Alternative Nation
Brendan Benson doesn’t quite bristle when he’s called a singer-songwriter, but he does become a bit anxious. After all, the one-man-band act that the Detroit native performs on his latest album, The Alternative to Love, is hardly the stuff of guitar-strumming troubadours armed with harmonica racks and folk songs. “Technically speaking, I do sing, and…
Crazy for Meze
Hors d’oeuvres, canapés, tapas, or meze: Whatever you call the little eats, they’ve developed a jumbo following among Cleveland diners, and for obvious reasons: Nibble on two or three with a glass of wine or a cocktail, and it’s a sophisticated start to a night on the town; settle in with friends for an evening…
Fischerspooner
Now that electroclash has gone the way of countless rails of yayo, New York’s Fischerspooner confronts that difficult second album in a post-Scissor Sisters soundscape. Perhaps not coincidentally, Warren Fischer and Casey Spooner opt for a warmer, less processed sound on the follow-up to 2003’s #1, emphasizing songcraft over dance floors and camp — not…
The Unusual Stand-Up
4/7-4/9 After 20 years as a stand-up comedian, Kevin Pollak finally got around to releasing his first album, A Little off the Top. It didn’t take him that long to get good; he’s just been busy. A well-received dramatic turn in 1990’s Avalon led to steady movie work, including roles in A Few Good Men…
Rockers Rally Round
Last summer, Sue Schmidt showed up at Richard Roberts’ door with a surprise. The Chi-Pig guitarist was dropping off their long-lost babies — the songs that the new-wave trio (which includes Roberts on drums and Deborah Smith on bass) had recorded back in 1978, when Akron was still being celebrated as the hotbed of inventive…
Yo La Tengo
The 42 songs on this three-CD Yo La Tengo career retrospective aren’t sequenced chronologically, but it wouldn’t much matter if they were. The two-decade tale of Hoboken, N.J.’s finest indie rock band resists a linear celebration; rather than an evolutionary journey, it’s one of vast eclecticism and experimentation. The band’s husband-and-wife core of guitarist Ira…
Diamonds Are a Girl’s Best Friend
SAT 4/9 Janet Podojil is the GM of the Cleveland Comets women’s baseball team. “General manager to most, group mommy to the players,” she explains. Doubling as coach, Podojil is on the prowl for new players to add to her 11-member squad. They play two games a month between June and September. If all goes…
Memo to Ms. Clarkson
Dear Kelly, I apologize for writing all of this stuff to you in a letter, but I couldn’t snag any phone time with you. Being the first-ever American Idol and embarking on this big, huge tour must mean your schedule is utterly packed. I can relate — I mean, yesterday I had to juggle grocery…
Mudvayne
Members of Mudvayne are fucking determined to outlast the nü-metal wave they rode in on. In the wake of Slipknot, the ‘Vayne popped in 2000, covered in full-body paint, riffing like they were rapid-firing heavy artillery. The 2002 disc The End of All Things to Come saw them wiping off the makeup, dropping their Gwar-worthy…
Body Shots
4/9-9/18 Yes, the “plastination” models featured in Body Worlds 2: The Anatomical Exhibition of Real Human Bodies are kinda creepy. But look at the preserved corpses from an educational — rather than icky — perspective, suggests Linda Abraham, executive director at the Great Lakes Science Center. “You’re certainly reminded of all the individuals who gave…
High Concept Hip-Hop
Who came up with the first rock concept album? It’s one of music’s burning questions — especially if you have some work you’re trying to avoid — and depends heavily on your personal definitions of “concept” and “impenetrable bullshit.” Pete Townshend usually gets a majority of the votes, of course, while Ray Davies fans complain,…
Fannypack
Call off the truant officer, because the school of lo-fi sass is back in session. To kick things off, Brooklyn’s Fannypack throws itself a raunchy little pep rally on “Keep It Up,” with MCs Jessibel, Belinda, and Cat playing head cheerleaders to a band of whistle blows and sneaker squeaks conducted by producers Fancy and…
God Is His Copilot
THU 4/7 Toby Mac’s faith was put to the test three years ago, when he and his wife struggled to have a second child. The couple vowed to pray for 30 consecutive mornings. On the fifth day, while they were at church, a stranger told them that she knew a woman who was putting her…
Boys vs. Men
Oh, to be one of the boys at a Backstreet Boys show. The taunting starts early. Even before we entered the sold-out House of Blues, which BSB packed on their first tour in four years, the security guards let approaching males know that this evening had the potential to be a bit emasculating, like losing…
Sledgehammer
Metalcore progenitor Integrity has been part of Cleveland for longer than Jacobs Field, and the band has seen about as many lineup changes as the Indians. Through 17 years and roughly 70 members, the on-again-off-again institution has morphed from hard-riffing, Prong-on-speed hardcore to black new-age electronica and back again. Through it all, the band’s sole…
Finder’s Fee
Damian Cunningham has the face of an angel — calm and cool blue eyes perched above freckled cheeks and a benevolent grin — which is only appropriate for a seven-year-old boy who speaks with the late, great saints, among them Peter, Joseph, Claire, and, of course, Francis of Assisi. Damian sees dead people, all right,…
Straight Outta Cleveland
In honor of the O’Jays’ recent induction to the Rock Hall, internet radio station Soul Patrol (www.soul-patrol.net) has made the Canton-spawned group the focus of the latest installment of Cleveland Soul: Rare ’60s & ’70s Classic Soul Straight Outta Cleveland. “Soul Patrol attempts to document the past, present, and future of black music,” says CEO…
Centrifuge
The title Sadness, Loveless, Hopeless, Endless pretty much says it all: This is wrist-slashing doom that’s the heavy-metal equivalent of the passing of a loved one. Forever downcast, Centrifuge is the inverse of optimism, three dudes from Ohio striving to be a Blacker Sabbath. Recorded and mixed by Abdullah frontman Jeff Shirilla, Sadness trudges through…
For Love of the Game
Last year, the Simmons family of Needham, Massachusetts, just outside Boston, sent Christmas cards for the first time in more than 20 years. “We send out Xmas cards about as often as the Red Sox win the World Series,” the card very cleverly proclaimed. This movie is for them. In truth, Fever Pitch is for…
Eisley
Hanson suffered an unfortunate fate when its Partridge Family-style bubblegum pop skyrocketed up the charts and into the hearts of prepubescent kiddies everywhere: People neglected to acknowledge that the squeaky-clean trio possessed the chops to move beyond Romper Room-level emoting. Thankfully, so far the siblings in Eisley aren’t suffering the same ignominy. In 1997, sisters…
Fortunate Son
Sahara is a stunning piece of work — stunningly inept, stunningly incoherent, stunningly awful in every single way imaginable. How this didn’t go direct to video or cable or airplane or bootleg is unfathomable. Actually, that’s not entirely true. It gets a proper blockbuster theatrical release through Paramount Pictures because its director, Breck Eisner, is…
Matt Bianco
Never shaky, routinely stirring, Matt Bianco is back after more than 20 years, making its unusual, burnished jazz. Packing a 12-piece band, Basia Trzetrzelewska, Mark Reilly, and Danny White, a.k.a. imaginary spy Matt Bianco, will perform at the Allen Theatre on Sunday, April 10, as part of a two-month tour. Reilly, the male vocalist, is…
Unreal As It Gets
What if a man has no friends? What if he speaks only when spoken to, and then only of the weather? What if, every day of the week, he attends mass, serves as a janitor, and retires to a one-room studio, emerging only to return to work? What happens to this man? Who is he,…
The Dresden Dolls
As the band name suggests, the Dresden Dolls perform a sort of dressed-up, post-apocalyptic music, devoid of high hopes, yet rich in high drama. The Boston duo (vocalist-pianist Amanda Palmer and drummer-guitarist Brian Viglione) calls the act “Brechtian Punk Cabaret,” which is fairly near the mark, but the theatrical element seems closer to The Rocky…
Pass Me, or I’ll Sue!
Carol Cummings dreamed of being a dental hygienist. The 40-year-old mother of two nearly coasted through her first year of classes at Tri-C with a B average. But she got hung up on Head and Neck Anatomy, a difficult course in which students must memorize dozens of bones, arteries and muscles. Last year, after the…
Death Warmed Over Again
Give Dan Harris, the writer-director of Imaginary Heroes, plenty of credit for boldness and ambition. Not many kids fresh out of Columbia University would have the wherewithal to tackle a complex family-crisis drama with four or five different kinds of trouble running through it and half a dozen crucial minor characters hanging around the edges.…
Sole/Pedestrian
Sole and Pedestrian are the marquee talent from San Francisco’s Anticon collective, an indie lab that’s developed a mutated strain of cutting-edge hip-hop. Social criticism set to music, recent Anticon records often sound as if they were made using broken radios, primitive drum machines, and old hand-held Coleco video games. Sole’s third album, the recently…
Facing the Music
Doug Gillard cuts loose gradually, 12 ounces at a time. The man knows how to swagger, but it takes about six songs and as many beers to bring it out of him. He doesn’t need to drink to take the stage of Friends, a caramel-hued Austin hangout just down the street from the Midnight Cowboy…
Diva Down
“I know why I hate integrity,” moans Jeremy Irons late in Callas Forever. “It’s great for the person who has it; it’s pure hell for those around it.” Indeed. As tacky, ponytailed impresario Larry Kelly, Irons makes for one seriously deranged philosopher, but his dedication to the late opera legend Maria Callas (Fanny Ardant) transforms…
Gris Gris
Back in the developmental days of the late ’60s, all those sloppy, three-chord, Nuggets-style nose-pickers that now get name-dropped by the garage revivalists were lucky to land third place in local battle-of-the-bands contests. Meanwhile, the spacey psychedelic end of that teen explosion — bands like Pink Floyd, the Creation, Jefferson Airplane — were actually selling…
Local Girl Makes Bad
Being ridiculed in Cleveland apparently wasn’t enough for former finance director Kelly Clark, so she went south — and got arrested for racketeering. You go, girl! Clark managed the books under former mayor Mike White. When the two left City Hall in 2002, they claimed the city was flush with a whopping $11.8 million surplus.…
Cop a Plea
In the past 20 years, there must have been at least a billion cop shows on TV, what with CSI-this and Law & Order-that, and a fair chunk of those scripts had something to do with police brutality. Small wonder, for there’s nothing more terrifying than the thought of our armed protectors using the weight…
Hella
With Church Gone Wild/Chirpin Hard, Hella becomes the latest outcast duo to package concurrent solo discs as a double album. Drummer Zach Hill’s difficult-to-digest Church punishes parishioners with maddeningly redundant rhythms, oppressive feedback swarms, and violently distorted vocals, but its most inspired moments reward the faithful. “Half Hour Handshake,” with its jingly melody weaving through…
Reality Check
Shining a light on the night-riders: As of today, and as a result of your article [“Crime Fighters Inc.,” March 23], the Ohio Association of Security & Investigation Services will be filing a formal complaint with the Division of Homeland Security against the unlicensed entities and individuals listed in this story. Great reporting. Thank you.…
Cabaret Array
Ask most folks in Cleveland about cabaret singing, and they’ll either refer to the helmet-haired songstress screeching “My Heart Will Go On” at the Ramada Inn or recall seeing Liza Minnelli once in the flick Cabaret. Not quite right on either count. Real cabaret singing is an art form in which the singer spins stories…
The Bravery
MTV and Rolling Stone both call the group “an artist to watch.” It’s at the “Top of the BBC’s ‘Sound of 2005’ poll.” It’s the next Strokes, or at the very least, the next Killers. The members of the hyped-up N.Y.C. act the Bravery practically have “Next Big Thing” stamped on their foreheads — they’re…
Poker Faced
Mike Kennedy feels deceived. Six months ago, he began holding poker tournaments at his Lorain pool hall and bar. These would be gentlemen’s games for a peasant budget — no entrance fee, no playing with cash. “They do not put a penny in,” he says. Nightly winners might take home a pool cue or a…
On Stage
Beauty and the Beast — Carousel’s version of the ubiquitous show features some terrifically enjoyable performances, but it lacks visual appeal. Many scenes — even intimate two-person moments — are played on the theater’s immense but essentially bare stage, sometimes in front of a painted backdrop or a silvery curtain. At times, it feels like…
Oreon
With At Wits End on indefinite hiatus, singer Pants Pantsley is taking his platinum-plated voicebox even further beyond hardcore with Oreon, a band closer to straight rock, but with an occasional screamo inflection, all the attitude of punk, and nine times the finesse. Available now at www.myspace.com/Oreon, “Twilight” tells the tale of a seductress with…
Tasty Dish
Giada De Laurentiis acknowledges that the Food Network is aiming for a hipper demographic these days. The cable network best known for serving up cooking shows, both rudimentary (The Essence of Emeril) and trivial (Iron Chef), has gotten a bit, um, hot and spicy lately. “They’re trying to draw in a younger audience,” says the…
On View
NEW Contemporaries: 7 — Todd Schroeder is a painter, but he’s also a composer of sorts. His abstract pictures in this exhibition of works by seven local artists bear witness to an intuitive grasp of music’s fundamentals. The paintings, sprinkled with colored dots radiating into larger circles and networks of horizontal and vertical lines, share…
Norm Nardini
Jon Bon Jovi on Norm Nardini: “Norman Nardini is the epitome of rock and roll. He lives it and breathes it.” And, in a transcription of his mile-a-minute stage rap, Norm Nardini on Norm Nardini: “All man, all day. The last true man. The heart and soul. The manful handful. The beauty on duty. The…
This Week’s Day-By-Day Picks
Thursday, April 7 It was only a matter of time before Vermont glam-punks River City Rebels brought a New York Doll into their fold. Their trash guitars and hedonist aesthetic was practically forged from the template the Dolls created three decades ago. The Rebels’ latest album, Hate to Be Loved, is produced by Sylvain Sylvain,…
Two Faces of Fournos
It doesn’t seem entirely fair: Many restaurants struggle to develop just one unique identity, and handsome Fournos Café has two — one for lunch, and one for dinner — and each of them is more than a little charming. During daylight hours, for instance, the Greek-accented Independence café is a speedy yet civilized lunch stop…
Lisa Marie Presley
It’s probably a little early for Lisa Marie Presley, musician, to bring up the expectations attached to her new album. A more appropriate title for this follow-up to the rock-and-roll scion’s 2003 debut, To Whom It May Concern, might’ve been Now Who? Not that Presley’s inexperience as a singer has kept her from surrounding herself…
