Singing Away Sorrow
The Children of Uganda throw all their energy into a repertoire of spirited songs and dances from their homeland. But their onstage exuberance belies their message of losing parents to AIDS. “It’s difficult for people who haven’t been to Africa to identify how AIDS has impacted the country and society-at-large,” says Alexis Hefley, the troupe’s…
Accept Retribution
British extreme-music label Retribute Records has signed two of Northeast Ohio’s most abrasive bands to one-album deals. Power-hardcore quartet Apartment 213’s CD, tentatively titled Cleveland Power Violence, is due this month, and the debut from Akron all-star punk-metal hybrid Accept Death will follow later this year. “I’ve always been a huge fan of Cleveland music,”…
Morning Rituals
Brand-name pancake houses are sprouting up like congressional probes. There’s the Oregon-based Original Pancake House in Woodmere, Denver’s Le Peep in Independence, a dozen Californian IHOPs, and, most recently, First Watch of Florida, which opened last month at Crocker Park. The flapjack stackup started us wondering just what sets any of these places apart from…
Toon In
Lakewood Library is expanding its popular Anime Club with a Manga Circle today. Club members take their usual TV viewing a step further by grabbing colored pencils and drawing their own manga, or Japanese cartoons. “It helps to have a little drawing experience,” says the club’s Justin Adkins. Led by artist Peter Wong, fans will…
Dana Cooper
Dana Cooper fits the definition of journeyman singer-songwriter: 30 years in the business. One-time major-label act, now gone indie. Set down roots in L.A., Texas, and Nashville. Critical acclaim, but little public recognition. Check, check, check, and double-check. But Cooper really brings those years of making folk, blues, rock, and country to bear in his…
Brazil Not
Recently opened Sarava (13225 Shaker Square, 216-295-1200) has been getting plenty of props for its sassy Brazilian menu and sizzling decor. So why isn’t chef-owner Sergio Abramof smiling? It seems that guests are still streaming into his other place, Sergio’s on University Circle (1903 Ford Drive, 216-231-1234), seeking a taste of Brazil — and getting…
Stop When You’re Feeling Dizi
Daniel Clemens’ mission tonight is to make his customers Dizi at the Boneyard. The veteran bartender recommends that his manly customers cop a buzz with a shot and a Miller High Life, while the ladies guzzle the raspberry-flavored Bomb Pop martini. “It looks like an ice-pop,” says Clemens, whose speedy service has earned him the…
Anti-Flag
The cardinal sin in punk rock is, of course, selling out to the man — or even being perceived to have sold out. So no surpise that ultra-leftist punk outfit Anti-Flag found itself faced with a dilemma last year when — after more than a decade as an underground, anti-establishment hero — it signed with…
Latino Heat
It’s difficult to tell from the image on the poster for Take the Lead, but that’s not star Antonio Banderas dancing in blue silhouette. In fact, the movie isn’t even about Banderas dancing — it’s about Banderas teaching teenagers to dance. You’d think that might be a dream come true for some of them, but…
Scene Stealer
Singer-songwriter Jason Collett has a theory as to why his hometown of Toronto has become the Seattle of the new millenium. Once known for exporting goof-popsters Barenaked Ladies and mopey alt-country troubadours the Cowboy Junkies, Toronto and other Canadian hotspots have lately produced some of the hippest indie-rock on college radio. “Canada doesn’t celebrate its…
KT Tunstall
The comparisons to Dido and Joss Stone that surround KT Tunstall are inevitable. She’s British and pretty, she sings wonderfully, and she was successful right out of the gate. But similarities to her fellow countrywomen end there. Whereas Dido and Stone are content to mine one stylistic vein, Tunstall has dynamited the whole musical mountaintop.…
Puff Piece
“You want an easy job, go join the Red Cross,” someone says, well into Thank You for Smoking, a gleeful farce about capitalist mendacity based on Christopher Buckley’s 1994 bestseller. The implication, made drummingly plain in the film’s every bon mot, is that our ethical barometers skew lazily toward goodness, and that the toughest tasks,…
American Strife
Almost single-handedly, David Sedaris has made spoken-word performances hip. He’s a pioneer of the dysfunctional generation that has no problem airing its dirty laundry in public. Over the past decade and a half, Sedaris has hilariously dished on co-workers, exes, and, most famously, his family. His grousing has been featured on radio (his nasal NPR…
Slave to His Past
In October, the Black Contractors Employers Association picketed the Cleveland Clinic, claiming not one black-owned firm had been hired to build its new $450 million heart center. A month later Norman Edwards, the group’s founder, threatened to protest the $258 million makeover at the Cleveland Museum of Art because there weren’t enough blacks on the…
The Reputation
The Reputation’s singer-guitarist Elizabeth Elmore harks back to the early alt-rock ’90s and spunky women like Kristin Hersh (Throwing Muses), Marcy Mays (Scrawl), Juliana Hatfield, and Liz Phair. Like them, Elmore uses serrated guitar lines to complement her fiery independence and shield her vulnerabilities in songs that wind around issues of determination and isolation. “There’s…
Sans Quentin
You may not yet have lost your ardor for the pressure-point hammerblow Quentin Tarantino executed on American movies, but it’s difficult at this late date not to view him as a necessary inoculation with unfortunate side effects: gas, bloating, dizziness, delusions of cleverness. The fad seemed to have peaked a few years back, but overwritten,…
Religious Right and Wrong
The Public Squares poke fun at the faithful tonight in their new sketch-comedy revue, I, Rock’em, Sock’em Robot. In the nine-skit show, the cast takes shots at religious zealots — from Catholics who collect papal trading cards to Muslims who get all worked up over cartoons of Mohammed. “We’ll attack anything,” says director Brett Tryda.…
The Sweetest Deal
Four years ago, FBI agent Christine Oliver wrote a confidential, 64-page affidavit that might well have been titled “The Pillaging of Cleveland.” It detailed the culture of bribery that permeated former Mayor Mike White’s dozen-year reign, contending that city and school contracts were up for grabs to anyone willing to offer kickbacks. And according to…
South
Usually rock and electronica form only an uneasy alliance. South succeeds because while it has a foot in both camps, the arrangements feel organic; it’s not like some shotgun wedding. It isn’t a matter of bringing the two styles into equal balance so much as creating an environment where they co-exist and complement each other.…
Call Me Madam
One of the small, dark fears that occurs to anyone who has brought a child into the world is this: What if I can’t stand her — or vice versa — when she’s all grown up? What happens when the baby of Sierra Club parents starts wearing O’Reilly Factor T-shirts? As hard as we try…
Cliff Hangers
Hailed as the Sundance of the High Peaks, the Banff Mountain Film Festival World Tour comes to town tonight with a program of short, documentary, and feature films. For three decades, the movies have showcased people with more guts than we’ve got: Skiers leap off cliffs, men jump from planes 30,000 feet above the Grand…
Love Is the Drug
Somewhere on I-90 Sunday, a Ford 15-passenger van will hit the exit ramp and begin navigating the streets, anxiously looking for the night’s stop. Sure, they’re tired, but that’s not why they’re scouring the landscape for a motel. It’s Magnolia, the 20-month-old apple of Jason Hammel and Kori Gardner’s eyes. She’s tired, and she’s the…
She Wants Revenge
What do a couple of DJs from the land of milk and honey know about darkness? Quite a bit, it would appear from She Wants Revenge’s self-titled debut, which bubbles with the same debauched, white-makeup-black-lipstick vibe and downcast synth as British darkwave progenitors Joy Division, Bauhaus, and the Cure. If imitation is the sincerest form…
Fox News
It’s a shame that our language has not kept up with the predations of the capitalist barbarians who control our economy. Years ago, these vipers were called “robber barons,” and though they frequently used unfair business practices to gain their fortunes, they also funded public museums, libraries, and hospitals. The modern versions, lacking a suitably…
Ghost in the Machine
As it did in The Ring, technology takes on a life of its own in the Japanese horror flick Pulse. After a young man kills himself, his ghost keeps showing up on people’s computers. And it’s not like they can just log off: The dude dials up (apparently apparitions don’t have broadband access), connects, and…
To Protect & Pound
“To protect and serve — our own asses.” That’s long been the motto of the Warren Police Department. For generations, cops there have been blamed for excessive force. Run a red light, and you could earn a fist in your crotch or a tag-team bludgeoning. No need to thank your friendly officer; it’s all in…
The Dan Band
Remember in Old School, the wedding scene, where newlywed Frank the Tank and his lovely bride are slow dancing, then pause to express dismay as the wedding singer drops a couple expertly timed F-bombs into the cheesy classic ballad “Total Eclipse of the Heart”? That wedding singer was Dan Finnerty of the Dan Band, which…
Capsule reviews of current area theater presentations.
Before It Hits Home — In its effort to probe the impact of HIV on the black community, Karamu has produced a play that has its heart in the right place, but few other vital organs correctly positioned. Written by Cheryl L. West in the early ’90s and expressing many of the reasonable fears and…
Jamaica State of Mind
For a guy who hasn’t even released a CD, Elan’s racked up quite a résumé: He sang with legendary reggae group the Wailers for two years, he opened for Santana on tour, and he backed Gwen Stefani on a soundtrack cut. The Los Angeles singer’s debut album, Together as One, comes out next month on…
He Was There
And his ears are still ringing: In “Two sides to tough love” [First Punch, March 22], you have the story all wrong. I am the son of the mother who was verbally assaulted by the officer who arrived at our house. It was three in the morning, and everyone was sleeping. My parents couldn’t hear…
Various Artists
Most of Hefty Records’ output is a bit too slow to dance to, yet far too electronic not to earn some dance-music subgenre tag; inevitably it defaults into the nebulous “downtempo” category — a style long bedeviled with a reputation for “sonic wallpaper” disposability. Rest assured that if anything on Hefty 10 Digest could be…
Capsule reviews of current area art exhibitions.
NEW 35th Annual Student Art Exhibition — Random, variably coherent personal gestures push social and political messages to the corners of this intermittently inspired show. Though her small black-and-white images are easy to overlook, photographer Erin Bauers is one of the brightest lights here. Her best work is “Me,” a creatively indirect self-portrait in which…
Kill Will
In the twisty new comedy-thriller, Lucky Number Slevin (opening nationwide today), Josh Hartnett plays an unlucky guy who’s having the worst day ever. He’s mugged, beaten, and mistaken for somebody caught in the middle of a gang war between two aging mobsters (Morgan Freeman, cool as always, and a scenery-chewing Ben Kingsley) who haven’t left…
Flights of Fancy
For Andrew Bird, the world is a fantastical “Brothers Grimm and Gorey” place, where “good kids grow horns” on “Opposite Day,” “Don Quixotes” fly B-17s, and life is a “fantastic voyage to parts unknown” perhaps best viewed “from inside an Etch-a-Sketch.” In light of such an imaginative worldview, it seems natural that Bird perceives music…
Mingo Fishtrap
Hailing from Austin Texas, Mingo Fishtrap swirls together soul, funk, and rhythm, rock, blues, and anything else that’ll fit. The eight-piece power combo’s truly irresistible gumbo goes down smooth, and usually leaves nary a butt in the seats. The band has toured with (and held its own against) Parliament Funkadelic, Neville Brothers, Dirty Dozen Brass…
Some Kind of Joke
The Mel Brooks Collection (Fox) Talk about taking the good with the bad; how else to describe a boxed set containing Blazing Saddles and Young Frankenstein (Brooks’ silly masterpieces), and Robin Hood: Men in Tights and History of the World, Part 1 (both overrated, even by people who can’t stand them). It’s an incomplete collection…
Dance Revolution
No fan of modern dance should go very long without seeing the Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater. The renowned African American dance company returns to Playhouse Square this weekend, performing three different programs, each culminating in Ailey’s masterpiece, “Revelations.” The work is an unforgettable suite of dances set to spirituals, portraying Ailey’s memories of black…
Changing Tense
Just repeating a word doesn’t make it redundant. Take the name of the Brooklyn-born, now bicoastal trio the Yeah Yeah Yeahs. It can be the same syllable in succession, or it can be Yeah? Yeah. Yeah! Your choice. “[The Yeah Yeah Yeahs] definitely started as a question with the aim of arriving at an exclamation,”…
Alan Jackson
A commercial powerhouse who’s never used his stardom as a bully pulpit, Alan Jackson has a great ability to imbue emotion with reason (or perhaps vice versa). In “Where Were You (When the World Stopped Turning)?,” his hit 9-11 remembrance, Jackson describes himself as “not a real political man” — one who watches CNN, but…
Tainted Black
On paper, Black sounds like a sure hit: Criterion Studios (the developer behind the spectacular Burnout games) designs a first-person shooter that does away with all that boring sneaking and instead focuses on the pure pyrotechnic appeal of a Hollywood-style gun battle. The game promised sub-woofer-rattling explosions, frantic gunfire in surround sound, and levels that…
A Fruitful Career
Comedian Paula Poundstone has a lot going on these days. “Right now, I’m slicing strawberries,” she laughs, calling from her California home. She’s been busy working on a humorous history book and raising three adopted kids. (Her problems with drugs and alcohol, which led to her arrest five years ago on a child-endangerment charge, are…
History Lessened
Everyone starts somewhere, and if there’s anything fame in the information age has taught us, it’s to destroy the film. Of course, Scott Stapp is not the only one with embarrassing footage out there. Besides MTV-video rips and late-night-TV appearances, youtube.com contains a treasure trove of rare music videos of rock stars in “compromising situations”…
Calexico
Calexico’s music has always had a progressive political bent — the inequities of border life and suburban sprawl are thematic constants. Their songs often feature protagonists seeking refuge — usually unsuccessfully — in unspoiled, idyllic settings. So the notion of Garden Ruin — the title of their new disc — is hardly out of character…
The week’s best releases from the pop-culture universe:
DVD — God Save the Queen: A Punk Rock Anthology: Twenty songs document a time when punk was more than just three guys singing about farts and jacking off. The performances from seminal bands like the Stooges, Buzzcocks, and X-Ray Spex are spotty, grainy, and muddy — just like the music itself. Nothing against Fall…
Blimey! It’s Blazer!
Just four months after playing its first live show, Blazer is rubbing elbows with intercontinental headliners. Last month, the quartet from Bay Village opened for ex-Psychedelic Furs frontman Richard Butler at the Beachland. Tonight, it warms up the Agora for Britpoppers Hard-Fi. “It’s shocking, in that it’s happened so quickly,” says Jay Glenn, the band’s…
Sound Advice
Jenny Williams is the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame’s communications coordinator. What does your job translate to in practical terms? It is my job to not only help make sure the public knows about what is going on at the museum, but also to help coordinate internal communications. I also set up interviews and…
Robinella
Making her debut for Dualtone, singer-songwriter Robinella Contreras steps up to the plate with new assurance and freedom. She and the CC String Band (which still backs her, though its name has been dropped) made a good-natured impression with 2003’s self-titled effort for Columbia, but label expectations of “the next Alison Krauss” stifled Contreras’ introspective,…
Our top DVD picks for the week of April 4.
Bee Season (Fox) Best of 3rd Rock From the Sun (Anchor Bay) The Big Question (THINKFilm) Bustin’ Bonaparte (Freestyle) Dawson’s Creek: The Complete Sixth Season (Sony) Dirty (Sony) The Fallen (Anthem) Far Side of the Moon (TLA) Gorillaz: Demon Days Live (Virgin) Judges (Anthem) Little Manhattan (Fox/Regency) Liza With a Z (Showtime) Mae West: The…
East Side Beirut
Beer Pong champs are made one cup at a time at Buffalo Wild Wings’ weekly tournament. Teams toss Ping-Pong balls into opponents’ cups of beer. Score a point and your opponent has to down the brew. “Win or lose, you get to drink beer,” says general manager Scott Harwood. “Where’s the problem?” Thursdays, 9 p.m.,…
Last Word
“I try to catch the openers. Some of my favorite bands today are bands that I saw opening for someone else, i.e. Alice in Chains opening for Van Halen, etc.” — Matt Wardlaw, The Metal Show “It’s hard to watch eight bands until the headliner goes on. 85 percent of the time the bands suck.…
Aereogramme
Aereogramme is a study in extremes. It embraces the (very) soft-LOUD-soft methodology of Mogwai; the singing aches with harmonious, little-boy-lost melancholy one moment and shrieking, disemboweled torment the next. The songs themselves range from naive, simple tunefulness to massive slabs of monolithic metal riffs to saturnine, ambient soundscapes — within the same song. In “Dreams…
Hot and Heavy
N.Y.C.’s Dub Trio makes a lot of noise on its latest CD, New Heavy. Weaving in and out of all the punk, hip-hop, and metal elements, the guys make it clear that they’re having real fun bringing the disparate sounds together. Separately, the three members have worked with artists as diverse as 50 Cent and…
Money Where Your Mouth Is
Band: The Lovekill (www.thelovekill.com; myspace.com/thelovekill) Hometown: Cleveland Sounds like: “Rites of Spring meets Sonic Youth.” Fun fact: “We collectively ate an entire tube of spicy peanut butter on our last tour — and sort of enjoyed it.” Playing: Saturday, April 8 (late show), at the Grog Shop. Why you should see them: “Because, face it,…
Cletus Black
In the Shadow is where Cletus Black’s been far too long. It’s high time for this guy’s traditional yet unique rock attitude to reach ears outside the Cleveland area. Maybe LeBron James can carry a few of Black’s CDs with him on the road and sell them to the folks hounding him for autographs. On…
O Sister
Adrienne Young makes country music that sounds like it came down from the hills more than a half-century ago. Buzzing with banjos, fiddles, and a rustic sense that home is where the heart is, Young’s songs bleed Americana. With her exemplary band, Little Sadie, Young crafts tunes on her second album, The Art of Virtue,…
Hard-Fi
Hard-Fi frontman Richard Archer raises his fist as his aching vocals moan, “Going on my Middle Eastern holiday/ Give me a gun, I hope I see my mum again” on the feverish war-torn anthem “Middle Eastern Holiday.” The English foursome cleverly examines issues of war and working-class culture on its debut album, Stars of CCTV.…
Clever Dan
Clever Dan melds explosive choruses and funky, hard-rock grooves, sounding indebted to such California bands as Korn, the Deftones, and particularly Incubus. But it’s when singer Sean McFalls isn’t courting a cease-and-desist order from Incubus’ attorneys that the band really shines: Unlike Incubus, Dan’s smart enough not to reach beyond its artistic capabilities, concentrating instead…
