Plaid Flannel Carnage
It’s no revelation that secretaries, usually women, frequently lead lives of not-so-quiet desperation. Indeed, these office minions have been righteously bitching about their lot in corporate life for many years now. But usually, their dissatisfaction with repetitious, brain-destroying work and harassment from co-workers is presented with good-old-gal humor (e.g. , the movie 9 to 5)…
Agnostic Front
Agnostic Front’s early work was fast and hard enough to earn it a permanent spot in the hardcore limelight, though conflicting fan factions argue whether the New York legend is the music’s equivalent of Mike Tyson, Evander Holyfield, or Buster Douglas. The band grew up brawling on the streets, had an epiphany when it discovered…
Loser’s Curse
“I look at the draft like a par five in golf: Just advance the ball,” Browns General Manager Phil Savage said just days before his own first round from Berea. “As long as I’m putting for a par when I get to that green, we’ll be OK.” Come draft day, however, Savage didn’t heed his…
On Stage
Daughter of a Buffalo Soldier, the Life and Legacy of Marjorie Witt Johnson — It’s hard to feel bad when you’re dancing, young Marjorie Witt Johnson learned as a black student at Oberlin College back in 1930, and it changed her life forever. By combining her pedagogical curriculum in social work with a fast-blooming interest…
Garmonbozia
Garmonbozia is the experimental-but-brutal side project of bassist Steve Rockhorst, who’s played with pretty much every heavy band in town from Integrity to 13 Faces. The band is fronted by Dead Even singer J.C. Koszewski, who explains, “It’s kind of our take on old Mushroomhead.” The band’s demo will be available for the first time…
Loose Change
Every novice magician learns enough sleight-of-hand to make coins disappear. But the trick is much less amusing when the coins represent a respectable chunk of the state’s Workers’ Comp fund investments. Which is just one of the reasons Tom Noe — a rare-coin dealer who sat on the Ohio Turnpike Commission and the Ohio Board…
On View
NEW Maya Eventov: Recent Paintings — Russian-Canadian painter Maya Eventov loved Matisse and Gauguin as a child, and their influence still bears strongly on her work. Her acrylics reveal an interest in light — the calling card of Impressionism — yet she makes the concept her own with a refreshing style one might criticize only…
Second Chance Prom
Even if you had a good time at your prom, you can still have a better time at the Second Chance Prom. You’re older, you’ve got some cash in your pocket, you’ve had 10 years to work on your lines, and Mom and Dad (probably) won’t be waiting up for you. In honor of Armed…
Hold Your Horses
Hold Your Horses Another round of Shoot the Messenger: Of the many phrases I can think of to describe this story [“Eating Mister Ed,” May 4], “unbalanced and sloppy journalism” comes to the top of the list. Denise Grollmus has done her part to perpetuate the lie that sending horses to slaughter is both necessary…
Music to Our Mouths
The pity was palpable — and possibly not misplaced. “You’re eating at the House of Blues’ restaurant?” the colleague repeated, just to be sure she had it right. “Hmm, well . . . you realize, don’t you, that that place is all about the music?” Indeed I did; and as any music lover will tell…
Common
Most people agree that the former Common Sense has few peers on the mic. But his last album, 2002’s Electric Circus, was an intermittently exciting exploration of acid rock that enraged hip-hop purists, and today’s cutthroat industry doesn’t extend many mulligans for experimentation. Like any boho artist, though, Common wants to keep his integrity intact…
The Divine Mystery
The massive heart attack Linda Lucarelli suffered in November caused a severe loss of oxygen to her brain. Now in a vegetative state, she looks like Sleeping Beauty — her long hair rests peacefully on a pillow, her blue eyes are partly closed, her wheelchair-borne body is wrapped tightly in a blanket. Linda is seated…
Big Apple to the Core
It’s been more than five years since chef Mark Wilson helped effect the Grovewood Tavern’s transformation from down-at-the-heels watering hole to sophisticated wine bar and café. Now, after stints at downtown’s Wyndham Hotel and the Great Lakes Science Center, the Culinary Institute of America grad is preparing for a return to the public eye. Together…
System of a Down
Smartasses in more ways than one, System of a Down’s Daron Malakian and Serj Tankian may not be the first to have read media critic Danny Schechter while pumping Slayer and actually absorbed both. But on Mezmerize, SOAD’s third and most consistent album, the now equally billed frontmen revive a threadbare theme — the anesthetic…
Stich in Time
Cabaret Dada’s Russel Stich estimates that more than 75 people have performed in Cleveland’s oldest comedy-improv troupe over the past 10 years. He’s predicting that most of them will come back this weekend to help celebrate A Decade of Dada, an anniversary edition of the annual party-performance the group throws for itself. “Once we find…
No Laughing Matter
Neil Hamburger is not your average comedian. He’s below average, in fact. So much so, that the greasy nerd with a toupee and road-weary groan has had a hard time convincing people he’s a real comedian at all. Hamburger’s first LPs came slithering out of the mid-’90s like mysterious reissues of some bozo’s lost ’60s…
Toby Keith
Just like his beloved president, this Nashville foot soldier is a simple man of action. After two albums keyed around political machismo, Honkytonk University turns back to country’s home turf of barrooms and bedrooms, opening with an I-did-it-my-way title track that’s so lumbering and full of bass, it could be mistaken for prime Waylon or…
This Week’s Day-By-Day Picks
Thursday, May 19 Boy, George Lucas wasn’t kidding when he said Star Wars: Episode III — Revenge of the Sith (opening today) was going to be dark. Murdered children, slaughtered Jedi, and severed limbs abound in the final chapter of the sci-fi saga. And while newcomers might have a hard time figuring out just what’s…
Wing and a Prayer
“There’s two things I want to avoid more than anything else,” says Porcupine Tree founder-leader Steven Wilson. “One is sounding like other bands, and the other is repeating myself. So in some respects, they become two of the most important influences on a project — albeit in an extremely negative way. A lot of stuff…
Mercury Rev
Mercury Rev once set the world afire with its chaotically cosmic psychedelia; now it grandiosely lulls it to sleep. Growing ever more sane, content, and financially stable since its 1998 commercial breakthrough, Deserter’s Songs, Mercury Rev has continued to reiterate the widescreen sentimentality of that album with 2001’s All Is Dream and now The Secret…
Never a Dull Moment
Five years ago, singer-songwriter Mindy Smith sighed in despair as she sat in her one-room “ghetto motel” in one of Nashville’s nastiest neighborhoods. For years, Smith had juggled minimum-wage jobs with sit-ins at every open-mic night she could find. Still, she saw no end to her paycheck-to-paycheck existence. “I could not get out of that…
Fallen Idol
Just what has become of American Idol? It began as a sweet Cinderella story, a chance for an anonymous nobody with a little singing ability to become an omnipresent somebody with a million-dollar recording contract. But the good clean fun of watching amateurs fail or triumph in front of a live television audience, celebrity guest…
Little Richard
Before he devolved into a talk-show celebrity best known for saying “shut up,” Little Richard found his core muse in 1970. Call it southern soul. And call Little Richard one of its greatest exponents. The proof is this limited-edition, three-disc set, the sad and thrilling document of a comeback that failed. King of Rock and…
San Francisco Treat
FRI 5/20 DJ J-Boogie stood in a San Francisco studio last year and listened to a pair of rappers spit rhymes on his latest track. “Here, the politricktions care less about addictions/The war that’s on the television seems more like fiction,” they rhymed on the Bush-bashing “You’re the Murdera.” When the session ended, J-Boogie (aka…
The Best of the Fest
The best moment at this year’s Cleveland Music Fest came at just past midnight on Saturday at the Peabody’s complex. Upstairs at Rock Star, the Jah Messengers laid down some soulful, spiritual reggae. Downstairs at the Pirate’s Cove, it was time for Heroin Dave and the Needles — a band whose very name represents just…
Cap Gun Cowboys
Heartache is the Cap Gun Cowboys’ business, and business is good. The Cleveland country-western trio claims as much on its latest LP, Atomic Horsepower, making it perhaps the only act of its ilk ever to borrow a line from Megadeth. By turns irreverent and nostalgic, the Cowboys’ wit is almost as sizable as their Buick-sized…
No More Cold Feet
SUN 5/22 Jack and Ralph Staph don’t claim to be meteorologists, but the father-and-son organizers of the Rite Aid Cleveland Marathon & 10K could give Dick Goddard a run for his money. Last year, the 26.2-mile race was held at the end of April. This year, the Staphs chose to move the date to mid-May…
The Roots
What does a band that Rolling Stone readers once voted one of the 20 best concert attractions in the world do on its summer vacation? It heads back out on the road, of course. So the Roots, who redefined live hip-hop during the ’90s, will take the provocative rhymes of Black Thought and the funky…
Ryan Humbert
Ryan Humbert’s Hangman starts off like a standard-issue singer-songwriter disc, but immediately gets much more interesting. The Akron native is a DJ for the wonderfully eclectic WAPS-FM 91.3, and his expertise with adult-oriented rock is obvious. Humbert also recruited some big-league talent of his own for his second album. He’s backed by Columbus’s Andy Carlson,…
All Wet
FRI 5/20 Todd Nelson’s recipe for recreation is simple: Just add water. On Friday, the owner of the Kalahari Waterpark Resort in Wisconsin Dells, Wisconsin, will open a similarly African-themed splash park in Sandusky. Spanning 435,000 square feet, Kalahari will house an outdoor waterpark, indoor surf pool, nine-hole miniature golf course, full-service spa, eight restaurants,…
Colin John Band Signs
Akron’s Colin John Band has signed to Graboy Records, a California-based independent label distributed nationally through Fontana Distribution, an arm of Universal Records. “I like their music,” says Graboy President Jeff Grabow, an industry veteran with long runs at Virgin and Warner Bros., who has also managed such artists as the late New York Dolls…
Hell-Raisers
5/20-5/21 Jeff Blanchard, one-half of the Hearts of Darkness comedy duo, finds it oddly satisfying that he and Mike Baker are staging their latest production, The House of the Holy Tour, in a church. “How many old churches are out there where we can do a show like ours?” Blanchard says of this weekend’s performances…
Finch
The ongoing emo explosion often feels like a modern-day Revenge of the Nerds, where the pale kids with Warped Tour aspirations battle the varsity meatheads who want to smash their skateboards into kindling. Fortunately, somebody forgot to mention all this to Finch. While the California band released its debut disc, What It Is to Burn,…
Sith Is It
“Somewhere, this could all be happening right now,” spoke the narrator in the trailer for the first Star Wars movie (thereafter known as Episode IV: A New Hope), and to those who were small children then, it rang true. For an entire generation, the Star Wars trilogy could never be mere movies; on a transcendent…
Mary Timony
Effortlessly elegant and cerebral, Mary Timony is progressive rock’s poster girl. She first became Queen Crimson with 1997’s Magic City, an album filled with swirling synthesizers, folk-faerie melodies, and elaborate portraits of “Medieval People” and “Cosmic Rays.” Indie rockers tend to address such subjects ironically, but Timony’s teardrop eyes never wink. She’s one of modern…
On the Dark Side
It’s a question to which the response should be more than a shrug, but it’s the only thing I can offer anyone who asks, “So, how was it?” The final installment in the mostly irrelevant second Star Wars trilogy is far superior to its two predecessors, The Phantom Menace and Attack of the Clones. But…
Engelbert Humperdinck
Most earnest pop performers have no idea when enough is enough, overstaying their welcome until their careers inevitably end in irony or tragedy. Except, of course, those pop performers who never really mean it in the first place, in which case the triumph of irony can be a weird kind of personal victory. That’s certainly…
Bad Daddy
If it’s been a while since you’ve seen a great work of art, perhaps you’ve forgotten what it feels like: It feels euphoric. At least, that’s the glorious, heel-kickin’ boost that resulted after a screening of Look at Me, by French writer-director-actress-superhero Agnès Jaoui. There was euphoria — and jubilation (somebody knows how to make…
Keane
>Around your bros, it’s impossible not to sneer at the mawkish sentimentality of Hopes and Fears, the debut from Brit trio Keane. But get those same guys around their girlfriends and wives, and the record takes on this weird power — it becomes . . . beautiful . . . gorgeous . . . wonderful.…
Shock and Awful
It is no great joy to review Palindromes, the latest film from writer-director Todd Solondz, who is loved by those who do not loathe him for such movies as Welcome to the Dollhouse, Happiness, and Storytelling. Advance word had Palindromes as Solondz’s most shocking film, which seemed impossible, given its predecessors — Happiness, especially, with…
Slim Cessna’s Auto Club
To see Slim Cessna and company live is to love them, but the act’s studio recordings, though entertaining, haven’t truly captured the fun and frenzy Cessna is capable of generating onstage. The band’s latest, The Bloudy Tenent Truth and Peace, comes up a bit short in this respect, too, but it offers ample compensation through…
