Enough Already
It’s very tempting to not just dismiss Enough, the latest bill-paying gig by Michael Apted (Enigma) starring Jennifer Lopez, but shred it altogether. Ms. Lopez hasn’t exactly added to her acting credibility with a string of showy, glamorous roles in such mediocre fare as The Wedding Planner and Angel Eyes. Rather, she’s been more concerned…
Medeski, Martin & Wood
During their nine-year run, Medeski, Martin & Wood have become all things to all people. The trio continues to satisfy the jazzbo crowd, which counts on the band’s Blue Note releases to bear the future-fusion torch. But somewhere along the way, the dreadlocked white-boy network stopped playing Hacky Sack for a minute and took notice…
Tales From the Cryptologist
Quick! Name a brilliant mathematician at one of the country’s leading academic institutions who, despite obvious emotional problems that keep him on the edge of a nervous breakdown, is enlisted by his government to decipher seemingly impenetrable military communications that the enemy sends to its operatives around the world. If you guessed A Beautiful Mind’s…
Luna
Lament, dear reader, the musical stalwarts who were abandoned by their benefactors but never lost their artistic conception. Licking midlife wounds, some of them are healing on indie labels. That’s where you’ll find New Zealand noise-pop ex-pat and Galaxie 500 co-founder Dean Wareham. Last of the original Lunas, he continues to float toward a vision…
The Last Radical
It’s half past three on a balmy weekend in Kent when the young woman finally climbs the rickety stairs to the makeshift stage. The sun peeks out from behind the clouds as the crowd begins to stir. “Are we ready to get started?” she shouts into a microphone as she paces the stage, an Arafat-style…
The Get Up Kids
The emo backlash will be worse than anything you can imagine. Scads of grad students in black-framed glasses with wispy guitars, slyly poppy vocals, wannabe punk dynamics, and lyrics that sound heartfelt — but really don’t make a goddamn bit of sense — will all meet their doom. It will be worse than the death…
Jim Crow Sundown
When Paul Bellamy asked Charter One Bank to close its high-interest lending unit because he thought it discriminated against black customers, he admits that bank executives found the idea “amusingly presumptuous.” Bellamy, after all, is only the director of the Lorain County Reinvestment Coalition, a group agitating for banks to better serve poor and minority…
Timo Maas
If there’s one thing the world most definitely does not need right now, it’s another watery mix CD from some overhyped trance DJ — you know, the ones with the tastefully modernist cover art (invariably featuring a handsome European staring meaningfully into space) and the interminable synth buildups that eventually crest in predictable spasms of…
Public Access Denied
It’s 11:30 on a Wednesday night, and the cast of Last Call is midway through a Lakewood pub crawl. Having recently emigrated from Kent, the foursome is still learning the nightlife here. They leave one raucous bar to reconvene at McCarthy’s Ale House, thinking it will be, by bar standards, quiet enough to converse. Turns…
Joe Lovano
Tenor saxophonist Joe Lovano pays homage to great tenor singer/paisan Enrico Caruso in this engaging reprise of tunes Caruso either made famous or knew from his Naples childhood. Like Lovano’s mid-’90s albums Celebrating Sinatra and Rush Hour, Viva Caruso is melodic and romantic, and aims to mainstream material long confined to a particular market. The…
Babe Ruth of Berea
It is a pleasant, even beautiful city, but the friendly confines of Berea don’t seem worthy of Cleveland’s biggest slugger. He plays for the brown and gold of Baldwin-Wallace, a college that apparently stole its name from a personal injury firm. Only 100 to 150 people show up for his games. They don’t even have…
Prefuse 73
Atlanta-raised and Barcelona-based glitch-hop producer Scott Herren chose the moniker Prefuse 73 as a tribute to one of his two favorite sample sources: pre-fusion jazz recorded before 1973. His other favorite is vocals, which Herren cuts into blips and sprinkles into his music like confetti. On last year’s Vocal Studies + Uprock Narratives, Herren used…
One Man’s Garbage
Another man’s glamorous gothic pop: I want to start off by saying that Garbage’s third album, Beautiful Garbage, is the best the band has put out so far. Rob Harvilla, if you are going to write an article on a band [Nightwatch, April 18], please bother to do your research. Saying that Shirley Manson of…
The Black Keys
For a white boy, Dan Auerbach sounds as black as Art Modell’s heart. The Black Keys frontman sings as if he were sired by Jimi Hendrix, weaned on Wild Turkey in T-Model Ford’s shotgun shack, then mentored by Mountain’s Leslie West. The latter would explain why “Leavin’ Trunk” sounds a lot like “Mississippi Queen,” the…
Concrete Solutions
What kind of new housing would tempt people to live close to downtown? Nine architects try to answer that question in House: Case Study Cleveland, a show at Spaces through June 14. The architects are finalists in a contest sponsored by the gallery. Their challenge was to design a home for $180,000 (exclusive of land…
The Prince
Roman Coppola and L.M. Kit Carson, filmmakers and friends and co-conspirators, sit in front of an audience of 30 on the University of Dallas campus. Their appearance together, in this wood-paneled auditorium on this verdant site, completes a circle, or perhaps a dozen of them, and the moment makes Carson anxious. He feels the vibe.…
Good Noosa
“I can’t believe I’m eating this!” exclaimed Picky Companion, lunging across the table for another piece of my calamari. “But it’s sooo good.” I couldn’t believe it either, as I watched the golden rings disappear. After all, minutes earlier, she had brushed aside my suggestion that we share a platter. “I’m not much of a…
Dream Grille
Time has stolen many of Clevelanders’ special places, including the Central Market, Mills Restaurant, and Chef Boyardee’s. Now, for once, we’re getting something back, thanks to Forest City Commercial Development’s just-completed restoration of Higbee’s Silver Grille. The seven-month, $800,000 project returned the magnificent art-moderne space to its original 1931 splendor. Rife with marble, grillwork, and…
Stacked Decks
“Painful” is probably the best word to describe the transition that has occurred in the Cleveland dance music scene over the past two years. The inevitable downturn in the illicit underground rave circuit of the early ’90s led to a more legalized party scene, with DIY promoters staging city-permitted events in nontraditional venues, drawing hundreds…
Better Dead
Nothing D.H. Peligro says sounds convincing. He’s afraid of each question, perhaps worried that he’ll come up empty-handed when asked, “Why?” Why did he help rob the grave of the dead Dead Kennedys, America’s best-loved primordial punks, after a 19-month legal battle, during which singer Jello Biafra and his breakaway bandmates Peligro (drums), East Bay…
Saucy Lads
Lots of people like ribs. Lots of people even make it a point each year to eat as many ribs as humanly possible at area rib festivals. But not many folks keep score as they move from vendor to vendor. Or query grillin’ guys on their techniques. Or post their upcoming appearances on a website…
Rap Royalty
There’s a reason the centerpiece of George Goins’s living room is a pair of turntables, rather than a TV. As one of the founders of the hip-hop promotions company Nappyhead Inc., Goins (better known as Poohmanchew) seeks no distractions from his muse. He’s lined his walls with hip-hop handbills, which outnumber the lone personal memento…
Albania Mania
Playing gigs in a pizza shop may not make them stars, but the Albanian Eagles will take American anonymity over Albanian fame any day it’s offered. This time last year, Dolnar Spahija appeared to be holding the Albanian music world in the palm of his hand. The 23-year-old keyboardist/guitarist had earned a music degree from…
Emissions From the Monolith III
Perhaps only a lifetime prescription for medicinal marijuana would thrill a stoner more than the third annual Emissions From the Monolith fest. Three days of piledriving reefer rock in a Youngstown roadhouse that looks as if it were pulled from the recesses of David Lynch’s scrambled brain, Emissions is a THC tour de force. “I…
Memental
The bad news for Memento fans is that Christopher Nolan’s Insomnia is far less complex and challenging in form than the backwards-edited art-house hit that sparked as much disdain as devotion among moviegoers last year. The good news for Memento haters is that Insomnia is far less complex and challenging in form. Its relative straightforwardness…
The Gossip
We’re not ones to spread rumors, but word has it that the Gossip crew fancies itself the logical offspring of Sleater-Kinney and the White Stripes. Take the gender/sexuality-charged punk of the former (plus Corin Tucker’s firehose-at-full-blast-whipping-around-uncontrollably voice) and the calculated half-assed blues of the latter, and you’re feeling the “Alabama Heat,” this Olympia, Washington trio’s…
