Family Ties
Martha Wainwright wasn’t sure which direction her self-titled debut album would take before she recorded it last year. She wasn’t sure if she should follow the folkie path her parents walked (Mom and Dad are Kate McGarrigle and Loudon Wainwright III, respectively) or explore a more adventurous sound, as older brother Rufus has on four…
Upward Momentum
Roué has played but one song, and already the audience is backing off the P.A. “I’m moving away from the speaker,” a small young gal with close-cropped black hair tells a friend, recoiling from a stage monitor as if from a bomb. She walks to the center of the room, joining about two dozen other…
Weird Science
6/4-8/14 We have no idea what genomes are, but apparently they’re a pretty big deal. HealthSpace Cleveland is bringing the traveling exhibit Genome: The Secret of How Life Works to town for a two-month stay. Hopefully, it will help clear up some things. “We did a study, and only 1 percent of the people could…
Reindeer Games
When former Dictators frontman Handsome Dick Manitoba went all cease-and-desist on Dan Snaith’s band Manitoba, the electronica artist didn’t even know who the grizzled old punk was. “I’d never heard of the guy,” says Snaith, a Canadian who named his group after a province in his homeland. “And now I’ve gone through therapy to have…
Fear Factor
6/2-10/31 Halloween doesn’t come just once a year for Bill and Jayme Criscione. By the first week of June, the owners of Ghostly Manor unlock the doors to their haunted house for five months of “high-startle” wickedness. A 25-foot-tall skull is the newest addition to the array of state-of-the-art props inside the 5,000-square-foot mansion. Throughout…
Benatar Brings the Classical Rock
The stuffiness normally associated with an evening at the orchestra was quickly deflated when a guy with a long brown ponytail stood up and threw the devil horns. “Why is he doing that?” a guy in the back gasped. Because the show was kickass, that’s why. Last Tuesday, ’80s rock chick Pat Benatar and her…
Beyond the Mat
SUN 6/5 J.T. Lightning laments the day that wrestling became a passing fad. Since World Wrestling Entertainment still hasn’t found anyone to fill “Stone Cold” Steve Austin’s mudhole-stompin’ boots, the Hot Summer Night 2005 promoter hopes to spark some life into sports entertainment. “When the WWE did shows at the Gund, they used to sell…
Flyy Bar
Investors tapped two of the biggest names in Cleveland entertainment to design and execute Bar Flyy, the fly new club on West Sixth Street, downtown’s booming entertainment district. Though the venue will be an independent operation once it opens, it came together through the efforts of Agora founder Henry “Hank” Lo Conti and Gary Bauer,…
Forces of Nature
6/3-6/4 Nature Moves, this weekend’s Verb Ballets performances at the natural history museum, isn’t a program filled with random routines from the dance troupe’s repertoire. On the contrary, says artistic director Hernando Cortez, “We’re incorporating world, folk, and ethnic dances . . . It reenergizes what people think of as educational tools.” The five-part program…
Manowar
Manowar is the line in the sand. It’s easy to like Black Sabbath. It’s easy to like Judas Priest — even if you think Rob Halford’s studded codpiece is a little excessive. But Manowar is the ultimate test of one’s metal bona fides. There’s just so much to accept — or ignore — before ever…
Gaveling Gays
Stark County Judge David Stucki had to make the call: Who should take custody of the two-year-old boy? On one side were the boy’s parents, who had proved they weren’t up to the challenge. The boy’s mother, Lois Deaver, was developmentally handicapped and living with an alleged wife-beater. Her husband, Cary Williamson, had lost custody…
Broke, But Not Broken
There was no reason to expect much from Cinderella Man, Ron Howard’s biography of boxer James Braddock, who in the summer of 1935 became the most unlikely heavyweight champion in the history of boxing. After all, it’s a true tale, with an outcome that’s predetermined; surely there could be no tension in its telling, no…
Ozomatli
It’s hard to talk about Ozomatli without coming off like some chai-drinking, dashiki-wearing boho hipster. To wit: The socially conscious, knock-you-on-your-ass party grooves of the band’s latest, Street Signs, offer a blend of hip-hop, funk, Latin, and Middle Eastern flavors that compel earnest white people like us to use phrases like “global block party.” Set…
Much Abrew About Nothing
“Make it more than a quickie,” reads the faded sign outside the Stop On Inn, a dark, musky North Olmsted bar with a string of banners inside that look like leftovers from last Fourth of July. A man onstage croons about his broken heart as the horde at the bar cheers the Indians on TV.…
One for the Girls
The Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants is a flawed movie born of a flawed novel, but let this be clear: Girls will eat it up with a spoon. It features three young stars, indulges in rampant romantic fantasy, drips with teary-eyed sentimentality, and pays a heaping load of lip service to the long since co-opted…
The Dears
On No Cities Left, its terrific 2004 album, this Montreal outfit makes delicious art-pop, replete with chattering guitars, swirling strings, warm horns, and the sort of eerie keyboards Thom Yorke probably uses as background music when he wants to unsettle burdensome houseguests. The band is led by singer-guitarist Murray Lightburn, an unqualified drama queen –…
Idiot-Proof
After weeks of defending the state’s investment in rare coins — without bothering to check if his boast of huge returns was actually true — Governor Bob Taft has finally learned that it isn’t a good idea to sink $55.4 million into . . . collectibles. “I can go to any barroom or bowling alley…
Skate Bored
Lords of Dogtown is an odd, disorienting commodity — a fictional version of a documentary (Dogtown and Z-Boys) about the birth of skateboarding in 1970s Venice, California, that was written by the man who directed said doc, in which he was a central figure. Stacy Peralta, whose Dogtown and Z-Boys now serves as a demo…
Luciano
The artist formerly known as Jepther McClymont has always camped out at the intersection of Jamaica’s two major musical subgenres: the conscious warmth of roots reggae and the digital grind of modern dancehall. And few singers in any style have been as successful at negotiating the boundary between sacred and sexy. The Davey Town native…
Return of the Boogeyman
Eleven-year-old Katie Wolgamott rides the bus home from school. From her stop, she walks alone the three and a half blocks to her babysitter’s house in a quiet, blue-collar Massillon neighborhood. A maroon sedan is following her. An older man with gray hair yells for her to get in. Katie picks up her stride and…
Thick and Rich
Layer Cake, the new British crime drama from first-time director Matthew Vaughn, is a block of granite struggling to liberate its inner statue. Vaughn (producer of Snatch and Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels) has plenty of dark threat and compelling visual style, but his ambitious trip into the London underworld is so tricked-up with…
The Raveonettes
Since the Starvations have nearly broken up and the Strokes can’t harmonize, our fleeting hope that some dark doo-wop would seep into the music world is fizzling fast. The Raveonettes still burn, though, and they’re the best bet to expose the creepy teen-dream melodrama of that ’50s sound. On their first two releases, these Denmark…
With Friends Like This
With Friends Like This Someone was talking through the hat: On November 21, 2004, The Plain Dealer touted David Brennan as “The Man in the White Hat” with big ideas to solve the crisis in nursing-home costs [First Punch, May 18]. They published a huge picture of him with his white hat. They called him…
The Kids Aren’t Alright
Don’t let the PG-13 rating fool you. Though it’s acted almost completely by children, Nobody Knows is not a film for children. A poignant, deeply affecting tale of child neglect and abandonment — all the more disturbing for being based on a true incident — this Japanese film (with English subtitles) is the latest from…
Jesse McCartney
Hey, this is Jesse’s cell phone. I’m on my first major tour right now, so leave me a message, and I’ll get back to you as soon as I can. Peace. “Hey, Jesse — it’s Aaron Carter. Somebody else just mistook me for you, ’cause of that dirty blond bedhead you’re sporting — which is…
Scooter Time
Phil Waters turns crimson when he tells the story. Stationed in the army in Germany 18 years ago, he was sucking up beers with his barracks buddies and bragging about his vintage ’69 BMW bike parked outside the bar. After hearing enough hot air, another soldier challenged Waters to a race against his Lambretta motorbike.…
Not So Jolly Folly
War creates strangely disparate fates for people. For every buoyant investor clutching valuable shares of Halliburton, Dick Cheney’s ex-employer and a major profiteer of the Iraq hostilities, there are a few more dead or maimed people whose families will never be the same. War is hell — and a hell of a good way to…
Asleep at the Wheel
Bob Dylan was a luckier young man than Ray Benson. Dylan got to speak with his idol, Woody Guthrie, a few years before Guthrie passed away. Benson wasn’t so fortunate with his muse, Bob Wills. Benson met the king of western swing in December of 1972, during the recording of the last album by Wills…
This Week’s Day-By-Day Picks
Thursday, June 2 Despite sounding like a full band, the Conversation is more like a monologue for Texan Jared Putnam, who gets a little help from some friends on his second album, last year’s Blue. Mixing hooky pop and adult-alternative sounds, Putnam (who plays almost everything but percussion on Blue) writes such songs as “Lost…
On Stage
A Chorus Line — This elegant metaphor for the human journey takes place in a stark theatrical version of a Skinner box — an empty black space with mirrors on the back wall, where rewards and punishments are doled out by the frequently disembodied voice of the choreographer. He’s the reigning deity in this claustrophobic…
Brazen Rogues CD release and Amerivespa Club of America Party
The Brazen Rogues aren’t the most obvious choice to play the national gathering of the Amerivespa Club of America, but the Cleveland blue-collar Oi! band is a good fit for a roomful of gearheads and scooter enthusiasts. The party also doubles as a CD release for PBR Streetgang, the long-awaited sophomore LP from East Cleveland’s…
Four Tet
Blessed with exquisite musical taste and an enviably large record collection, Four Tet (British producer Kieran Hebden) has maximized those assets over four increasingly accomplished albums since 1999’s Dialogue, while incidentally becoming the foremost proponent of “folktronica.” Four Tet’s mastery of the laptop and sampler culminates on Everything Ecstatic, a strange yet beguiling amalgam of…
On View
NEW Jesse Bransford: Recent Work — Obscure, unappreciated intellectuals are Bransford’s favorite people, their achievements his most cherished subjects. The young Atlanta-born, New York-based artist, whose show of recent drawings at Shaheen is his first solo exhibition, takes inspiration from thinkers whose accomplishments or ideas were ignored or even discredited in their day, often importing…
Empire!
Capsule’s indie rock days may be over, but Britpop is eternal. Catch the temporarily displaced Ben Vendetta at Empire!, his monthly DJ night at the B-Side Liquor Lounge. This month, the boy and girl in the snazziest, most mod gear will get a free copy of Smashing Orange’s 1991, an LP drenched in guitar effects…
Teenage Fanclub
Back in the heady months between “Teenage Riot” and “Teen Spirit,” these four Scotsmen earned their name by opening up the druggy romance of ’80s noise merchants like the Dream Syndicate and Dinosaur Jr., replacing snooty self-involvement with the excitement of amateurs trying to overreach their abilities. On their first Matador releases, melodies burst through…
Loaded Question
The better the restaurant, the smaller the menu: As generalizations go, this one isn’t too far off the mark. At one end of the continuum, gourmets can point toward those few and fabulous fine-dining temples lorded over by culinary high priests, where nothing is served save free-range quail cheeks scattered on a bed of organic…
Quasimoto
Of all hip-hop wunderkind Madlib’s multiple identities, Quasimoto remains the most compelling — a Munchkin-voiced dope fiend who’ll say and do just about anything. But the real marvel is that his creator finds equally colorful settings for this comic-book creation: first on the 2000 classic The Unseen, and now, upping the ante considerably, comes The…
Layzie Bone
It may well be true, as Krayzie Bone once remarked with understandable bitterness, that everyone in hip-hop has a Bone Thugs-N-Harmony song. Although they were eclipsed by Nelly and others years ago, the various Bone brothers have continued to amass a catalogue built on the harmonized, meter-tripping rhymes that have become their trademark. Some excellent…
Sun Sessions
When it comes to outdoor dining, our delight is directly proportional to the degree of winter’s wretchedness. How else to explain why, when warm days finally arrive, there is hardly a restaurant, deli, café, or wine bar here that doesn’t drag out a chair or two, unfurl a ratty umbrella, and call it “alfresco dining”?…
Swing Out Sister
Where Our Love Grows, the first Swing Out Sister album in eight years, boasts forgettable lyrics, ethereal melodies, nice singing, and a rhythm section that seems stuck in Robotland. Paul Staveley O’Duffy, the computer whiz who has helped fashion the cotton-candy SOS sound since it began 20 years ago in Manchester, England, is the main…
Between Home and Serenity
Sure, most of the expected screamo trademarks make their presence felt on Between Home and Serenity’s full-length debut: bloodletting shrieks, hyperventilating guitar, and themes of hope and heartbreak that occasionally feel cribbed from an episode of Degrassi Junior High. But with Anthony Dargaj’s wrist-spraining solos and Brian Weir’s propulsive double-bass drumming, the Cleveland quintet hardens…
Dancin’ in the Dark
A surreal thought occurred to VNV Nation founder Ronan Harris during a recent show in Atlanta. Playing at the midtown venue EarthLink Live, he realized that just the night before, pimpin’ pee-wee football coach Snoop Dogg had graced the very same stage. The laid-back mannerisms of the gangsta-rap icon stand in stark contrast to Harris’…
Oasis
Don’t believe the hype on Don’t Believe the Truth, which old-school Britpop boosters are calling Oasis’ comeback album — the one where the Manchester-born band jettisons the bloat and boredom of its past several albums and gets back to the grand and dirty rock of its first two. The Gallagher brothers — singer Liam and…
