Air Time
SAT 7/23 After eight years in Colorado’s ski country, John Flower brought back to Cleveland the ability to toss weighted beanbags in the air and ski simultaneously. A couple of juggling joggers gave him the idea. “I thought if they could joggle — jog and juggle — I could certainly skiggle,” he says. “That’s why…
Overseas MP.3s
When the Supreme Court ruled against internet sites that enable peer-to-peer file-sharing last month, it did music downloaders a favor. As anyone who’s ever visited P2P sites like Grokster and Morpheus can attest, sound quality is maddeningly dodgy and the catalogue is hopelessly disorganized. The imminent shutdown of these sites should provide the kick in…
Michael Stanley
American Road is one giant wink from Michael Stanley to the fans who have stuck with him since the days of sold-out performances at Blossom. It’s also enjoyable mostly for the uninitiated. While some pieces are very ’80s backyard-barbecue rock, many more hint at Stanley’s maturity and current retrospective mood. The wryly deft “Backing up…
Field Day
MON 7/25 If you’ve been watching Aaron Boone for the past three months and think you can do better, here’s your chance to prove it. At Monday’s Open Tryouts, the Indians look for a few good men . . . to hit, pitch, and field. “There’s that slim possibility that we’ll find that diamond in…
Howie Day
“I don’t even know how to classify what he does,” said a Miami of Ohio undergrad at Howie Day’s first headlining show in Cleveland in 2002. “It’s a little bit emo, a little bit pop, a little bit classic rock at times. He’s got a wide variety of influences.” Even then, at 21, Day had…
Joe Rohan
“Everybody wants to be James Dean,” Joe Rohan quavers midway through These Days. He’s talking about nonmusicians — if he were writing about fellow singer-songwriters, he might have sung, “Everybody wants to be Jonny Lang.” Everybody wants to have the blues — even when their hard times are barely a light shade of aquamarine. A…
Rain Men
FRI 7/22 Ask Zero Rain drummer Chris Winder what he thinks Cleveland’s happy-hour secret is, and he comes up with this gem: “I’ve never seen a place, ever, where people go out after work in business attire, don’t go home and shower, and drink until two-thirty in the morning.” Since 1999, the Columbus quartet has…
End of the Street
Furnace St. , a nominee for Scene’s Best Alternative/Electronic artist of the year, has broken up. “About a year before we disbanded, Lisa [Jorgensen] and I made a pinkie swear that if [2005’s] Extroversion didn’t get us to the next level professionally, we’d stop playing original music and start playing Led Zeppelin covers in the…
Wacky Willy
If you’re a fan of Shakespeare’s plot contrivances and character flourishes, you may have found a treasure trove in one of his later plays, Cymbeline, now being performed by the Cleveland Shakespeare Festival. This rather lumbering work features a nasty stepmother, underhanded trickery, crossdressing, and a beheading. It’s hard to ask for more from an…
Amped, but Unplugged
FRI 7/22 The Avett Brothers play their acoustic guitar, banjo, and upright bass with such force, there are times the members of the Americana trio wish they were plugged in. “The way we approach our instruments, we should be playing electric ones,” says Scott Avett, who plays banjo in the group he leads with sibling…
The Spits
The no-fi fringe-punk scene this Seattle band travels in has been sputtering for years. The sound is all fast and dirty, proudly pumped out on cheap 7″ singles with black and white, cut-and-paste art sleeves that strain to look like moldy artifacts from 1977. It’s called “Rip-Off-Records style” or “Killed by Death,” monikers that mean…
Egypt Us
There’s hardly a sturdier geometric shape for a romantic story than the eternal triangle. When two love one, simple division indicates that somebody is going to be left holding the bag. And when you factor in different nationalities — especially countries at war with each other — the math gets even more complex. So it…
Send in the Clones
It should come as no surprise that the hero and heroine of the new Michael Bay action extravaganza are clones. Exact copies of other people. You don’t get to be a Hollywood hitmeister like Bay — 200 Zillion Tickets Sold! — without indulging in formulas, and the characters played by Star Wars hero Ewan McGregor…
Soilent Green
Compared to their New Orleans scuzz-metal peers (Eyehategod, Superjoint Ritual, Crowbar), the members of Soilent Green are overachievers. They’re a genre-hopping act in the vein of Mr. Bungle or Naked City, except that just about all the styles the band spans in its hyper-abusive songs are variations on “extreme” music. There’s a little doom, a…
Boyz N the Studio
MTV Films made a wise purchase in picking up Hustle & Flow at Sundance: The soundtrack is killer. Rapping over music composed by Three 6 Mafia and Al Kapone, star Terrence Howard has the skills. The rest of the songs heard onscreen, most of which fall into the uniquely southern hip-hop subgenre of crunk, are…
LawnChair Generals
LawnChair Generals (producers-DJs Carlos Mendoza and Peter Christianson) have become Seattle’s go-to double threats on the local and international house-music circuits. These amiable ambassadors of slightly left-of-center house have found their own tracks getting deck love from frequent-flyer jocks like DJ Sneak, Derrick Carter, DJ Heather, and Mark Farina. It’s easy to understand why: LawnChair…
The Devil & Mr. Zombie
When rocker-turned-director Rob Zombie’s House of 1,000 Corpses was released in 2003, after years of bouncing around between studios afraid to put their name on a movie about a cartoonishly murderous family, it was anticipated as a hardcore gorefest. Instead, it was a plotless mess, with decent violence, but nothing outrageous. A fun mess, to…
Backstreet Boys
Yup, the boys are back in town, although they would argue that they were never gone — hence their cleverly titled comeback album, Never Gone. Like a boomerang to the head, the Orlando quintet has returned, with pristine harmonies intact and a newfound maturity marked by the weighty presence of guitars, strings, and pianos. Not…
Bad News
Going to the theater this summer has been like stepping into a time machine where your fondest childhood memories are retooled by cynics and sadists. Bewitched, Herbie: Fully Loaded, last week’s Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, and now Bad News Bears are meant to be gobbled like comfort food by wistful thirtysomethings weaned on the…
Brian Jonestown Massacre
Over the course of its 15-year existence, Brian Jonestown Massacre has been the among the most prolific rock bands. The group has released a dozen or so amazing full-length records (and a dizzying number of limited-edition singles and EPs) that run the gamut from driving, ’60s-tinged psychedelic R&B to blissful shoegazer rock. Unfortunately, the group…
Dark Alleys
About two-thirds of the way through A League of Ordinary Gentlemen, Chris Browne’s weirdly engaging documentary about professional bowling, the bad boy of the game, Pete Weber, looks straight into the camera and assures us: “I’m not an asshole.” Whether to believe Weber is an open question, given what we’ve seen of him in the…
3 Doors Down
In the late ’90s, the Spin Doctors played to single-digit crowds. A few years later, the Cherry Poppin’ Daddies rode the dead-horse neo-swing trend into wildly oversized (and undersold) venues. When awful acts pay for their aural atrocities in such a humiliating manner, it almost justifies the inexplicable popularity that set the stage for their…
The Coldest Case
Before there was Natalee Holloway, Shasta Groene, or Shakira Johnson, there was the little girl with the ponytail. It’s the ponytail, braided on the left, that most people remember first. Just a side-saddle swish dangling above the half-closed eyes of a 10-year-old girl, smiling for her class photo. Amy Mihaljevic always hated that picture. But…
On Stage
Baby — This energetic comic musical deals with the ways three very different couples handle their personal journeys, once they determine there’s a bun in the oven. The play, which had a respectable run on Broadway in the early 1980s, features a bundle of charming songs with music by David Shire and lyrics by Richard…
Mastodon
When rawk phemons Mastodon decided to write an album based on Moby Dick, the move was more than a little pretentious, and it definitely should have been a big, bloated flop. Instead, Leviathan is the hard-rock triumph of the year, launching the band from big-indie label Relapse to major-league Warner Bros. In the future, people…
Too Hot for The PD
Plain Dealer Editor Doug Clifton — known for his staunch views on the public’s right to know — last week found himself defending his decision to withhold “two stories of profound importance” from Northeast Ohio readers. In a June 30 column, Clifton wrote about the chilling effect that would be caused by the Supreme Court’s…
Fresh Fish
Twelve can be a good age for a restaurant — old enough to know what it’s about, but young enough that it has not yet crumbled into quiet mediocrity. And since so much of what passes for mass appeal is simply the frisson of novelty, any place that endures for a dozen years is likely…
David Childers and the Modern Don Juans
David Childers and the Modern Don Juans are a kick-ass, down-and-dirty, hard-rockin’ Americana band (and so are openers Hillbilly Idol). And if that’s not your idea of a good time, in the summer, the Barking Spider’s big doors open wide and let the great outdoors inside, with live music seven nights a week, from open-mic…
If Men Got Pregnant . . .
Pro-life and male: Your article was outstanding [“Bitter Pill,” July 13]. The fight for reproductive rights is becoming an uphill battle against pro-life, middle-aged male politicians who will never be pregnant. Nearly three years ago, I faced a “condom malfunction” with my boyfriend. Luckily, I was able to obtain emergency contraception from my local Planned…
On View
ONGOING Alicia Basinger: Shiver and Craze — This recent Cleveland Institute of Art graduate is the latest headliner in MOCA’s Emerging Artist Series, and she deserves the spotlight. A ceramist, Basinger makes clay seem like a brand-new medium by mixing it with previously unrelated elements. In “Timber,” her most physically impressive work, tall cylinders of…
Bob Mould
As the title suggests, Bob Mould’s Body of Song is a representative cross section of all his solo material since the 1988 split of Hüsker Dü, his hardcore-turned-power-pop trio. Mould’s string of dark solo albums was interrupted by a few well-received, radio-friendly releases by Sugar, his alt-rock band in the early to mid-’90s. Bored with…
City for Sale
If you believe a secret affidavit authored by the FBI, the City of Cleveland was open for business during the reign of former Mayor Mike White. And that business was extortion. The affidavit — sealed by a federal judge but obtained by Scene — was written in 2002 by FBI Agent Christine Oliver as part…
Cajun Comeback
One of the East Side’s former favorite watering holes, Solon’s Swamp Club, will soon be back in business, under new owners Dario and Liana Picciotti. Best remembered for its huge portions and turbo-charged noise levels, the original Swamp ran dry in 1997, after almost a decade. What followed was a string of ultimately unsuccessful operations,…
Buckshot and 9th Wonder
Brooklyn rhymer Kenyatta “Buckshot” Blake is one of many shoulda-been-huge MCs who suffered when hip-hop became a blinger’s game. However, despite legal battles, label struggles, and plain bad luck (Tupac was a fan, but died before he could get Buckshot’s career into overdrive), the Black Moon leader hasn’t given up. “My mission is to go…
Joy Ride
On its new album, Are You Wigglin?, the coed members of the Oakland-based cult band Gravy Train!!!! try something new: playing a mix of camp-punk and spiky new wave with live drums, loud guitars, and a newfound command of their instruments. “It was a big joke,” keyboardist and guitarist Hunx (whose real name is Seth…
Warped Minds
What follows is a diary of a trip to this year’s Vans Warped Tour. The city doesn’t matter, because Vans Warped is its own city. The tour stops in Cleveland this week. 7:41 a.m. Get a wake-up call from my 14-year-old nephew, Jeremy, whom I’m taking to his very first Warped Tour. He asks to…
Jason Mraz
Jason Mraz’s second studio album actually makes something of its uninspired title. From his upbeat whiteboy funk to his clever coffeehouse “Wordplay” to his swooping, Broadway-style ballads, Mraz couldn’t cover more bases if his skills had been designed by a marketing committee. Of course, for those who prefer that “talent” be preceded by “natural,” this…
This Week’s Day-By-Day Picks
Thursday, July 21 Jennifer Jeanne Patterson discovered something after her nuptials: Marriage ain’t easy. But unlike most of us (who bitch, cry, and resign ourselves to a life of misery), Patterson worked out her problems by writing a book: 52 Fights: A Newlywed’s Confession. “I was getting frustrated and was thinking that maybe I married…
Legend in the Making
Until recently, neo-soul crooner John Legend was known as John Stephens, his given moniker. Legend says he made the switch to draw more attention to his work and to challenge him with “a higher standard to live up to.” It seems to have worked. In addition to seeing Get Lifted, his major-label debut, quickly go…
Lungfish
Some bands grow up as they grow older; others are born ancient and simply erode. Over the past 15 years, Baltimore’s Lungfish has built an edifice of imposing post-hardcore that resounds far beyond the small world that birthed it — and Feral Hymns is another chip off that old block. Guitarist Asa Osborne still twists…
Ireland’s English
As his five-piece band takes a break in a Dublin rehearsal studio, Michael English muses about his upcoming trip to Cleveland. While he’s no stranger to Ireland’s aficionados of traditional music, the 26-year-old singer recognizes that he’s not yet a household name across the Atlantic. Last fall, English (not to be confused with the Contemporary…
Joe Strummer Revisited
Here’s a cultural riddle: Take an icon of a major pop movement and pretend the movement never happened: Ice Cube without gangsta rap, Ken Kesey without LSD, John Lydon without punk. What’s left? Would we ever even have heard of these guys? Like Lydon, Joe Strummer rose with punk and will always be associated with…
Black Halos
Six years after it was released, “Retro World,” from the Black Halos’ self-titled debut, remains rock’s most relevant self-critique. In it, grubby-voiced Billy Hopeless croaks, “Here it comes, baby, there it goes/It’s getting harder to shoot my load/Nothing’s really dangerous, just a retro world.” Here was an anti-nostalgia anthem, rendered in perfect shades of 1977…
