo food chain in spring 2003, SR founders John Nolan and Shaun Cooper left the Long Island screamo kingpins. The duo cited those ol’…
Midnight Hustler
Among night owls, Marc Brown may be the most famous guy in town. His Norton Furniture commercials appear in heavy rotation on 14 channels between the hours of midnight and 5 a.m. To say they’re weird would be charitable. Forget the appearances of knights, pirates, and a smiling hot dog that squirts ketchup on his…
Country Ham-Handed
The Linguistic Society of America recently announced its “Words of the Year,” an annual tribute to the fresh coinages that have wormed their way into our language. And once again, amid all the dazzlingly creative new terms — “hillbilly armor,” “carb-friendly,” and “crunk,” among them — a response to the crying need for a new…
The Silos
R.E.M., Jason and the Scorchers, the Blasters, Los Lobos — these are ’80s bands commonly cited as being among the forefathers of today’s Americana scene. One group that was just as significant but often — and unjustly — overlooked is the Silos. During the mid-to-late ’80s, they released several excellent albums (seek out Cuba, now…
Salem Witch Hunt
Jimmie Lee Smith isn’t very womanly, though he does try. He stands 5 foot 10, with boxy shoulders. His hands are callused and gnarled and enormous. He speaks in a high, quiet voice, and like most intensely private people, he’s comfortable with long silences. The bells of his ankle bracelet softly jangle with his hip-swaying…
On Stage
Michael Stanley Superstar: The Unauthorized Biography of the Cuyahoga Messiah — When Satan himself presents the opportunity to be world-renowned, fledgling rocker Michael Stanley avers that he’d be satisfied with just being famous in Ohio — more specifically Northeast Ohio, the area from Brunswick to Willoughby to Sheffield Lake. That’s one of the many comedic…
Music Saves Listening Party
In the long-forgotten days of yore, our forefathers and foremothers and foreuncles and fore-cool-older-sisters would gather and stay up late into the night, sharing prized platters of new vinyl. Despite the fact that they really do sound better, the records are gone, but the listening party remains. Between performances by experimental singer-songwriters Mike Machine and…
Simply Shocking
Some disturbing news from the Cleveland bureaucracy: Apparently, some city departments actually do what they’re supposed to. The Community Development Department, which helps poor and old people rehab homes, has come under scrutiny of late. Over several years, William Brelo, owner of AA Furnace and Boiler Co. in Warrensville Heights, kicked bribes to inspectors Jackie…
On View
George C. Rousch II: Contemporary Abstracts — Akron-based painter George C. Rousch II plays the part of the wandering loner in this show of recent work. On a sign at the door, he confesses that “mental driftwood” inspires his blurry abstracts. If that’s true, the driftwood comes from a modern-art history course, because the majority…
Third Annual Battle of the Belts at Spitboxers Reloaded
Spitboxers Reloaded is Northeast Ohio’s only weekly live hip-hop event. As MCs trade lines, the competition is always heated. Tonight, the rhymers are playing for keeps. The Third Annual Battle of the Belts will see one-on-one competition as MCs and breakers engage in verbal mortal combat. For the war of words, 24 rappers will square…
Leeches at the Gate
Wal-Mart has been caught forcing people to work off the clock. Firing black employees who dated whites. Hiding and destroying evidence in dozens of lawsuits. Violating child-labor laws. Paying women less than men. Spying on union-friendly workers. If these guys’ last names ended in vowels and they operated out of a bar on Murray Hill,…
New Kind of Moxie
Longtime fans of Moxie, Brad Friedlander’s East Side dining room, surely weren’t surprised last fall when Gourmet tapped the seven-year-old salon for inclusion in its annual guide to America’s most happenin’ restaurants. After all, Esquire’s longtime food-and-travel correspondent, John Mariani, had crowned the brassy bistro one of America’s best new restaurants way back in 1998.…
Shivaree
Too obscure to qualify as false advertising, a shivaree — courtesy of our Acadian countrymen — is an American variation on the French charivari, a drunken wedding revel. The band name nevertheless belies the precise adult pop that Ambrosia Parsley, Duke McVinnie, and Danny McGough craft in their Los Angeles digs. If any boozing went…
Money Talks
Money Talks It’s a green thing: I have been both a black business owner and a customer of Scene for two years, and I read your recent article regarding City News [“Pay Up, Honky,” January 5]. I want you to know that not all black people agree with what City News is saying. In fact,…
Positively Fourth Street
In a move more or less analogous to transplanting the Eiffel Tower onto a side street in Dubuque, restaurateurs Michael and Liz Symon are resettling their nationally known dining room Lola from trendy Tremont to downtown’s East Fourth Street. The move is the latest — and greatest — in the ongoing rebirth of East Fourth,…
Bright Eyes
There’s a famous line uttered by Ethan Hawke’s character in Reality Bites: “The only thing you have to be by the age of 23 is yourself.” Winona Ryder’s character Lelaina dutifully retorts, “Yeah, well, I’m not sure who that is anymore.” The musical equivalent of this dichotomy between self-assurance and insecurity just might be Bright…
Yellow Pages
Over a couple bottles of wine, Dawn E. Mitchell could see the horror in her fellow writers’ eyes as they passed around her four-page short story. Some winced; others slumped into their seats. After all, “Tart” was a ghastly tale about a fat old guy raping his four-year-old granddaughter. “The smell of his flesh was…
Go With the Flo
Neil Stanley never seems to leave the stage, even when standing in his West 123rd Street living room, where his only audience is a ceramic rodent resting on the mantle and five dudes crumpled into couches that look borrowed from Jeffrey Lebowski’s pad. Better known as funk live-wire Flo White, Stanley (who fronts a group…
. . . And You Will Know Us by the Trail of Dead
After making an indelible impression with 2002’s seismic Source Tags and Codes, Trail of Dead appeared poised to deliver a profoundly pretentious follow-up. Interscope issued a photo of the band members wearing Ye Olde Renaissance Faire garb and brandishing woodland-minstrel stringed instruments. When Worlds Apart opens with an “Overture” that includes an operatic choir and…
This Week’s Day-By-Day Picks
Thursday, January 20 Stomp was already a wall-rattling, floor-shaking experience. So imagine the damage it can do when blown up to Omnimax size. The trash-can-bangin’ dance-and-percussion troupe is the star of the super-huge theater’s latest flick, Pulse: A Stomp Odyssey. Its members also serve as guides on a musical journey that spans the globe, from…
Family Tradition
“Mention the word ‘folk’ — or even worse, ‘singer-songwriter’ — and you literally see kids’ eyes glaze over,” says Michael Merenda, for whose band, the Mammals, the sticker motto is “Trad Is Rad.” “The way we see it, not only is this music as raw, exciting, explosive, and exploratory as rock and roll, it is…
Smoke Screen/Various Artists/Drilla/AUG
The Northeast Ohio hip-hop scene is as hazy and amorphous as the billowing cloud of marijuana smoke that is the lone common denominator among recent releases. Unlike most regions that have an identifiable sound, this area’s rap underground is a wild pastiche of indie wordsmiths, mostly unconvincing thugs, and midwestern crunk. Kent’s Smoke Screen is…
Life of Sin
There are cult movies. Then there’s The World’s Greatest Sinner, a long-shelved 1962 oddity about a middle-aged insurance salesman who quits his job, changes his name to God, picks up a guitar, rocks the masses, and runs for President. It features his (implied) sex acts with a senior citizen and a 14-year-old girl, a score…
Mama Drama
When she fronted Throwing Muses, Kristin Hersh played guitar so hard that she turned her hands into a bloody mess. Now, after six predominantly acoustic solo albums, she’s playing some of the harshest, loudest music of her career, with the power trio 50 Foot Wave. And while a mother of four isn’t an obvious source…
Trillville and Lil Scrappy
Combining two artists’ debuts into one release was sensible marketing for Lil Jon, who sought to bring out further evidence of the young crunk culture of Atlanta. But the maneuver almost begged for competition between Lil Scrappy and the trio Trillville, even though both received the benefit of Jon at the helm. It didn’t take…
Slide Effects
WED 1/26 Andy Friedman’s press kit offers many descriptions of the Brooklyn poet and artist: “painter with lyrics,” “master of the slide projector,” “a country-blues-rock-n-roll-cabaret-spoken-song [performer].” Friedman doesn’t really care what you call him. He realizes audiences need familiar and identifiable labels to pull them in. “People need to be able to sniff the ass…
Labor of Love
Dave Love has every reason to celebrate. It’s a big year for the founder of Heads Up Records, one of the country’s biggest jazz labels. The Cleveland-based company is marking its 15th anniversary with a Grammy nod and sales that have climbed into the millions. Yet Love greets slaps on the back with the polite…
Hot Wheels
1/21-1/23 Jason Oster claims he can “put Pimp My Ride to shame.” As one of 420 exhibitors at this weekend’s Carquest Cleveland Rod & Custom Auto-Rama, Oster will show off six cars he’s souped up — including a 2003 Hummer with seven TV sets inside. “It kicks ass,” he boasts. “We just make them much,…
A New Path for Gatlin
The chief players from the recently disbanded Cleveland rock bands Gatlin and Another Path have formed a new band, APG. APG features Gatlin frontman Jon Drake on bass and vocals, Gatlin guitarists Don DeBiase and Patrick Ols, and former Sappy Bell drummer Tony Castillo. Another Path singer Dave Hudec fronts the band. “The basic idea…
Name That ‘Toon
SAT 1/22 As Jeff Ingram screened more than 20 entries for the second Standing Rock Short Film & Video Festival, he noticed a common theme: Most were heavy on animation. “The editing programs they have available are making for a lot of cool experiments,” says Ingram, the festival’s director. “It’s not quick and easy, but…
Ying Yang Twins
Although they didn’t achieve national success until teaming up in 2003 with crunk overlord Lil Jon and a Britney Spears in search of club cred, Atlanta’s Ying Yang Twins have actually been twurking around the edges of the southern hip-hop scene for years. D-Roc and Kaine joined forces in 1996 and made noise in the…
