Making No. 2
Jon Stewart is the funniest white man in America. It’s right there in the pages of Entertainment Weekly, which two weeks ago declared Stewart and the cast of Comedy Central’s The Daily Show No. 2 on its list of the continent’s 25 funniest people. (Chris Rock was at the top.) “If you look at laughs…
Grassroots Dining
Anyone who wonders how Americans got so pudgy and pasty-faced need only cruise the aisles of the local Quickie Mart, where the “Breakfast” foods rack is stocked with Pop Tarts and Hostess Donettes, and canned Vienna cocktail franks figure prominently among the dinner-item display. It’s a national nutritional nightmare, one that could easily lead health-conscious…
Clutch
Clutch frontman Neil Fallon sounds as if he was born with a mustache and a Supernova. He sings of muscle cars and goats in a gruff holler that’s no doubt the product of a permanently roached throat. It’s combined with perhaps the most swinging rhythm section in all of contemporary hard rock; this may be…
Bar Association
TUE 4/6 Tuesdays at the Pirate’s Cove are more than just another night of synth-driven tunes from the ’80s. They’re also an opportunity for local bands to hang out — some of them as guest bartenders. The idea sprouted last year, when This Moment in Black History needed cash for a tour. Instead of making…
Shake It Up
Breasts: Kids love ’em! Grown men, too — and while Ruben Studdard has a nice set, most dudes prefer the ones on women. Why? Chemistry. See that guy across the room from you? His testosterone started boiling the second he first registered the joys of feminine pulchritude, and it probably won’t stop until his relatives…
Eddie Spaghetti
We’re talking about the potty-mouthed singer of a band that’s two parts Dead Boys and one part Crazy Horse — accuse him of being a folk singer, and he just might slam his glass down on the bar. But The Sauce is a blatant violation of the usual rocker-goes-country equation. For one thing, the voice…
Grapple Blossoms
4/4-4/6 Unbeaten in 42 matches this year, J. Jaggers has one more high school challenge to contend with: being crowned the nation’s best at this weekend’s Senior Wrestling Championships. It’s a national competition featuring more than 750 of the best high school seniors in 14 weight classes. Jaggers, a 135-pounder from St. Peter Chanel, is…
Hip-Hop’s Spin Cycle
From a pop-culture standpoint, it’s always an interesting sign when quality reissues trump current releases. Thing is, that’s pretty much all the time. Marvin Gaye deluxe editions soar miles above 99.9 percent of contemporary R&B material. Roots-reggae reissue specialists like Blood + Fire and Moll-Selekta have consistently outgunned any label trafficking in today’s slick dancehall…
Various Artists
Jazz fans, take note: Here is an affordable, rollicking two-disc collection of Los Angeles-based recordings, circa the late ’40s and early ’50s, that permanently eradicates two long-held myths — that everything interesting in the genre at the time was happening in the Big Apple, and that all West Coast jazz from that era was detached…
Portrait of the Artist
SAT 4/3 Guy Maddin paints pictures on film. His movies — which include the episodic World War I fable Archangel and the operatic dance fantasy Dracula: Pages From a Virgin’s Diary — are thoughtful, stylish, and deliberately paced. “I’m from Winnipeg, which is the most isolated city in North America,” he explains. “There aren’t too…
Best Band on the Planet
Oddly enough, the most autobiographical tunes in the arsenal of Modesto, California’s Grandaddy are evidently those that involve jaded, despondent, booze-addled robots. Guitarist Jim Fairchild vehemently denies this. As evidence, he cites “I’m on Standby,” a standout tune on Grandaddy’s latest record, Sumday. Written — as are all the band’s tunes — by frontman Jason…
Gil Mantera’s Party Dream
Attempting to capture on wax the beer-soaked, thong-clad mania of the Party Dream’s live show is like describing an orgasm: For some things, you just gotta be there. Onstage, brothers Gil Mantera and the Ultimate Donny combine short-shorts, dubious facial hair, Casio beats, and lots of homoerotic undertones into oversexed electro that packs all the…
What’s in a Name?
WED 4/7 Stellastarr* admits that the asterisk at the end of its name doesn’t really mean anything. It just looks cool. “It was something we did when we started out,” explains singer Shawn Christensen. “We didn’t think much of it. We wanted [our name] to feel like one word, and we felt it was helpful.”…
Avril & the Mall Rats
“You’re gonna get a black eye, girl,” the one tween threatened the next. Though they were dressed like renegade Easter eggs — all pink and purple pastels — their dispositions weren’t nearly so cheery. They jockeyed for position like a couple of pint-sized power forwards in the center court of Strongsville’s Southpark Center Mall, where…
Rambler 454
When an artist works diligently on a persona, it’s usually to hide a musical deficiency. Then there’s Rambler 454. These three guys from the East Side have carefully crafted an image of chain-smoking, Blue Ribbon-slamming refugees from the auto-body shop. Look beyond that; the music rocks. On No Name Cafe, the band’s second CD, Dan…
Tall Order
Before Star Wars and Indiana Jones, audiences thrilled to an epic big-screen trilogy of a different sort: the tale of one righteous lawman and his big piece of wood. Based on the real-life exploits of Tennessee sheriff Buford Pusser, the first Walking Tall movie (1973) made lead actor Joe Don Baker a redneck hero forever…
Greetings, Death
James Murphy, veteran guitarist for thrash-metal greats Death, visited Strongsville’s Spider Studios last week to produce a track by the Cleveland-based metal band Chimaira. The song, a cover of Death’s “Symbolic,” is slated for an upcoming tribute album to the band, whose founder died of cancer in 2001. Within the Mind: In Homage to the…
Tall Boy
As a professional wrestler, The Rock faced down giants like Hulk Hogan, The Undertaker, and the seven-foot-four Big Show. As an actor, he’s held his own onscreen — over a relatively brief period — with the Oscar-nominated Michael Clarke Duncan and Oscar winner Christopher Walken (whom he describes as “geniusly insane”). Behind the scenes, in…
Don Caballero
This is a seminal band re-formed, its drummer the sole remaining original member. No, seriously. But since algebraic time signatures were at the heart of Don Caballero’s angular instrumental rock, a couple of factors give DC2004 a better-than-average shot at rocking the Lime Spider. Drummer Damon Che made his bones in the ’80s and early…
What the Devil?
The Golden Age of the Comic Book Movie has turned the color of tarnished copper. But there is no going back, not when comic shops have become movie studios’ research and development labs. No moving forward, either; the comic-book movie has become a cinematic smudge once more, one blurring into the next till they’re all…
The Boss Martians
The Boss Martians’ sudden evolution from surf-punk to pop-punk seems to have paid off in a big way. The 10-year-old Seattle group is attracting more attention than ever before: The track “He’ll Be Around,” from its latest album, The Set-Up, was featured in a recent episode of the teen drama One Tree Hill, and Little…
Punk Monk
It’s a bit unorthodox to ladle superlatives all over a film in the opening paragraph, but The Reckoning deserves them. Moving, gripping, and powerful, suspenseful, stylish, and literate, this exploration of justice and art may be set in 1390s England, but its resonance is fully relatable and significant today. This brilliant and unpretentious movie raises…
Tortured Soul
Describing Tortured Soul is deceptively easy: It’s a house-music band. When it plays live, the Brooklyn-based trio pumps out sultry and funky jams, blending from cut to cut without pause, like marionettes under the skilled control of an invisible DJ. But they’re also more than just a house-music band, and their forthcoming debut album, Introducing,…
New G-man in Town
Todd Clifford already had spent 11 years in prison for stalking and raping women. Now he was the one being chased. Wanted for kidnapping and gross sexual imposition, he eluded Medina County sheriff’s deputies for two months by renting different motel rooms. It was a predictable move, but enough in a county where deputies only…
The Wince and Me
She’s a pre-med farm girl intent on ministering to the world’s suffering children. He’s a car-racing Danish prince looking to shed the burdens of royal duty. They’re both in America’s heartland, where they share a chem lab, an employer, and a penchant for driving fast. What, pray tell, is going to happen? Yes, it’s a…
Mud City Manglers
“Nobody’s happy living in Pittsburgh,” a sampled bit of movie dialogue declares on Heart Full of Hate, the latest from Pennsylvania’s Mud City Manglers, a band that sounds like living proof of those words. Piss-drunk and pissed off, the trio plays short-tempered gutter rock that’s meaner than your stepdad. Growling frontman Ted sings like a…
Pittsburgh Rock City?
One cannot expect a magazine that specializes in stories about wool-blend tweed and sideburn-grooming to have a proper appreciation of rock. This likely explains why Esquire didn’t include Cleveland among its ranking of America’s 10 hottest rock towns. The dainty mag’s April issue argues that — gasp! — Pittsburgh is the nation’s rock capital. Denver,…
Hamer Time
The appeal of a quirky little Norwegian film called Kitchen Stories arises from the unlikeliest of sources — a series of domestic studies conducted back in the early 1950s by a group of Swedish efficiency experts. The mission of the Home Research Institute, as far as anyone could tell, was to chart the movements of…
Blonde Redhead
Longtime Blonde Redhead fans may be a bit put off by the less jagged and even more melancholic sounds of the band’s latest album, Misery Is a Butterfly. Then again, the band’s never been one to sit still. Journeying from noise-rock roots to clavinets and duets, Blonde Redhead has found a home on the lush…
Strangers in the Night
April 17, 1966, 5 a.m.: Chief Gerald Buchert is on patrol in Mantua, when the Portage County Sheriff’s Department sends word over the radio for its deputies to look for lights in the sky, last seen headed east. Buchert races home to wake his wife and grab his camera. Joan Buchert is still groggy as…
Spontaneous Convulsion
It has been claimed that there’s a gene in some people’s DNA spiral that compels them to seek out risky, potentially harmful activities, such as rock climbing, deep-sea diving, and parking at expired meters in Cleveland Heights. Such daredevils apparently find contentment in perilous situations that others would do practically anything to avoid. And while…
The Star Spangles
Paul Westerberg’s songwriting genius and the inimitable sloppy chemistry of the Replacements ensure that disciples of their punkish thrash have never quite captured their essence: a country-music-like vulnerability and scrappy indie attitude that produced tunes with equal parts heart and DIY heft. Yet modern ‘Mats progeny — especially N.Y.C.-via-upstate-New York youngsters the Star Spangles –…
The Dumbest Lawsuit Ever
Every legislature is talking about tort reform. Never mind that such suits constitute but a small fraction of America’s Litigation Hell, or that large jury awards are rarer still. Legislators have the same migration patterns as hookers: They go where the money is. And in this case, the guys being sued, like manufacturers and doctors,…
On Stage
Bee-Luther-Hatchee — In a world where reality-show contestants are rewarded for sabotaging their peers, the idea of discussing intellectual honesty may seem quaintly passé. But playwright Thomas Gibbons wrestles with a number of heavyweight issues, including intellectual-property rights, ownership of cultural identity, and a passel of racial conundrums. The ethical storms kick up when a…
Michael Fracasso
Though the similarity is more in range than style, Ohio native Michael Fracasso’s high-pitched voice has most often been compared to that of Texas-born Roy Orbison. The first member of his family to be born in the U.S., Fracasso spent the first 13 years of his life in the steel-mill town of Mingo Junction, where…
Sour Note
Sour Note Tart words from a dissatisfied customer: This is in response to “Like a Hurricane,” the article on the Neil Young concert at the Convocation Center [March 10]. Had I known his “concert” was going to be a musical, I would have spent my $100 elsewhere. Neil Young is a legend. And, yes, he…
On View
Aerossault: The Artwork of Grant Smrekar — Grant Smrekar’s work is evidence that there’s more to graffiti than just gang tags and foul language. His often political pop art — full of American flags, helicopters, and what looks like Ché Guevara — poses timeless questions about politics and war; clearly, he wonders whether America’s overseas…
Janet Jackson
The last time Ms. Jackson transgressed community standards and common sense — with the S&M lite of 1997’s The Velvet Rope — she returned with All for You, an artistic apology with little X in its sexuality. So even though Damita Jo was completed long before Janet’s Super Bowl fiasco, it feels like the same…
The Horror!
There’s bad blood between the creators of Cinema Wasteland and Fright Vision, the two horror conventions happening this weekend. It’s a turf war for the hearts, souls, and pocketbooks of local monster fans — Cinema Wasteland’s Ken Kish even asked that his event not be mentioned in the same paragraph as the other. (Sorry!) But…
Jersey Gurgle
Full disclosure: I like precisely one and a half Kevin Smith movies. There’s the one everyone else hates, the John Hughes homage Mallrats, and the first hour of the one everyone else loves, Chasing Amy, which dries up around the time Ben Affleck dumps Jason Lee for Joey Lauren Adams. There are bits of Dogma…
The International Noise Conspiracy, with the Rogers Sisters
This Swedish band — swathed in farfisa organ, mod haircuts, and Marxist politics — grabbed a bit of buzz at the cusp of the ’60s-ish garage revival, back in 2001. But their influences are much more current than the usual Nuggets names. In fact, their story mimics their main influence: the amazing early ’90s Fugazi-Stax…
This Week’s Day-By-Day Picks
Thursday, April 1 John O’Neal approaches American folklore as an art form worthy of preservation. For 25 years, he’s taken the character of Junebug Jabbo Jones — a “pesky loudmouth,” he says — and recounted stories and anecdotes from America’s past as seen through the eyes of the fabled folk hero. “He’s a celebration of…
Paint the Town Red
In her navy blue suit, with her hair pulled back and the occasional cloud of concentration throwing a short-lived shadow across her eyes, Marianne Frantz looks more like a high school chemistry teacher on a job interview than a fun-loving oenophile. But looks can be deceiving: This petite woman with perfect posture throws one hell…
The Legendary Shack Shakers
Opening with a warm riff and concluding with a maniacal howl, Cockadoodledon’t is to rockabilly these days what the Reverend Horton Heat was in the early 1990s and the Cramps were in the early 1980s. Intimately connected to the rhythm of the blues, but hell-bent on destroying rockabilly’s constricting boundaries and image, the Shakers’ rerelease…
