God Forsaken
Ever since Amores Perros burst onto the international scene two years ago, Latin American cinema has been experiencing one of the most fertile periods in its history. Encompassing such works as Alfonso Cuaron’s Y Tu Mamá También and Walter Salles’s Behind the Sun, these socially conscious, frequently brutal portraits of life south of the border…
Joey DeFrancesco
A renewed interest in organ jazz during the late ’80s was fueled by the rise of Joey DeFrancesco, a child prodigy who has continued to foster the legacy in grand fashion. Of course, it would have been difficult for the Philadelphia native not to get involved in music: His father, Papa John DeFrancesco, is an…
Hecklin’ Jekyll
It’s pretty clear why the concept of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde never loses its appeal. Just as soon as you think the old “innocent-fellow-with-an-evil-maniac-inside” thing has run its course, a vaguely incompetent but harmless Yale frat boy morphs into a warmongering, ozone-destroying imperialist President. Go figure. In his original novella, Robert Louis Stevenson put…
Big Daddy Kane
Accepting the Grammy for Best Rap Album recently, Eminem skipped the customary shout-outs to his peeps, instead sending respect to some all-time great MCs, including one Big Daddy Kane. His nuanced performance on the new album from avant-garde hip-hoppers Jurassic 5 is further proof of how the Smooth Operator still commands the respect of rap’s…
Hate Is Enough
“We don’t touch dead things.” This is one of the tortured thoughts that streak through the father’s mind, a split second after he is asked by a nurse whether he wants to hold his stillborn son. But “dead things” can certainly touch us, and did so poignantly and affectingly in the world premiere of the…
Richard Ashcroft
Leaning closer to the mystical indulgence of someone like Cat Stevens than to George Harrison’s generous spirituality, an entire Richard Ashcroft album feels at times like a long audience with a charismatic zen master. As on Ashcroft’s solo debut, Alone With Everybody, Human Conditions offers pearls and puffery alike. Luckily, the cult-iconic northern Englishman backloads…
That ’60s Show
This is a story with a happy ending, because, so far, nothing bad has happened to indicate otherwise. There are no ratings to sweat over, no network executives to fight with, no cancellations to suffer through. The rough territories lie ahead, over the horizon of 8:30 p.m. this Sunday, when a new show debuts on…
Calexico
It doesn’t stretch the imagination much to use pedal steel and maracas to evoke the landscape of the Southwest — rocky desert, border towns — but the remarkable thing about Calexico has always been the way Joey Burns and John Convertino tread beyond the clichés of their band’s country-and-mariachi instrumentation in order to grasp at…
A Bar for All Seasons
If you think antiques are the only things that develop patina, you’ve got to see the interior of the Eastland Inn, Dave and Elizabeth Peterkoski’s tiny tavern in Berea. Although the Peterkoskis took over the business only five years ago, the joint has been a neighborhood watering hole since 1948, and every minute of that…
Voivod
Voivod — much like its greatest muse, former Pink Floyd frontman Syd Barrett — has frequently been waylaid by its own eccentricity. Whereas Barrett’s acid-abetted meditations left him a recluse battling dementia, Voivod’s forward-thinking, technology-obsessed speed metal eventually became so diffuse that even the band members themselves seemed confused by the time they got around…
Bum Deal
Carol Bevier is the lone female resident in the elevator as it lumbers down from her eighth-floor apartment to the lobby of Riverview Towers, the massive public housing project on West 25th Street. There’s a urine stain on the floor, and the elevator — notoriously prone to fits and starts — is beginning to smell.…
Bellying Up to Brunch
Never mind Saturday night at the club — the real action starts the next morning. Some of Cleveland’s best Sunday brunches are found not in upscale restaurants or fancy hotels, but in the city’s taverns, bars, and grills. Granted, service was notably lethargic on our visits to three of the area’s best bar brunches (presumably,…
The Buzzcocks
Although they were somewhat obscure in America during the original days of punk, the Buzzcocks’ esteem among the faithful has steadily risen, and the band now ranks right up alongside the Ramones, Sex Pistols, and Wire as punk’s founding fathers. This new self-titled album, featuring original members Pete Shelley and Steve Diggle, will do little…
The Duct Tape Caper
Still have doubts about that vast right-wing conspiracy in America? Consider the case of duct tape. Two weeks ago, Homeland Security Secretary Tom Ridge became a national punch line for suggesting that the combo of duct tape and plastic sheeting could actually save people from chemical or biological attack. As one writer sneered: “Homeland security…
Cat’s Meow
One of the traps music sets for listeners is that it encourages us to believe we’re on intimate terms with the person on the other end of our headphones. When a song really works, a communication takes place between singer and fan: Frank Black terrorizes our minds as he screams about losing his; Greg Dulli…
Sam Cooke With the Soul Stirrers
In 1957, the gospel music world was rent asunder with the revelation that Sam Cooke, the 26-year-old lead vocalist of the renowned Soul Stirrers, had sold out and gone pop. Today’s listeners may be mystified to learn of the ancient uproar caused by innocuous teeny-bopper hits like “You Send Me” and “Cupid,” but to gospel…
Seduction of the Fighter
It had the ambiance of a medieval torture chamber. But that humid, blood-spattered room on the second floor of the Fairfax Recreation Center was where boys became boxers. Ruling the room was Alvin Jones, a man of wiry build, sharp cheekbones, and welcoming grin. Jones never hunted for boxing talent. The boys found him. The…
Brass Tacks
Until the Dirty Dozen came along, New Orleans brass band music was about as dead as the corpses it has escorted into eternity for more than a century. By the 1970s, the once rollicking second-line parades were doddering on legs weary of the same old “Muskrat Ramble.” The white handkerchiefs were not being waved with…
Easy Street Band
It’s a short alphabetical hop from Easy Street to E Street, but Springsteen is just one of the influences on Back on Easy Street. Culled from sessions that took place last year and in 1982, the disc is a well-executed but derivative piece of studio pop. “Band” designation aside, Easy Street’s disc is fundamentally a…
Laughing Through the Apocalypse
It would seem to be a period of mourning for the left. For the first time since Eisenhower, Republicans control the White House and both houses of Congress. Funding for everything from the environment to worker safety is being slashed. And we’re about to go to war. All of which would appear to make for…
Run, Rasta, Run
Imagine you were abducted by aliens in 1973. Thirty years later, the little green bastards return you to Earth. Your friends hold a welcome-back party, during which they ask you, “Hey, man, guess which album has ruled the charts since you left?” “Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band?” you say. Nope. “Led Zeppelin IV?” Nope.…
Volta Sound
You don’t usually get this kind of sway out of a Cleveland-bred bunch. Volta Sound’s approach — tempos that flow like molasses, stoned moaning, oceans of reverb and feedback — is most often associated with such British fog-machine fiends as Spiritualized or Spacemen 3. Mercifully, the Volta Sound isn’t quite as dense as those two.…
Pointy-Head Welfare
If the downtown suits have their way, Cuyahoga County will soon blow $350-$600 million on a new convention center. Never mind that these things always fail. The suits haven’t been able to seriously plunder the public treasury since Browns Stadium. They’re like heroin addicts on methadone. They desperately want back on the good stuff. Problem…
Cutting Class
As we stroll through Cuyahoga Community College’s posh recording suites with Tommy Wiggins on a sunny Thursday morning, we’re not sure what’s more remarkable: an accredited-college record label or a professional musician who wakes up before noon. “Musicians actually show up for nine o’clock classes, which is cool,” says the singer-guitarist-instructor, before catching himself with…
Letters to the Editor
Sitting Bull was a stand-up guy: I was horrified when I saw the ad for the Partnership for a Drug-Free America [First Punch, February 12] that featured Chief Sitting Bull. The ad stated that Sitting Bull smoked pot and lived in a tent with no cable, and that the U.S. government killed him because of…
Enter the Vortex
The blacklight poster of a magic mushroom, emblazoned with the caption “Eat Me,” is the first indication of the psychedelic sensibilities that inform the Vortex, the new Flats club in the space once occupied by the Basement (1078 Old River Road). It’s followed by the leering image of Alice in Wonderland’s Cheshire Cat, with the…
Garage (Rock) Sale
Don’t tell Mark Leddy to slow down. He won’t do it. Not if it’s going to stop progress in Collinwood. Three years ago, the east Cleveland neighborhood defined urban blight: boarded-up storefronts, condemned houses, and crackhead hangouts. Everybody thought Leddy and business partner Cindy Barber were insane to make a music club out of a…
The Detroit Cobras
It’s a telling fact about the vaunted “Detroit scene” that its two best bands — the Detroit Cobras and the Dirtbombs — primarily play covers. After all, it’s the cool record store/ bulging music history of that city that so informs the tastes of its modern rockers. Though they possess the ever-marketable cute-girl lead singer…
This Week’s Day-By-Day Picks
Thursday, March 6 The fact that we know very little about cars doesn’t take away the joy of looking at all the brand-new shiny ones on display at the 2003 Greater Cleveland International Auto Show, continuing through the weekend. Tonight is Team Chevy’s “Celebrity Night With the Cleveland Browns.” No word yet on which Browns…
John Prine
John Prine has had to do a fair share of fighting in his 30-plus years in music. He’s tussled with cancer (free of it for the last four years, he says), record labels (he’s had his own for two decades now), critics who think he should have made a career out of rewriting “Sam Stone,”…
Magic Man
Illusionist David Copperfield is known for making things vanish: people, train cars, airplanes — even the Statue of Liberty. But somebody else, it seems, has made Dave’s sense of humor disappear. As he prepares to bring David Copperfield: An Intimate Evening of Grand Illusion to town this weekend after a successful Las Vegas stand, the…
Crooked Fingers
The dark constellation of singer-songwriters formed by Leonard Cohen, Nick Cave, and Tom Waits is no place to go poking around if you can’t stand a little self-indulgence. So pomp-averse listeners beware: Crooked Fingers may well get on your nerves. The latest earnest enterprise from former Archers of Loaf singer Eric Bachmann, Red Devil Dawn,…
SEAL Appeal
John Shaft went to Africa, so why shouldn’t Die Hard’s John McClane? In the new action romp Tears of the Sun, Bruce Willis undertakes a jungle-rescue operation on the Dark Continent, and for his part, it’s a McClane adventure in camouflage, minus all the sass and most of the spectacle. As Navy SEAL squadron leader…
Sugarman 3
Nouveau funk band Sugarman 3 is a Manhattan unit steeped in the legacy of B3 organ groups, wailing King Curtis-styled saxophone, and boogaloo drumming of the Stax-Volt variety. Led by tenor honker Neal Sugarman, the Sugarman 3 lay down greasy dance grooves, daring people to get off their butts on tracks like “Pure Cane,” the…
Phat Chance
You know Internet dating’s become totally mainstream when Disney cranks out a bland comedy featuring a randomly selected pair of mismatched stars to take on the subject. Bearing the unwieldy and meaningless title Bringing Down the House, said comedy is predicated on the biggest pitfall of cyber-flirting, the idea that the actual person you’re communicating…
Hate Eternal
Bands on Relapse Records can generally be divided into two categories: face- rippingly fast (Burnt by the Sun, Agoraphobic Nosebleed, Benumb) or mind-numbingly slow (5ive, Bongzilla, Neurosis). Dying Fetus definitely falls into the former category. The band is one of several thousand grind-hardcore-punk-thrash outfits polluting stages and stuffing record bins from coast to coast and…
