Fannypack
The Brooklyn-based trio Fannypack — 16-year-old Belinda, 17-year-old Jessibel, and 21-year-old Cat — is already hitting “media darling” status and drawing comparisons to Salt-N-Pepa, J.J. Fad, and L’Trimm. Discovered while rhyming on the street, then ushered into the studio by producers Fancy and Matt “Big Black” Goias, Fannypack does have a bit of the manufactured…
Cat Mask Fever
7/24-8/17 Contessa Gallery is giving theatergoers an up-close look at The Lion King Masks, featuring 5 of the original 230 masks from the Broadway show. The exhibit, which remains on view throughout The Lion King’s run at the State Theatre, features baby king-to-be Simba, the Lion King Mufasa, whimsical Zazu, leering Scar, and serene Nala.…
Rest of the Best
If there’s one thing musicians hate more than day jobs, it’s being categorized. And each year, that’s exactly what we here at Scene do to Northeast Ohio’s top artists. Because of this, lots of great bands routinely go unrecognized, either because they failed to garner enough votes to get into the increasingly competitive categories, or…
Serart
A fusion of Frank Zappa’s ostentatiously odd arrangements and Slayer’s infernal metallic brutality, System of a Down is one of the few beacons in nü-metal’s sea of crap. So it’s not surprising that a System side project also intrigues. On this eponymous debut, System vocalist Serj Tankian joins forces with Turkish avant-garde multi-instrumentalist Arto Tuncboyaciyan,…
Fairground Hoedown
SAT 7/26 The sixth annual Dollar Bank Jamboree is deep in the country. Clint Black (pictured) headlines, joined by J.P. Country, Debrae, the Curtis Brothers Band, and Buddy Jewell, winner of Nashville Star (the hillbilly American Idol). It starts at 3:30 p.m. Saturday at the Cuyahoga County Fairgrounds (164 Eastland Road in Berea). Admission is…
Body Count
“When the President of the United States says your name in anger,” Body Count frontman Ice-T once said, “the shit has hit the fan.” The original gangsta’s success as a rapper and actor is closing in on two decades, even after his hardcore-metal project Body Count endured 15 minutes of infamy that could have buried…
Vic Chesnutt
With Silver Lake, Vic Chesnutt strides boldly into the realm of lushness — and for the first time, that’s not an alcohol reference. Because of his partial paralysis, his guitar leans toward spare necessity, and his voice — always a wry, bittersweet instrument — often comes closer to spoken word than to singing. But the…
Books With Hooks
7/25-7/26 Author Paul McComas doesn’t read books at his signings — he sings them. The Illinois performer is on a cross-country junket for his second novel, Unplugged. It’s the story of Dayna Clay, a bisexual rocker who retreats to South Dakota to fight the blues. The book was motivated by Rock Against Depression, a project…
Road to Nashville
Mike Farley fans prepare to get Blue: The esteemed local singer-songwriter is leaving town for Nashville. “If you’re a songwriter, it’s good to be where the publishers are,” says Farley, a native of Long Island, New York, who spent the last six years in Cleveland. “You can pursue things from anywhere, but there’s just some…
DJ Spinna
Hip-hop’s history is a long-raging tug of war between MCs and producers. Through much of the late ’90s, lyricists had the upper hand, prompting the British label BBE (short for “Barely Breaking Even”) to launch The Beat Generation, a series of albums devoted to rap producers. Following efforts by veterans like Marley Marl and Pete…
Ozon Layered
French director François Ozon doesn’t like to repeat himself. His last film, 8 Women, was a theatrical, rather campy piece of fluff starring la crème de la crème of contemporary Gallic actresses. Before that came Under the Sand, an unsettling drama about a woman (Charlotte Rampling, giving perhaps her finest screen performance) who loses her…
Walkin’ Cane
Lazy Eye, the boutique label of Austin “Walkin’ Cane” Charanghat, uses the slogan “Damn Fine Blues.” Walkin’ Cane’s latest CD makes it difficult to refute that claim. Nevertheless, 706 Union Ave. is a radical departure for the man. There’s no band here, just Charanghat and his acoustic guitars, and no overdubs. This album isn’t incendiary,…
Bucking the Odds
The novelist F. Scott Fitzgerald asserted that “There are no second acts in American lives.” But a horse named Seabiscuit and the three disparate men who shared his success would surely disagree. Based on the best-selling nonfiction book by Laura Hillenbrand, Seabiscuit recounts the true story of an unprepossessing, knobby-kneed horse who became not only…
Robin Stone
As engaging a vocalist and savvy a lyricist as Robin Stone is, it’s her knack for just making good music that ultimately drives her new album. Like most fine songs, Stone’s succeed on purely musical terms. No matter how one interprets the verbal snapshots, impressions, and journal entries here, they consistently make for good lyrics.…
Virtual Family
Spy Kids 3-D: Game Over continues a fine tradition of turning third installments of film series into three-dimensional efforts; Amityville 3-D and Jaws 3-D exploited the gimmick long before Robert Rodriguez made clever use of the numeral signifying the milking to death of a franchise. But what Rodriguez lacks (say, Tony Roberts and the rubber…
We’re Number 6!
Punch doesn’t blame the mayor for sending a press release to celebrate Cleveland’s most recent triumph: a City Livability Award from the U.S. Conference of Mayors. The award, one of five honorable mentions given to cities with more than 100,000 people, recognizes Mayor Jane and the non-profit ParkWorks for a program using school grounds as…
Kiss Me, Sons of God
At the beginning of the third ugliest decade of the 20th century, a musical duo called They Might Be Giants put out an album called Flood. This 1990 trick-bag of oddly brilliant, stick-in-your-craw gems served as a fervid farewell to ’80s pop eccentricity and immediately summoned the hipper-than-thou barbs of dubious old Rolling Stone. Specifically,…
Girls, Guns, and Ghettos
July 2003, any Saturday, 1:45 a.m. You hear the long bass riffs from the music well before you pull up outside Big Family Lounge on Harvard Avenue. Men in white T-shirts and women in tight denim or street-legal couture wait their turn in line. There are no Black Americans among them — they are mostly…
Tart & Tasty
Theater in the summertime can be like a Hawaiian shirt: lightweight, colorful, and something you wouldn’t want to be seen in during any of the other three seasons. That’s why theater groups that produce shows in these drippy, sweltering months usually opt for frothy musicals and comedies, brain Popsicles that won’t tax the average playgoer’s…
Race Matters
Last school year, Don LeDonne, biology teacher and former coach of Cleveland Heights High School’s girls’ track team, wasn’t getting his phone messages. He’s the best coach the district has ever seen, yet boys’ track coach Claude Holland was the one who took incoming calls about the track program — probably taking most of the…
Bucket Kickers
These days, death is a to-die-for growth industry. Somebody gets whacked by fate at the start of every episode of HBO’s hugely popular Six Feet Under. And the Showtime series Dead Like Me is busy turning the job of the Grim Reaper — once represented by a solitary cloaked apparition lugging an ungainly sickle –…
David Gray
There’s something decidedly wrong with David Gray’s brand of emotional, accessible, well-crafted pop: It doesn’t suck. The ingredients don’t add up — one man, random instruments (think piano and pedal steel), and a lot of studio work — but he’s still selling out huge theaters and getting serious airplay. Dave Matthews, of all people, once…
Letters to the Editor
Extra Cheese for Jesus Happiness has no price tag: Some people say that we were stupid for giving back $640,000 [“The $640,000 Question,” July 16]. Some say that we could have traveled the world, gone on shopping sprees, and enjoyed the good life. Some even say that we could have been better off than we…
Bitchfest
Elizabeth Wurtzel is topless and flipping the bird on the cover of her 1998 book Bitch: In Praise of Difficult Women. Being called a cold, calculating bitch could be a compliment, Wurtzel suggested — a badge of honor that advertises power and confidence. Though her self-styled “bitchography” flopped, it signaled a bright new future for…
Today Is the Day
Lots of bands go in for cheap shock theatrics — Marilyn Manson is the default example. Very few bands possess the aura of irrationality, of sonic and behavioral unpredictability, that makes them genuinely frightening. For a while in the mid-1990s, Eyehategod had that: You never knew whether singer Michael Williams was going to attack the…
Hop Dreams
Buckeye Brewing Company could never make the opening montage of Laverne & Shirley. There are no conveyor belts or big, stainless-steel vats. There’s just Garin Wright and equipment that would fit into a broom closet. And Wright freely volunteers that Buckeye is the smallest brewery in Ohio bottling and kegging its wares. Even its motto…
Nuts to You
Wiry, aggressive, and adaptable, the frisky black squirrel has been Kent State University’s unofficial mascot for more than 40 years. How the peripatetic rodents first showed up at KSU is the stuff of legend; one from our own era asserts that they were escapees from a psych lab, the product of cross-breeding experiments gone terribly…
Anson Funderburgh & the Rockets
If, as Delbert McClinton claims, Anson Funderburgh & the Rockets are the best blues band around, their mastery of multiple styles is a big reason why. Skilled in a sparing, don’t-play-notes-that-don’t-matter approach, 48-year-old Funderburgh sounds equally at home in a classic Delta, Chicago, or Lone Star mode. The other not-so-secret weapon in the Rockets’ arsenal…
Old Sport
For baseball purists, it’s more than just three hours of crotch-grabbing and spitting. It’s a tradition, full of the grace and ceremony of centuries past. Baseball of the mid-1800s was a courteous contest played by gentlemen and ladies: Umpires and players alike were treated with respect. Stealing bases amounted to criminal thievery. Barehand grabs were…
Hip, in Theory
Fans of the former Mojo will scarcely recognize the place when they step into Theory (2221 Professor Street, 216-621-2301), restaurateur Doug Petkovic’s new, thoroughly remodeled dining room in Tremont. Gone is Mojo’s cool, contemporary vibe, replaced with a warm, earthy Arts & Crafts-influenced decor, complete with quarter-sawn oak paneling, mica-shaded wall sconces, and Craftsman-style ceramic-tile…
Shesus
Something funny happened on the way to Shesus becoming yet another screeching, riotous grrrl-led new-wave redux band. First off, it made a great debut record, one of the best of the year so far. Loves You . . . Loves You Not (Narnack) is a sharp slab of the kind of choppy, chanting indie rock…
This Week’s Day-By-Day Picks
Thursday, July 24 Steven Wilson was born too late — right after the Summer of Love, in November 1967, at the beginning of the psychedelic era. This is important, since Wilson’s own musical timeline — first with No-Man and now with London’s Porcupine Tree — is a crawling evolution of something started 35 years ago.…
Back With a Bang
A dark day in history sends out aftershocks. Horror, anger, sadness, and acceptance ripple around events in an ever-widening arc, like the rings inside an oak tree marking time. And at the outermost circle, far removed from the epicenter, is art. TV movies excepted, art generally requires gestation and reflection. Take the Columbine shootings, which…
Paul van Dyk
DJ, producer, and remixer Paul van Dyk got the itch to spin records behind the once-drawn Iron Curtain of East Berlin, at a time when DJs were considered “freaks in the corner.” Even cooler than this international experience is his recent court victory over the now-defunct MFS Records, which secured van Dyk’s claim to his…
Man Among B-boys
Rennie Harris doesn’t think of himself as one of the Legends of Hip-Hop, even though dance historians call him the 21st-century Alvin Ailey. To them, he’s a hip-hop savior who brought locking, popping, and B-boy dance styles to mainstream culture. In 1991, he founded Rennie Harris Puremovement, a Philadelphia dance troupe that thrives on breaking…
Higher Ground
Are you happier now working alone — “Yes,” Beans replies, before we can even finish our first question. Are you sure? “Positive,” asserts the bald, bespectacled MC-producer (real name: Robert Stewart), who last year departed from the underground hip-hop mavericks Antipop Consortium. “It’s a matter of freedom. I’d seen [former bandmates Priest and M. Sayyid]…
Longwave
With their thrift-store duds, shaggy indie rock ‘fros, and digs in New York City, Longwave could be considered just another band sprouting up in the wake of Strokesmania — especially since the groups also share a record label and publicity company, and have road-tripped together. Yet, whereas Julian and company take their inspiration from the…
Shake Their Moneymaker
7/24-7/27 As long as there’s been an AIDS Taskforce, there’s been a party in downtown Cleveland. The 19th Dancin’ fest takes place this weekend, with four nights of club partying and a daylong celebration on Sunday at Tower City Amphitheater. It’s Cleveland’s biggest annual rump-shaker and the Taskforce’s biggest fund-raiser. “This is the one party…
Scene Music Awards ’03
Music critics will probably never find Cleveland all that sexy. Let the rock hacks fawn over the long legs of Detroit, Austin, and Seattle — we’re rivaling them all down the runway. Northeast Ohio artists have dropped some of the hottest albums of the year, from rock (Cobra Verde’s Easy Listening) to metal (Chimaira’s The…
Super Furry Animals
Each song on Super Furry Animals’ 2001 triumph, Rings Around the World, was a game of stylistic connect-the-dots, exploding in a confetti shower of neo-psychedelic grooves, growling glam punk, electronica flares, and beach-blanket bounce. Phantom Power, the Welsh rockers’ follow-up to Rings, isn’t as immediately accessible or cohesive as those ribbons of rainbow-spun rock. Nevertheless,…
Kickball Fever
SAT 7/26 When Chris Andrikanish dreamed up his Adult Kickball Tournament, laughter was the primary response. It’s a kid’s game, he heard repeatedly. But the allure of the red rubber ball soon caught on. “You don’t have to be a professional, you don’t have to be in shape, you don’t have to be young,” Andrikanish…
Cocky and Loaded
Guitarist Matthew McAuley is riding in a tour van with his two A.R.E. Weapons bandmates, just talking about New York City. That’s how he arrived at the perfect nutshell for his band. “New York is a magnet for every fucking puke who thinks he has the greatest idea in the world, so he rolls there…
