Stake Fry
When people say they hear the voice of God and are acting according to his directions, the result might be either someone who works tirelessly for the poor or a state law banning rights for gay couples. Celestial inspiration is kinda dicey that way. Which is one reason that the story of Joan of Arc,…
Andre Williams
It’s a tall order to remain the biggest badass in the R&B world for damn near 50 years, but living-legend Andre Williams has managed to do it with verve, style, and an impeccable wardrobe. He first hit the scene with his 1956 smash hit “Jail Bait,” a hilariously funky jam that warned, “Even 17 and…
Peter Panache
Oh, that Johnny Depp. Played in some dime-a-dozen rock bands, did some average television, made a few cutesy little movies. Whatever. Yeah, he messes with his looks in a fun way sometimes, but otherwise he merely rides that nicotine-sunken-cheeks thing all the way to the bank. The guy’s popular, but so’s toilet paper. Ha! Easy,…
Nathaniel Mayer
Time was when the urban airwaves were fat with tunes from one-and-sometimes-two-hit wonders, who shared the waves and the charts with the big names. Artists like Dyke & the Blazers, Darrell Banks, and the Fantastic Johnny C. They recorded for small labels like Calla, Revilot, Double Shot, and Original Sound. Sometimes, if a record had…
On Stage
Stonewall Jackson’s House — It’s easy to be controversial: Just make a statement that goes against the currently accepted “liberal” conventional wisdom, and you’re sure to ignite some arguments and maybe get yourself a book contract with Ann Coulter’s publisher. At least, that was true in the mid-1990s, when Jonathan Reynolds wrote this often amusing…
Destiny’s Child
Thanks to Beyoncé Knowles’ transparent ambitions, Destiny’s Child has been on a deathwatch since day one. And after Beyoncé’s solo breakthrough last year, pragmatic observers may wonder how her R&B trio has survived. But the real surprise of Destiny Fulfilled is its content, not its mere existence. Rather than the expected urban trendfest, much of…
On View
NEW Drawn to Nature — Christopher Pekoc is known for his photography, but his works incorporate a variety of media, here including shellac and gold leaf, giving them the appearance of richly hued patchwork quilts. Jagged sewing-machine stitches outline images of birds and flowers collaged over a glowing amber polyester film that’s lined with a…
Eminem
As the title suggests, Eminem’s fourth solo disc is a direct continuation of 2002’s The Eminem Show. He fails to match the highs of his previous albums here, but Encore is still as compulsively listenable as The Marshall Mathers LP, the 1999 debut that rocketed Eminem from Detroit slums to national pop consciousness, establishing him…
The Meating Place
We stand in front of Brasa, in the shadow of the downtown skyline, tapping our toes to the sultry Brazilian music that spills out onto the sidewalk. As if we were characters in a Warner Brothers cartoon, we can almost see the “tendrils” of meaty aromas reaching out to us from inside the restaurant, wrapping…
Ted Leo + the Pharmacists
Since disbanding the punk-fueled band Chisel in the late ’90s, Ted Leo has emerged as a pub-rock hero, championing everyone from the Specials to Thin Lizzy while also creating his own revved-up version of the real thing. He takes something you might not think you had any particular opinion on — say, the Squeeze catalog,…
This Week’s Day-By-Day Picks
Thursday, November 18 Voodoo Glow Skulls and Go Betty Go have little in common. The former is a 16-year-old, testosterone-heavy ska-punk outfit that incorporates Mexican roots music into its work. The latter is an all-grrrl band that released its first EP of pop-punk earlier this year. But both hail from California, the land of hyphenated…
Sticky Business
They may spend their evenings in toney salons, but come the wee hours of the morning, area gourmets are just as likely to be found standing over the kitchen sink, spooning peanut butter out of a jar. We’ve reached that conclusion after noting the surprisingly large number of local food fans who have reminisced with…
Bright Eyes
Conor Oberst has gone from writing sensitive stories influenced by mid-American suburbia to sensitive stories influenced by New York City, where he’s been residing for the past couple of years. In 2005, Oberst will release two new Bright Eyes LPs, I’m Wide Awake, It’s Morning and Digital Ash in a Digital Urn. In the meantime,…
Dark Shadows
It’s the day after the Red Sox swept away an 86-year-old curse, and singer-songwriter Joseph Arthur is on his way to Boston. “Did they win the World Series or something?” he asks. “I don’t know. I didn’t watch it.” You can sorta forgive Arthur for not keeping up with little things like baseball lately. For…
Here Comes Your Band
Charles Thompson is infamous for being a grouch. The charismatic Pixies frontman, who shrieked and howled under the name Black Francis before launching a successful solo career as Frank Black, his current moniker, has often been portrayed as being as temperamental as the music he plays. But on this occasion, Thompson is quickly proving that…
The Futureheads
Unlike most of nü wave’s hottest acts — who endlessly parrot the notion that they just play what they play, without regard for what’s going on outside their heads — England’s Futureheads display a welcome familiarity with the hopped-up rock scene swirling around them. The 15 tunes on their self-titled debut are loud, fast, and…
One Nation, Under Goth
WED 11/24 In DJ Miseri’s Necropolis, she’s the dance-floor force behind all the industrial synthpop. A staple on Cleveland’s goth scene since 1997, Miseri spins every fourth Wednesday at Spy. While she’s in the main-bar booth, DJ Haz-Mat (from Bowling Green) is turntabling electro-industrial tracks in the Powernoise Room downstairs. But the real attraction is…
Not Quite the Bomb
Let it be known that I do not take the release of a new U2 album — or the public disparaging of same — lightly. Harsh personal experience provided this lesson. For, after writing a few discouraging words about the band’s last record, All That You Can’t Leave Behind, for Scene, I received angry hate…
Iyan Anomolie
Since releasing his 2002 solo debut, Iyan Anomolie has earned a bachelor’s degree and become a figure in Cleveland hip-hop as part of the forward-thinking 12 Monkeys crew. The rhymer experienced the same problem in hip-hop and academia: All the fundamental skills are considered hopelessly old-school, and the masses spend their years contributing to self-perpetuating…
Valhalla, They Are Coming
SAT 11/20 The Cleveland State Vikings hope to rebound from last year’s dismal showing when they tip off the season against the Hillsdale Chargers on Saturday. After starting last year with a 4-2 record and narrowly losing to national powerhouse North Carolina, the Vikings spiraled downward. Fast. “It took us two years to produce positive…
Drain You
Listen up, rockists, mythologists, screenwriters, and future biographers: With the Lights Out, the four-disc boxed set that Nirvana fans have been waiting for since April 8, 1994, does not definitively prove that Nirvana was touched by greatness from the flannel-shirted get-go. But that’s what scrap-heap retrospectives are supposed to do, right? Demonstrate that even when…
Flo White
When he performs with his band, all eyes are on Flo White. Clad in a white Lycra unitard, wings, and stuffed black thong, Flo commands the stage like a horny hellion. But the visual spectacle obscures his secret weapon: Behind Flo’s frantic, bratty raps lies some super-heavy funk that stands entirely on its own. And…
Barrie Good
11/19 Once again, Johnny Depp dresses up like a pirate. And once again, he’s likely to be nominated for an Oscar for his swashbuckling ways. But unlike last year’s frenetic Pirates of the Caribbean, Finding Neverland (which opens Friday) is a subtle, sober, and eventually joyous celebration of an artist at the top of his…
Coming Up Roses
If rock bands really are like relationships, Brandon Zano has just hooked up with a calendar girl. “It’s like having a thing for Claudia Schiffer. You go to a bar, she’s sitting there, and she starts hitting on you,” laughs the former guitarist for Cleveland modern rockers Leo. As he recounts the formation of his…
The Tossers
Toss a few back with the Tossers, but do it responsibly: Get the pints out of your system with a little jig or a lot of pogo. If you missed the Chicago band’s raucous set at last summer’s Euclid Irish Festival, here’s your chance to catch up on the revelry. This is rowdy, modern Irish…
It Was Good,
Uh-Huh
SUN 11/21 It’s been a while since Better Than Ezra had a song on the radio. More than five years, actually. But in the mid-’90s, when the alternative nation was thriving and folks couldn’t get enough of grungy guitars, Better Than Ezra was pretty hot. “Good” was all over modern-rock radio. Follow-up songs were pretty…
Bob Mould
Bob Mould’s transition from hardcore to scripting professional wrestling made sense on a certain level, though his transition from fast-as-it-gets punk to dance DJ is a little harder to fathom. Mould, if you’re just tuning in, fronted Hüsker Dü, the Minneapolis band that took the Ramones’ formula — count-off, blazing-fast song, and repeat without a…
Mini Kiss
You wanted the littlest, you got the littlest. They rock and roll all night, and party every day — but they need a little help when the cold gin’s on the top shelf: It’s Mini Kiss, the world’s premier all-midget Kiss tribute. The classics are full-sized, but the cover charge is a fraction of the…
Hip to be SquarePants
At the bottom of the ocean, inside a giant pineapple, lives an oblong yellow sponge who likes to blow bubbles, eat more ice cream than is good for him, and work as a fry cook. The “Krabby Patty” sandwiches he makes are so popular that a one-eyed plankton, who runs a failed restaurant across the…
And the Winners Are . . .
Cleveland music celebrities including Michael Stanley, Parliament Funkadelic’s Michael Hampton, and the late Roberto Ocasio will be honored at the first TVT and TCI Cleveland Music Awards Wednesday, November 24. “The entire focus is for Cleveland to recognize its hometown folk, who have complemented and enhanced the music industry,” says awards producer Jack Craciun. “We’re…
Debbie Does Akron
Full-on boffing. That’s what Bonnie Valentine found while channel-surfing late one night. Vigorous thrusting, melodramatic moaning, the works. “What I saw was intercourse,” the Akron resident says. “This is beyond obscene. This had crossed into pornography.” It wasn’t Cinemax that Valentine happened upon that night in September. It was Channel 15, Time Warner Cable’s public…
Drama Queen
Margo Channing cracked wiser. And her devious protégée cooked up better schemes to steal the limelight. Still, half a century after they lit up the screen, the principals in All About Eve probably would get a charge out of Being Julia. This bittersweet backstage drama skillfully combines a love of the theater with the certain…
Slayer
Slayer has played “Raining Blood” during unplanned virtual monsoons at outdoor shows, provoking massive mudfights, but not quite achieving lyrical symmetry. The song’s words clearly call for lacerated skies to leak red gore; crystalline precipitation makes the heavens seem sorrowful, rather than mortally wounded. Slayer tried to set up a splatter storm when touring in…
Film-Flam Man
At audition day for the television show Out of Darkness, dozens of actors and actresses wander into a Maple Heights casting studio, sporting egos so large they require their own check-in room. As they await their heralded director, they lounge about on folding chairs, lazily perusing scripts and enthusiastically bitching about their idling careers. “Did…
Enduring Creepiness
There is something very important to know about Enduring Love that is not apparent from the title: It’s a thriller. More specifically, it’s a creepy, twisted, overproduced, and often intelligent psychological thriller with an ending all too loyal to the genre. Director Roger Michell (most recently of The Mother, a nearly perfect family drama) would…
Cheap Trick
Cheap Trick has become this zombie that staggers around the pop-music landscape, just outpacing the “Are they still alive?” queries. At best, it’s nice to know they’re out there if you need to kill a little time — kind of like the rock-music equivalent of Jeopardy! Yeah, yeah, we all love Cheap Trick. They, just…
Gore in the E.R.
Gore in the E.R. Dishonored doc bloodied more than his rep: Concerning your story about the credibility of Dr. Patrick [“Playing Doctor,” October 27]: In 1991, I was 16 years old, and I came to the emergency room in Hillsboro for a severe nosebleed. Dr. Patrick inserted a device up my nose called a balloon.…
Cage Death Match
Jerry Bruckheimer has always insisted he cares less about critical acclaim than commercial appeal. “We make movies for the common man,” he said almost three years ago, as Black Hawk Down was crash-landing in theaters. “The pictures that I’ve made over the last 20 years or so have been very successful, so I am pleasing…
Ministry
Now that the debris from the November elections has been swept aside, one can expect its results to further infuriate Al Jourgensen and Ministry. Houses of the Mole, Ministry’s latest, is arguably the band’s most brutal effort yet, sparing no expense, right from the Carmina Burana-infused “No W” (Take a wild guess who Uncle Al’s…
Free Shivs!
Last week, state prison Director Reginald Wilkinson proudly announced plans for a new 37,000-square-foot slaughterhouse in Pickaway. By 2007, it will provide almost four million pounds of tasty meat products every year to Ohio’s 32 prisons, and is expected to save $2 million annually. Yet there’s an even bigger upside for prisoners: The plant will…
April Shower
It’s hard to argue with the proposition that everyone needs to get away from the daily routine now and then, and head off to a sun-drenched locale where glimmering waters and fragrant blossoms abound. Since there is unanimous agreement on this plan, it seems a rather slender thread from which to hang an entire play.…
Jem
Mention the name Jem to a child of the 1980s, and visions of the animated rock star and her truly, truly, truly outrageous backing band, the Holograms, are likely to spring to mind. The non-cartoon Jem doesn’t possess the former’s neon glow — although the Wales native co-wrote the Madonna single “Nothing Fails” with the…
Punc’d
Poor apostrophe. The rampant abuse of the tiny punctuation mark leaves Lynne Truss “depressed and horrified.” Prudential Insurance denies that there’s anything wrong with its “Were here to help you” slogan. Defunct Brit poppers Hear’Say threw the bugger in the middle of their name. And the Lands’ End mail-order people refuse to admit that it…
