Anthrax
Oh, the difference between first place and second. It’s hard to question Metallica’s status as the most influential band in modern heavy metal, but Anthrax gets our vote for runner-up. The Noo Yawk thrash greats single-handedly created rap-metal (hey, it seemed like a good idea at the time), ratcheted up the metal-hardcore crossover movement about…
Ohio Means Business
Furious is the wailing over Ohio’s inability to create new businesses — especially the kinds that involve lab coats. The reasons proffered read like a social studies test. Ohio sucks at business because: A) We fund our universities at the same level as an Appalachian dental plan. B) Our rich guys are too dumb to…
Nuclear Assault
Thrash metal would have had no heyday without Nuclear Assault. Beginning with Game Over in 1986, the New Jersey longhairs became one of metal’s most socially conscious acts, singing about environmental degradation at the same time Slayer was ranting about goat heads. With John Connelly’s nasal whine riding atop blitzkrieg guitars and Danny Lilker’s mountainous…
Loan Shark Attack
Ohio’s method of dealing with predatory lending may soon be a national model — though not in a particularly commendable way. Yes, the state that responded to a startling rise in bum loans and foreclosures by banning reforms could become the birthplace of the nation’s new lending policy. Meet Republican Congressman Bob Ney of St.…
Covenant
Visit a club on industrial-goth night and you’re likely to hear at least one song from Sweden’s Covenant, accompanied by Sprockets-worthy dance moves on the floor. The trio arrived on the industrial-dance scene with the 1997 track “Stalker,” a fusion of rigid beats, techno noodling, and dour vocals (classic “Electronic Body Music,” as described by…
Letters to the Editor
You gotta give if you wanna get: In a recent First Punch [April 16], you wrote about a band manager who complained to the musicians’ union about getting stiffed at a gig and thinks she should get something for nothing. To get the support of the musicians’ union, you first need to be a member.…
Strapping Young Lad
Devin Townsend understands extreme. The irrepressible frontman for Strapping Young Lad knows that true sonic extremity means being willing to push music into territory so bombastic that listeners teeter between moshing wildly and staring in open-mouthed wonder at the sheer outrageousness of it all. The guy, after all, got his start playing with Steve Vai.…
Greasey Feelings
It’s still the word. After more than 30 years, Grease still has groove; it’s got meaning. And it’s got former teen idol Frankie Avalon onstage when it comes to town this week. “What’s great about the play is that there are no surprises,” Avalon says. “People have seen it . . . I don’t know…
Dick Dale
“Cliché” is usually a bad word in music. But in the surf-guitar universe, it’s all about the tried-and-true moves: machine-gunned low-string single notes dripping with reverb, chordal flurries descending from the high end, menacing minor-key themes, and sunny Mexicali melodies. The inventor of this lexicon, Dick Dale, has spread the surf gospel from its Southern…
This Week’s Day-By-Day Picks
Thursday, May 15 Butterfly Magic was so popular last year that it’s returning to the zoo today. The exhibit, featuring hundreds of flying insects that are shipped weekly from Costa Rica in chrysalis form, is also a haven for tropical plants and flowers. As you make your way through the greenhouse, feast on these butterfly…
DAT Politics
DAT Politics is the antithesis of the solemn sonic-software manipulators now glazing eyes worldwide: The Lille, France trio seems to have laughing gas wafting out of its PowerBooks; it gleefully sprays peculiar, cartoony tones into splats of chaotic electropop. If he were alive, slapstick musician Spike Jones would surely dig these Frogs. Sometimes their tracks…
Jurassic Larks
The new Dinosaurs! exhibit at the Cleveland Metroparks Zoo features 18 life-size, animatronic prehistoric creatures, doing pretty much all the things real dinosaurs used to do. “There’s a lot of head-moving and tail-swaying,” says Dick Chodera, the zoo’s superintendent of facility operations. “We set them up so they’re eating trees and stuff.” And how are…
Alkaline Trio
The Alkaline Trio is Blink-182 with the Promise Ring’s guilty conscience; they’re the kid next door who leaves flaming shit on your porch but makes mulch in the morning. This band is as good as three chords and a sneer get these days, when rap-metal’s self-flagellating crunch is making the pursuit of boobs and beer…
Hit the Road
5/16 — 5/17 The Hessler Street Fair started as a block party in 1969 — a “hippie enclave,” as Martin Juredine remembers it. But f not for the efforts of those original free spirits, the historic homes of Hessler Road would have been razed to make room for parking lots and dormitories. “They were not…
Ash
If Avril Lavigne and her strip-mall punk peers hold any aspirations of career longevity, they would do well to pay attention to the musical trajectory of Irish rockers Ash. Beginning in the mid-’90s as a scruffy adolescent trio with a fondness for the Buzzcocks, Green Day, and songs about “Hulk Hogan Bubblebath,” Ash found its…
7th-Inning Stretches
THURS 5/15 There’ll be cameras and showers at the Blue Moose tonight, where Old Spice is filming guys belting out “Take Me Out to the Ball Game” for commercials slated to air during televised major league baseball games this summer. The suds start splashing at 6 p.m. at the Blue Moose Saloon & Patio (5513…
Tomahawk
Tomahawk is perhaps the first great prog-punk band, infusing the Escher-like rhythmic structures and meandering, drugged-out interludes of acts like King Crimson and Faust with the fiery bombast of early American hardcore punk and metal. It’s not an entirely unheralded development: Tomahawk frontman Mike Patton became notorious for fusing hitherto unrelated genres with his bands…
Big Brains
5/15 — 5/16 If you drop by the 2003 International Science and Engineering Fair to meet the world’s brightest high school brainiacs, ask them about their award-winning science projects. “You’ll feel smart by just interacting with these students,” claims Clint Tanner, spokesperson for Science Service, the organization that runs the fair. Billed as the world’s…
Wait Watchers
You can fuss, you can fidget, but you can’t say management didn’t warn you: If you’re going to eat at Angello’s, you’re going to have to wait. Owners Jim Angello and Monica Angello Bowe (a father-daughter duo) are only slightly apologetic about the delays guests will certainly encounter at their popular Italian restaurant in Canton.…
Prince Paul
Politics of the Business could be Prince Paul’s revolt against the rap game in the form of hip-hop hilarity, a literal impersonation of an industry gone awry via a bizarro rush-hour broadcast. Its songs are well produced and packaged with some incredible vocal collaborations, but the sense of mockery toward the popular rap lexicon (read:…
Cult Hero
5/17 — 5/18 Atlantic Monthly told him he wrote with his penis. One publisher said his work wasn’t “flexible enough” to put him on its roster. Another said he was “too experimental.” So Cleveland native Ken Wachsberger founded his own press in 1987 and published his first novel, Beercans on the Side of the Road:…
ReClassifying
The buzz is building for the new Classics, the elegant high-end restaurant coming to the InterContinental Hotel on the Cleveland Clinic campus. Management has been coy about details, but from what we’ve seen, Classics could be the most impressive European-style restaurant between Chicago and New York. At around 65 seats, the new Classics is smaller…
Various Artists
Although you’d have a right to be wary of this compilation’s generic title and faux-primitive graphics, you could do worse when the time comes to check out drumcentric CD surveys. (And you know that time will inevitably come.) Mondo Beat 2 rounds up popular stickmen such as Charlie Watts (Rolling Stones), Mickey Hart (Grateful Dead),…
Clowning Around
THURS 5/15 Hurry, hurry, hurry — step right up and see Tanya Gagne’s trapeze striptease! Thrill to Kinko the Clown’s Diablo tribute to Cirque du Soleil! Yep, the Bindlestiff Family Cirkus is in town with a new show, High Heels & Red Noses, a slapstick-burlesque extravaganza that blends baggy-pants comedy with circus splendor. Led by…
Gossip Folks
It’s not easy being young and black, even if you happen to be rich and famous. Sometimes, it’s even worse if you’re rich and famous. That’s when people notice you. People who want you to be something you’re not. People who think you’re something you’re not. People like, say, Bill O’Reilly, the self-important host of…
Rahsaan Roland Kirk / Pharoah Sanders
In March, around the same time that Norah Jones was scooping up an armload of Grammys for her polished pop-cum-jazz debut, Atlantic Monthly ran a lengthy obituary bemoaning the death of jazz. The once-lofty genre was murdered, music scribe David Hadju concluded, in part by the antiseptic approach to the music that Wynton Marsalis championed.…
Neo Sparrin’
Talk about tough acts to follow: The original 1999 Matrix, a critical and commercial smash, came almost as a revelation out of nowhere — if the combination of Joel Silver, Warner Brothers, and roughly 60 million bucks qualifies as “nowhere.” After more than four years, The Matrix Reloaded — the first of two sequels or,…
Mad Lib
“Everything sounds good backwards.” Throw in a yowl and the sound of a de-tuned guitar sliding along two or three indistinct notes, and it could be a line from a Pavement song — one of those deadpan, esoteric thunderbolts from the head of Steve Malkmus. And as a matter of fact, “Everything sounds good backwards”…
Allergic to Whores
As bands like Hatebreed and H20 take mainstream hardcore into obnoxiously uplifting territory, Allergic to Whores spares us the punk pep talks. “All we live for is to suffer and slowly die,” singer-guitarist Ray bellows on “Death’s Grip,” one of the standout tracks on Life Through Death’s Eyes, one of the most fatalistic albums of…
Talking Down
Ross Hunter, dead seven years, hasn’t been this alive at the movies since the 1950s and ’60s, when he produced some of the weepiest melodramas and cheeriest romantic comedies ever to barely stick to the screen. His ghost has been wandering up and down the aisles ever since Don Simpson was still snorting formula –…
Waves of Fascination
For 40 bucks, you can buy a device that emits some of the most irritating and beautiful sounds imaginable, a device that not only presents an international kaleidoscope of opinion, but also receives secret spy transmissions. Best of all, every time you turn it on, the thing behaves differently, depending on where you listen to…
The Unknown
If Unknown frontman Ken Blaze feels cheated by the FM dial, he’s earned that right. The songs on his band’s sixth full-length album, Radio Lied to Me, were made for the airwaves, with unsinkable harmonies and heart-on-the-sleeve lyrics that easily one-up strong-selling, similar-minded national acts such as Simple Plan and Bowling for Soup. And still…
Mask of Tyranny
Imagine if the police busted down your door this evening and hauled you away to an undisclosed cell, while never charging you with a crime and without giving you access to an attorney or legal proceedings. After all those hours watching NYPD Blue and Law & Order, you’d think they were breaking the law –…
Blossom’s Bottom Line
Blossom Music Center’s $17 million off-season renovation will be felt mostly by the backsides of concertgoers. The 35-year-old venue, already the best outdoor concert facility in the region, has installed new earth-tone seats throughout the pavilion. The updates, the first major capital improvements in Blossom’s history, were unveiled at a ribbon-cutting ceremony last Saturday. Though…
Move Over, Pabst
Extreme beer — defined as brews that are ultra-aged, ultra-strong, and/or made with exotic ingredients — is poised to be The Next Pabst among people who define their self-worth by the cachet of their beverages. So says no greater authority on cool than The Wall Street Journal. Connoisseurs say it’s an acquired taste, akin to…
Campus Crackdown
The worst thing about college used to be the occasional displaced vertebrae from keg-stand mishaps. But thanks to the good old Recording Industry Association of America, the ante has been upped. A few weeks ago, the RIAA lost a pivotal case in the battle against downloading, when an L.A. judge ruled that two companies who…
Clan of the Cave Geek
Shawn Gilbertson is a pudgy 20-year-old with the eerie pallor of one who seldom sees the sun. He’s dressed in a black T-shirt that reads “rm-rf/bin/laden” — computer code for “Remove Bin Laden.” But today he hunts more modest game: friend Brett Adamik. Using his keyboard, Shawn steers through an artfully rendered WWII army base…
