Rebels With a Cause
This just in: It may be OK to leave your house now and spend some time outdoors. Sure, the area’s weather has made outdoor escapes a scary prospect, as months of bone-snapping cold have given way to weeks of endless downpours. But if you’re looking for a good reason to brave the elements, here’s a…
Mellowdrone
Singer-songwriter Jonathan Bates, otherwise known as Mellowdrone, seems to understand the value of introversion as well as Lou Barlow ever did; such detachment gives him a worldview that mistrusts damn near everything under the sun. In one of the most self-absorbed moments of his accessible, minor-chord-driven debut EP, A Demonstration of Intellectual Property, released last…
In Hot Blood
“Mom was raped.” It’s one of those sentences that hits your bloodstream harder than any drug. You hear it from your sister, who’s on the phone crying. It was the guy from the bar last night. Fortyish, thin, with the Croatian accent. He knew your mom from the old days. He bought you drinks. You…
Femme Inanity
There are few topics more agonizing in today’s culture than abortion. Once you lop off the extremists at either end of the spectrum — the radical anti-choice zealots, who think any fertilized egg has more rights than its host female, and the fervent pro-choice proponents, who refuse to acknowledge that abortion does in fact end…
Wynton Marsalis
Like him or not, trumpeter Wynton Marsalis remains one of the most recognized and respected ambassadors of American jazz over the past 20 years. His take on the art form is seen as overtly puritanical by some critics, but there’s no denying his influence across the genre and beyond. Though he’s no longer the “young…
Rat Bastards
Thomas Mulready, proprietor of CoolCleveland.com, likes to tout his website as the place for all that’s “edgy, innovative and eye-opening in Cleveland.” But this description apparently doesn’t include giant rats. At a Cool Cleveland bash on Coventry last Thursday, wannabe hipsters flocked to the neighborhood anchored by the venerable Cedar Lee Theater, which shows movies…
On Stage
I Love You, You’re Perfect, Now Change — The promotional material dubs this musical revue “Seinfeld set to music.” But in reality, it’s more like The Bachelor set to a metronome, with predictable book and lyrics by Joe DiPetro and a mechanically repetitive musical score by Jimmy Roberts. Just pick your courtship cliché, and there’s…
Alabama Thunderpussy
Alabama Thunderpussy’s new singer, Columbus native Johnny Wells, has helped make Fulton Hill the band’s strongest album to date. Wells combines the best qualities of Axl Rose, Chris Robinson, Phil Anselmo, and Gary Floyd (from Sister Double Happiness and the Dicks) into a powerful, raw-throated roar. He’s also got the redneck attitude — in spades…
All Hair and Hot Air
All Hair and Hot Air Ambush news, another “reality” show: I came across the article “Must-Flee TV” [May 19] while doing research. A close friend had an unfortunate experience with these nasty reporters blowing hot air and chasing people relentlessly. I found your article hilarious and unfortunately very truthful. I forwarded it to my friend…
On View
Capturing Cleveland: Pages from a City Sketchbook — The 200-plus works in various media by 21 Cleveland Institute of Art students all portray Cleveland scenery. Although their subjects are easily recognizable, providing opportunities to reminisce, most of the works are mere surface studies, lacking tangible mood and depth. Among the exceptions are Sarah Laing’s digital…
Jadakiss/Lloyd Banks
Calling Jadakiss’s sophomore album Don’t Believe the Hype II would be a cold but not entirely undeserved assessment. Despite his disappointing 2001 debut, most observers suspected the former LOX leader was only delaying the classic his memorable growl seemed to promise. Yet Kiss of Death isn’t appreciably different from its predecessor; while it contains more…
Meat the Neighbors
Jeanne Have remembers the old days, when the customers were poor immigrants — Romanians, Ukrainians, Puerto Ricans — and business was good. The staple currency was food stamps. Families would buy them from winos on 25th Street for 75 cents on the dollar, then trade ’em in at the West Side Market for their daily…
Best of the ‘Bay
Life is full of harsh realities: Guys don’t read Playboy for the articles. Women don’t walk into a shoe store “just to look around.” And no one goes to Put-in-Bay to discover great eats. Well, no one, that is, except yours truly, who recently spent two days on South Bass Island in search of a…
Wilco
It’s little surprise that Wilco frontman Jeff Tweedy recently completed rehab for painkiller addiction; the man who summoned A Ghost Is Born is clearly haunted. After ambitious stabs at a history-of-rock concept album and a summery pop record culminated in 2002’s Yankee Hotel Foxtrot — a post-9-11 rumination on the state of America, famously recorded…
Name of the Game
In the 1970s, Lauren Mufson had feathered hair, wore a ratty jean jacket, and liked her tunes loud. “I was a little rock-and-roll Led Zeppelin girl,” says the 39-year-old actress. Which means that she had very little time in her teens for music that didn’t reveal secret mystical messages. In other words, there was no…
Rebels of the Right
Nothing fuels punk ire like a Republican government. And while the passing of Ronald Reagan gave countless punk pundits something to jeer about, former Misfits singer Michale Graves wasn’t chipper about the Gipper’s demise. “Ronald Reagan did wonderful things for our country,” says Graves, now leader of the band Gotham Road. “Ronald Reagan made the…
Phish
Phish fans still desperate to figure out why the 21-year-old jam band is breaking up following a short tour this summer will invariably look for clues scattered throughout Undermind, the band’s last studio album and a fitting end to a musical career awash with eclecticism and technical proficiency. They’ll find them, too: “Now waters run…
This Week’s Day-By-Day Picks
Thursday, June 24 Indigo Girls Amy Ray and Emily Saliers have been making records about love, life, and the line between for more than 15 years now. On their ninth album, All That We Let In, they stick close to the things they believe in: ringing harmonies, the diplomatic and democratic division of vocal duties,…
Little Gangster
Joey Fingaz has a handshake for everybody, even the panhandler shuffling toward him with eyes as lonely as the empty street. It’s good to have friends on Prospect Avenue after sunset, especially when you’re a white guy who gets compared to Emmanuel Lewis. Joey is the one classmates used to hold in their arms sideways…
DJ Shadow
There are tons of great DJ Shadow concert bootlegs floating around on disc and vinyl, but the stunning clarity and seamlessly mixed content of the official In Tune and on Time put all the rest to shame. This 20-track, 78-minute CD (packaged with a 24-track DVD) is culled from a performance at London’s Brixton Academy…
“Akron Fais Do Do!”
Inside his cottage in Louisiana, where the thermometer registers a sizzling 90 degrees, a chill runs up Michael Deucet’s spine as he talks about that blustery Minnesota day in 1982. It was the first time he and his BeauSoleil bandmates were to play on Garrison Keillor’s Prairie Home Companion radio show. “It was five below…
Take This Love and Shove It
How big a success has Eamon’s foul-mouthed breakup song “F*** It (I Don’t Want You Back)” become this year? Here’s all you need to know: Even the song’s subject — the ex-girlfriend addressed throughout as a “ho” and a “burnt bitch” — loves it. Of course, Eamon is quick to note, the young lady in…
Blitz
Everybody raps about finances, but few take on the International Monetary Fund. Such big-picture perspective distinguishes the promising Kent MC Blitz. Born in Ghana, Blitz (aka Samuel Bazawule) immigrated to Brooklyn before enrolling at Kent State. Raised on a continent where political strife is as commonplace as the blazing sun, Blitz embraces hip-hop’s revolutionary roots;…
Zero Heroes
FRI 6/25 Social Zero’s bio reads like a post office Wanted poster: The Wooster band’s four members refer to themselves as “suspects” . . . and they all go by the name “Richard.” “All suspects are considered to be armed with the knowledge and appreciation for musical genres, such as metal and heavy progressive rock,”…
Mr. Misery
Band press bios are notoriously loaded with hyperbole, self-aggrandizing, and general ludicrousness. But a gem of a line buried in the notes for Pedro the Lion’s Achilles Heel instills a new kind of awe. David Bazan, the band’s primary singer-songwriter (and, for a long spell there, its only actual member), is describing the joys of…
B.J. O’Malley
On the cover of Good Girls Get the Blues, a frowning B.J. O’Malley squats in front of a bar, holding a bottle of Jack Daniel’s in her tattooed arms. Believe it or not, it’s a triumphant scene. As “Nashville” relates, after years of dressing like Patsy Cline, O’Malley took a good look at Tennessee, listened…
Pretty in Plaid
SAT 6/26 Far removed from his former life as a Cleveland Browns center, Mike Baab is still a force to reckon with at the Ohio Scottish Games. At last year’s outing, he came in second in the open amateur division, throwing a 16-pound sheaf 23 feet, heaving a 22-pound hammer nearly 88 feet, and nailing…
Numbers Game
Lance Williams no longer has a car, but he does have a rock club. The twentysomething head of 10-34 Records recently hocked his ride to come up with a down payment for the red brick building on the corner of Lorain and West 121st Street, which he’s just christened Club 10-34. He’s selling the engine…
Hot Rocks
THU 6/24 Tim Swan has been a club manager long enough to know that diamonds really are a girl’s best friend. To prove his point, he hosts the Incredible Diamond Giveaway at Panini’s every Thursday. It works like this: At the DJ booth, Swan lays out a green velvet cloth, on which he sprinkles 100…
Sky Dogs Still Hunt
The Sky Dogs, a Cleveland blues-rock group that routinely filled area clubs in the early 1990s, will play together again for the first time in 10 years. The one-off reunion show is set for Saturday, July 10, at Lakewood’s Winchester (12112 Madison Avenue, 216-226-5681). “For what they were doing, they were the guys,” says Paul…
Mr. Pink
6/27-6/29 Tatiana James was driving back from a drag show in Columbus this spring when her cell phone rang. The Rock and Roll Hall of Fame was calling about a benefit at the Convocation Center. “They wanted a drag queen to sit there for an hour and eat Chinese food,” recalls James, the 21-year-old reigning…
Primus
Primus frontman Les Claypool seems an odd fit for a jam-band adventure on the high seas. One of the more innovative bass players of recent years, Claypool boasts a warped genius that doesn’t blend with the patchouli-scented Birkenstock crowd. Or so it would appear. “There’s certain elements of the music climate now [similar] to what…
Wrong Wayans
Perhaps some day in the distant future, film scholars and academics concerned with race relations will devote papers and lectures and even entire books to Keenen Ivory Wayans’s White Chicks, in which two FBI agents, played by Shawn and Marlon Wayans, don Caucasian masks and impersonate white women in order to catch a kidnapper. (Ostensibly…
Little Charlie and the Nightcats
Not all white-boy blues is secondhand. A few players, primarily Left Coasters, have fashioned a school of their own over the years, crossing the hard-edged Chicago strain with swing and jump styles. At the forefront of this mix stands Little Charlie and the Nightcats, a formidable Sacramento foursome that gets it done by coupling lights-out…
George of the Bungle
A strong toxin requires a strong antidote. In the case of the Bush administration, the cure is being served in significant part by Michael Moore, who previously delivered the rousing documentaries Roger & Me and Bowling for Columbine. This time, however, the exposé feels even more personal, as Moore reveals footage of George W. Bush…
Diana Krall
Pre-Norah Jones, Canadian crooner Diana Krall nailed the sound of consenting adults luxuriating in a privileged mental space of svelte sophistication on her debut, The Look of Love, an easy-riding pop-jazz confection. Krall’s new album, The Girl in the Other Room, nails something else: her attempts — with new husband Elvis Costello — to make…
Burning Bright
Everyone loves tigers, save perhaps for those actually being mauled to death by them. Men like ’em because they’re wild beasts; women like ’em cuz they’re big kitty cats. So whatever your point of interest, Two Brothers, starring a pair of tigers named Kumal and Sangha, is the perfect date movie. You can even bring…
Anthony Hamilton
The life of a hip-hop hook singer isn’t necessarily filled with Cristal and 22s, and Anthony Hamilton’s long hard-luck story is a case in point. The North Carolina native spent a decade adding his southern-fried vocals to albums from heavy hitters like Tupac, Busta Rhymes, and Eve, but his own solo career remained stubbornly resistant…
Tears in Heaven
It’s often a challenge to fairly assess a film that, by its very conception, is simply targeted to an entirely different demographic from one’s own. I am not by nature romantic, nor am I female; for those who are, it may have to suffice that the mostly double-X-chromosomed crowd watching The Notebook at a press…
Rufus Wainwright
It’s ironic that out of all the package tours roaming scorched parking lots and outdoor sheds this summer, the one jaunt with the fewest number of bands possesses the most musical diversity. Laid-back college faves Guster bring to the stage both an intellectual-fratboy sense of humor — they started a show last year by mimicking…
