Jul 28 – Aug 3, 2010

Jul 28 - Aug 3, 2010 / Vol. 41 / No. 31

What to Do Tonight: Mumiy Troll

Rock & roll crazy, Russia style! When Ilya Lagutenko formed Mumiy Troll in Russia 27 years ago, the Cold War still lingered in the political air. Mumiy Troll (literally translated as “The Mummies’ Troll”) played around for several years until Lagutenko had to serve his time in the Russian Air Navy. After his discharge, the…

What to Do Tonight: Admiral Radley

Shades or beards? Shades or beards? California indie rockers Grandaddy and Earlimart have been pals for more than a decade. There’s even been some crossover, like when Grandaddy frontman Jason Lytle produced Earlimart’s 2003 album Everyone Down Here. Given their history, you could call Admiral Radley the least surprising supergroup since Asia. What is equally…

What to Do Tonight: Coffinberry’s Farewell Show

Working on Mozart’s rarely played “Concerto for Eight Hands” It’s a sunny Sunday afternoon in late July and Tony Cross and Pat O’Connor are relaxing at their West 117th Street headquarters. They’re reminiscing about eight years of playing music in the Cleveland rock quartet Coffinberry (while drinking champagne spritzers and Bloody Marys), talking about blasting…

What to Do Tonight: John Mayer

“Do I look like a big enough douchebag? No, seriously, do I?” With a résumé that includes a Berklee College of Music education, platinum record sales, über-hot girlfriends, and a mantle lined with Grammys, it’s easy to hate John Mayer. And when he airs his cluelessness for the world to see — in the pages…

What to Do Tonight: Sharon Jones & the Dap-Kings

Nature walk reveals a rare sighting of Sharon Jones & the Dap-Kings A few songs on Sharon Jones & the Dap-Kings’ latest album, I Learned the Hard Way, sound so old-school R&B, they distract from the great singer and band playing them. The group’s 2007 breakthrough, 100 Days, 100 Nights, sounds like it was made…

What to Do Tonight: Sarah Borges & the Broken Singles/The Big Sweet

Borges unbroken Massachusetts roots rockers Sarah Borges & the Broken Singles have been on the road for more than a year supporting 2009’s The Stars Are Out, so they’re sounding really tight at this point. The album — a mix of covers and originals — never quite breaks a sweat, but between Borges’ raspy-but-pretty voice…

What to Do Tonight: Hellyeah

Hellyeah. Um, why not? Can you imagine going to work day after day in the same setting where your own brother was randomly and brutally gunned down in front of you? Well, that’s exactly what former Pantera drummer Vinnie Paul has to deal with every night. It’s amazing he finds the courage to go up…

What to Do Tonight: Miniature Tigers

Not at all ready to pounce Miniature Tigers generated some buzz in 2008 with a pair of EPs and their debut album, Tell It to the Volcano. The bright, sunny sounds were carried along by breezy melodies and a quirky, lighthearted attitude. Frontman Charlie Brand’s fey charms were expressed in jangly, whimsically lovelorn paeans to…

Harvey Pekar Memorial Show at the Beachland This Weekend

The Beachland Ballroom is holding a memorial on Saturday to help pay funeral costs for the late Cleveland writer, who died on July 12. Of course, the show will also pay tribute to one of the area’s most distinctive voices: the writer of the great American Splendor comic, an informed jazz critic, and the dude…

This Just In: Cleveland Concert Announcements

Waiting for Tuba Tally NEW LINEUPAlice Cooper/Classic Rock All-Stars (featuring singers from Rare Earth, Sugarloaf, Blues Image, and Iron Butterfly): Buckcherry is no longer on the bill. Gates 5:30 p.m., $34.50/$49.50 (440-975-8085), Fri., Sept. 3, 7 p.m. Classic Park. THIS JUST INClay Aiken: Saturday, Feb. 19. 7:30 p.m., $10-$75 (PlayHouseSquare.org). Place Theatre, PlayHouse Square Center.…

Harvey Pekar Memorial Show at the Beachland This Weekend

The Beachland Ballroom is holding a memorial on Saturday to help pay funeral costs for the late Cleveland writer, who died on July 12. Of course, the show will also pay tribute to one of the area’s most distinctive voices: the writer of the great American Splendor comic, an informed jazz critic, and the dude…

F’n Slayer for F’n Cheap

Today only, Slayer/Megadeth/Testament tickets for the August 18 Cleveland concert are a mere $25, marked down from $42.50. The special runs through 11:59 p.m. at Live Nation.com. Tickets with a Testament VIP meet-and-greet-plus-swag-bag are $192. Slayer are playing 1990’s Seasons in the Abyss in it entirety. Megadeth are playing all of their 1990 classic, Rust…

Cleveland Food Truckers in LA Land on Food Network Show

Surprised they went with black instead of purple, but whatever. For years, Matt Chernus and Ryan Harkins were known among plugged-in Clevelanders as one-half of Amps II Eleven, which was once named Rock Band of the Year by this respected publication. The duo moved to L.A. in 2007 to get into marketing and promotion. Instead…

Campaign Finance Reports Show County Executive Hopefuls’ Sugar Daddies

Tall, dark, and delicious. The contenders for Cuyahoga County executive filed their campaign finance reports last week, providing a clearer picture of who owns each candidate. Most backers were fairly predictable: Endorsed Democrat Ed FitzGerald got $10,000 from the Democratic Party and significant labor union support, while endorsed Republican Matt Dolan, whose father Larry Dolan…

RTA Cops Can Indeed Give Tickets to Bicyclists

Nick Zallar Bicyclists quivering in fear at the RTA. Just like bikes are real vehicles, it’s important to remember that RTA cops are real cops. And they can give you real tickets. Cleveland’s burgeoning Critical Mass ride—that “organized coincidence” that brings cyclists together at Public Square the last Friday of every month to show that…

Bernadette Music Called 911 to Ask Dispatchers Out on Dates

Police, fire, medical, dating. Maybe she just had a thing for 911 dispatchers. Maybe she was just lonely and horny and those 1-900 numbers were just far too long for her tired fingers to dial. Maybe she was drunk. OK, she was definitely drunk. According to Cincinnati.com, Bernadette Music, 46, dialed up 911 a couple…

The View From the Top Bottom of the World

Clevelanders who wanted to view their lovely town from the perch of the Terminal Tower observation deck this weekend, before the bird’s nest was closed to the public yet again, were greeted with long lines. Very long lines. Like, very, very, very long and dispiriting lines that only the bravest of the brave or bored-est…

A Saturday Spent Shopping, In Photos

I had a nice little Saturday this weekend. No trip to Bed, Bath & Beyond, but I did hit up the open air market in Ohio City which had plenty of booths hawking jewelry and other assorted trinkets. Then there was a trip to a thrift store and a toy store. It all turned out…

Outcasts Reunion Show Tomorrow

We couldn’t find a picture of the Outcasts, so enjoy this funny monkey Long before “Americana” become a music watchword and Cleveland produced bands like the Jack Fords, the Outcasts were playing rocking roots music. The quartet of lead vocalist/guitarist Don Owens, lead guitarist John Incardona, drummers Paul Zorich and bassist Tony Cvijanovic were active…

Why John Boehner Will Never Be Just a Regular Guy

“Now hold it right there. I told you I’m just a regular guy. I have private jet to catch right after this though, so be quick.” The Republicans have their sights set on retaking the majority in the House and John Boehner has his sights set on becoming the Speaker of the House. To do…

Ohio Ranks 8th Nationally in Oil Spills

One of Ohio’s cleaner ties to oil. Far from the gulf, far from deep sea oil wells, Ohio still suffers plenty of oil spills. Bet you didn’t know that, did you? Enough natural gas leaks, enough faulty equipment fails, enough injuries are incurred that Ohio ranks 8th nationally for oil spill incidents according to a…

Concert Review: Blitzen Trapper at the Beachland Ballroom

Awesome music, awesome facial hair Blitzen Trapper have the ability to take fans on a wave of nostalgia — back to simpler times, when yelling “Free Bird” at a concert actually meant something. The Beachland Ballroom rode that wave to ’60s and ‘70s folk-rock last night, when the band tore through an hour-and-45-minute set that…

Midnight Syndicate Hang Out at Hot Topic Tomorrow

Goodies Members of the Midnight Syndicate and other horror celebrities will appear at the Great Lakes Mall’s Hot Topic at 6:30 p.m. tomorrow. The appearance will celebrate the DVD release of The Dead Matter, the band’s new film, which features some big names in the genre. People on hand will include the band, Edward Douglas,…

Top Pop Stars Sing About Their Favorite Fabric

Next up for Caillat: a song about her favorite side item at Arby’s Did you know Colbie Caillat and Leona Lewis — both of whom scored Top 10 albums in the past year — are singing about cotton these days? And did you know you can download their songs for free, so you can listen…

Drew Carey Has Lost Weight, This is News

The Huffington Post, US Magazine, and Fox 8 Cleveland are reporting, after conferring with multiple sources of course, that Drew Carey has lost a shit-ton of weight and now looks like Orville Redenbacher’s lost grandson. “I just got sick of being fat,” he told US. Adjust your life, diet, and workout schedules accordingly.

Supporting Your Coke Habit With Meat

My purse can only fit two of these? Man, I did not think this one through In this afternoon’s addition of “Things Only a Cokehead Would Do,” we would like to introduce you to a 49-year-old man from Cleveland. This man, out of money and needing a way to support his coke habit, spotted a…

A Bunch of Old Guys Replace Buckcherry at Classic Park Concert

Now that Buckcherry has dropped out, Rock of Ages will be relatively douchebag-free Buckcherry have dropped off the September 3 Rock of Ages concert at Classic Park because they’re opening for Nickelback on their current tour. (Christ, that sounds fun, doesn’t it? Leave us a comment below about what you’d rather do than attend the…

Mushroomhead Reveal Typically Subtle Cover Art to New Album

Cleveland metal monsters Mushroomhead have just revealed the cover art to their new album, Beautiful Stories for Ugly Children. The typically subtle artwork features the masked group greeting listeners with snarls, sneers, and smirks. At least we think that’s what’s going on. Hard to tell with those damn masks. The band’s seventh album comes out…

Concert Review: Ted Nugent at House of Blues

Who could have predicted he’d become a right-wing nutjob? Listen, my sex life is nothing like Prince’s, and I’m not taking two-minute cold showers to save the earth like Michael Stipe. I also wouldn’t vote or eat like Ted Nugent, but sometimes you have to separate the music from the messenger. And if you’re looking…

4th District’s Jim Jones Really Loves Red Meat, Hates Quiche

Jim Joyce is the proud representative from Ohio’s 4th District. He’s also a proud Twitter user. He’s additionally a proud hater of quiche. Only red meat and lots of it for this proud American. He wants his cow served with a side of cow, dipped in cow, slathered in cow, washed down with cow. Hell,…

Afternoon Brew

Helping teachers hang out with 15-year-old boys since 2001 Good Afternoon, Clevelanders. Here’s something to read so you don’t get that 2:30 feeling anymore. Or 3:30. Or 4:30. -Thomas Edison has been selected as the next great Ohioan to be set in stone at the National Statuary Hall in Washington D.C., but only after a…

William Lickvarcik, Obviously a Sex Offender

If you need to be told to stay away from someone who looks like this, you need to be locked up, too We’re sorry, but sometimes you just know by the face. If you spend an inordinate and potentially unhealthy amount of time looking through mug shots like we do over here at the Scene…

Cuyahoga County Corruption Probe Turns Two

The perfect gift for a second anniversary. The traditional gift for a second anniversary is cotton. How perfect is that? It’s the second anniversary of the Cuyahoga County corruption probe today. Two years ago the FBI blazed through government offices, personal homes, and Jimmy Dimora’s extra-secret snack refrigerator, launching a snarling and expansive investigation that…

Marriage Scam Comes to an End

“Do you, Ag..ne..sa Ole..ho..vna, take Dar..gaj Ivin…Oh just forget it. Kiss the bride.” Two men who were arranging fraudulent marriages for Eastern Europeans so that they could achieve permanent U.S. residence were sentenced in Ohio today, leaving hundreds of men in Alabama in tears when their mail-order brides didn’t show up to the altar. According…

Randy Roginski, Construction Worker, Hit and Killed on I-271

Obey these signs, please. Randy Roginski was working on I-271 late last night when he was struck and killed by a vehicle driven by Anthony Jones. Roginski, 41, was on the highway in a construction zone for Solar Testing Labs, according to the AP report about the accident. Randy R. Roginski, 41, of North Royalton…

Concert Review: Lilith Fair at Blossom Music Center

Dixie Chicks – mouthy one = Court Yard Hounds Speculation to the contrary aside, thousands of fans were clearly happy to see Lilith Fair return to Blossom Music Center yesterday. Headliner and organizer Sarah McLachlan deserves a lot of credit for being brave enough to bring back the all-female music festival after a ten year…

ZAC ATTACK

The vagaries of the U.S. film industry — whether the super-sized Hollywood variety or indie-scale — are as mystifying today as they were 20 or even 30 years ago. Take Burr Steers. He began his career as an actor (he was in The Last Days of Disco and Pulp Fiction) before segueing into life as…

The Concerts You Should See This Week

The Maine Who says youth is wasted on the young? The Maine began in 2007, when most of the band’s members were freshly graduated from their Tempe high school. Naming themselves after a song by their favorite band, Ivory, the Maine set up a MySpace page and built an audience the new-fashioned way (they’ve since…

In the Line of Fire

It’s taken U.S. readers a few years to get to know Stieg Larsson’s Lisbeth Salander, the heroine of three posthumously released books that were a hit throughout Europe after the first one was released in 2005. Part one of the crime trilogy, The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo, is this year’s surprise bestseller in the…

On Stage This Week

Curtains — In 1959, a less than talented actress is murdered during the opening night of her new play. July 31 and August 1, 7, and 8 at Cleveland State University’s Summer Stages, 1833 East 23rd Street. Call 216-687-2113 or visit http://www.csuohio.edu/theater/SummerStages for more info. Hunter Gatherers — The weirdest dinner party you will ever…

We Get Letters

Life in the Hoop’s Shadow The fact is, no one is saying basketball is bad [“Where Hoop Dreams Die,” June 30, 2010]. The problem is that some of the people who gather there to play a game are intimidating to the younger kids. They use foul language, conduct other business while at the park, and…

IDOL CURIOSITY

The fact that teenage girls get screamy, weepy crushes on entertainers is no news flash (sorry, Justin Bieber). It’s been going on since Frank “Swoonatra” crooned his way into your great-grandmother’s 13-year-old heart back in the 1940s. But Elvis Presley has always been the gold standard for girlish idol worship (sorry, Shaun Cassidy), and Bye…

In Loving Memory

Really smart scientists have proven that our taste in music mostly comes from our memories. Daniel J. Levitin says in his book This Is Your Brain on Music: The Science of a Human Obsession that we lump things into categories (or genres) to help distinguish what something sounds like. We also have a distinct ability to…

Get Out!

WEDNESDAY, JULY 28 OUTDOOR ADVENTURE Crayfish Safari at the Metroparks Think of crayfish, and you probably think of the formerly plentiful supply of small crustaceans from the Gulf of Mexico that are a staple of Louisiana’s regional cuisine. But they’re also lurking in our own backyards, and without the crude-oil marinade courtesy of BP. On…

Drive Time

By Jeff NieselYiddishe Cup’s Bert Stratton brings his new comedy and music project, Driving Mr. Klezmer, to Cain Park’s Alma Theater at 7 p.m. on Thursday. Stratton will play the clarinet and provide some spoken-word while his “chauffeur” Alan Douglass performs on the piano. Stratton calls Driving Mr. Klezmer a “nudnik/beatnik mix of comedy and music.”…

THE COMMIES NEXT DOOR

Caleb Maupin would like you to know he’s not a super-villain, despite what you may have seen on TV. A communist? Sure. But he’s not out to indoctrinate your children. Not yet. The 22-year-old is chatty and affable, a skinny pale kid with a burning bush of unruly red hair. When it comes to talking…

Metal Mayhem

When and how did Lamb of God become a metal institution? They still seem like a new band, even though they’ve been around for more than 15 years. Their first album, a self-titled disc from when they were still called Burn the Priest, came out in 1999. New American Gospel, their debut under their current…

No Bark, No Bite

The hyper kiddie flick Cats & Dogs: The Revenge of Kitty Galore has the best opening title sequence going right now: a terrific spoof of James Bond-style credit montages, with lots of feline silhouettes and iconic balls of yarn, etc. And there’s a guilty-pleasure closing-credit crawl of YouTube LOLcats and canine highlights. In between these…

Film Capsules

Cats & Dogs: The Revenge of Kitty Galore (PG) — Read review Friday at clevescene.com. Charlie St. Cloud (PG-13) — Featured in this issue; read review Friday at clevescene.com. Dinner for Schmucks (PG-13) — Read review Friday at clevescene.com. The Girl Who Played With Fire (R) — Reviewed in this issue. Inception (PG-13) — Christopher…

Dinner Is Served

Dinner for Schmucks plays more like a Hollywood multiplex comedy than a remake of a French art-house hit. That’s either good news or bad news to fans of 1998’s Le diner de cons. The jokes are broader here, and the cast is topnotch, but there’s also a little too much catering to mainstream tastes to…

On View At Local Galleries

PRIMAL CUTS Cleveland Institute of Art student Katy Richards paints meat: The kind you find in grocery stores and the kind of sweaty flesh you might find in a proverbial meat market. “My attraction to the flesh…comes from my interest in the primordial urges that drive us to consume,” she says. “I want to arouse…

Monkey Business

Craig Ramsey hadn’t planned on playing the Cleveland Music Festival. Now in its 11th year, the annual showcase embodied the local rock rat race that never much interested the indie veteran. But a “talent buyer” from the show’s promoter, Gorilla Productions, sold Ramsey on the idea. He said he too was in a local band,…

At the Arthouse

All Quiet on the Western FrontThink Oliver Stone and all those commie-lovin’ hippie filmmakers of the ’70s and ’80s were the first to make anti-war movies? Think again. This 1930 classic, set during the first World War, is about a German kid who soon figures out that war is indeed hell. So why should you…

CD Review: Kelis

What was “Milkshake” anyway? R&B? And now that you think about it, isn’t it kind of weird to categorize what Kelis did in “Caught Out There” as singing, or what was going on in “Bossy” as rapping? Kelis has been a risky oddball from the get-go. On her fifth album, she sounds like she’s finally…

CD Review: Melomena

Menomena continue to swap instruments and build ideas on their fourth album of indie prog-pop. But where their other records combined pop smarts with mysterious thematic flourishes, the relatively straightforward lyrical approach on Mines ends up sounding quite brave. The difference here is in the directness — like the repeated mantra of “I’d like to…

CD Review: Rick Ross

On 2009’s plush and vibrant Deeper Than Rap, Rick Ross spit the spunkiest rhymes of his career. He’s like a younger, looser, and stranger Jay-Z, with a knack for curious imagery and free-associative boasts. His fourth album is duly impressive, full of ritzy pop-funk cuts, prideful anthems, and elegant glimmers of introspection. But Teflon Don isn’t…

CD Review: Tom Jones

The panties thrown at Tom Jones these days should be the size of parachutes. But Jones, who turned 70 in June, has built an audience made up of the granddaughters of his original fans by covering Prince’s “Kiss” with Art of Noise in 1988 and recording his 1999 album Reload with the Cardigans, Portishead, and…

Stay In!

TOP PICK — Video Game ModNation Racers (Sony) This fun video game for the PlayStation 3 feels a lot like Mario Kart and other similar racers. But it’s got one thing on all of them: You can create your own awesome tracks and share them with other gamers. Want an obstacle over here? Go ahead…


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