Tortured Soul
The phrase “dance band” brings to mind an amalgam of celebratory funkateers and drill-team high-steppers that could be dubbed KC & C and the Sunshine Factory. Tortured Soul pairs the sweat-soaked soul of the former with the precise pounding pulse of the latter, but unlike electronic acts that use live instrumentation (such as Ming and…
The Orb
In the early ’90s, the Orb’s “Little Fluffy Clouds” took cheeky vocal samples and mushroomed them into something stranger and spacier. While rhythmically rooted in house music, Alex Paterson and crew dosed it with stoned dub and U.K. prog, even goofing on Pink Floyd album covers. This dizzying mixture of LSD consciousness and Ecstasy swing…
What’s Opera, Doc?
WED 11/30 William Luce has made his career writing about famous dead people. Actor John Barrymore, writer Isak Dinesen, and playwright Lillian Hellman were all among the dear departed when Luce wrote about them. “They’re legendary,” says the Oregon-based author. His Bravo, Caruso! — which he wrote about opera tenor Enrico Caruso 15 years ago…
T.I./Young Jeezy
Atlanta rapper T.I. is the nominal headliner of what’s been dubbed the Georgia Power tour, but his counterpart, Young Jeezy, is the guy from the ATL who has the momentum. Last summer, Jeezy made a pair of debuts inside the Billboard Top 10: one with his own Let’s Get It: Thug Motivation 101 — which…
The Facials
The Facials’ idealism is so steadfast, it occasionally breeds lyrics that sound as if they were penned during an 8th-grade social studies class. Quick primer: Racism is bad, politicians are devils, and war is hell. Ingredients for a revolution? Only on the playground. Despite the Facials’ knack for stating the obvious, the Cleveland punk quartet…
Trigger Happy
11/25-12/18 A Christmas Story holds a special place in Clevelanders’ hearts. After all, the 1983 movie — about Ralphie Parker and the Red Ryder 200 Shot Carbine Action Air Rifle he hopes to find under the tree — was mostly filmed in town. With the exception of The Drew Carey Show, it offers more spot-the-location…
Horrible Heist
More than $2000 worth of gear was stolen from the Beachland following a punk festival. Held the weekend of November 11, Horriblefest hosted 30 out-of-town and local bands in three venues around the city. Chicagoan Russ Murphy and Clevelander Ryan Dahl, two scenesters who don’t regularly organize shows, set up the fest and booked two…
Saul Glennon
Saul Glennon — Saul’s a band, not a guy — is a retro-pop group with a sound straight out of the mid-’60s. But the Slavic Village band has always been like the ugly pretty girl in so many ’80s movies: an irresistible beauty hidden under a very slight layer of drab. With the new Refractory,…
Common Cold
A few weeks ago, Harold Ramis was sitting in a hotel conference room, discussing the subtext of The Ice Harvest, his new film based on the novel by Scott Phillips and adapted by Robert Benton and Richard Russo. Ramis explained that he took the project, which Benton (Nobody’s Fool, The Human Stain) and others were…
Turkey Shoot IV
Everybody knows that Nickelback sucks and that the Pussycat Girls are more annoying than sobriety. Piling on such easy targets is like hurling bricks at the elderly, something we’re trying to cut back on. So as we compile our annual list of the lamest albums of the year, we’re attempting to bypass the usual suspects…
Your Government at Work
Punishment Park (New Yorker Video) This 1971 movie from director Peter Watkins could have been made yesterday, which is no doubt why it finally sees video release long after accruing cult status. Born of the filmmaker’s outrage over the Kent State killings, the war in Vietnam, and other abominations of the era, Punishment Park resonates…
Spent
Ever since its Broadway debut in 1996, Rent has generated a loyal, almost cultlike following. Showered with praise, the Pulitzer Prize-winning musical touched a nerve among the young, artistic, gay, urban, and alternatively dressed people who identified as outsiders and wondered how they would make their way in the world. Admirably, it dealt with both…
Rob Thomas
Matchbox Twenty was just getting good when it went on an unofficial hiatus a few years ago: On 2002’s More Than You Think You Are, the group took the grunge-lite mush that had quietly made it one of America’s most successful bands and morphed it into sexy disco-rock. The transformation afforded frontman Rob Thomas the…
For Those About To Rock
Deep down, we all want money for nothing and chicks for free. Back in 1985, when Dire Straits first revealed this eternal truth, it seemed that any goofball with a DayGlo headband could pour himself into package-hugging spandex and become a rock star. But it turned out that noodling on the fret board wasn’t nearly…
Get Wrapped
For Aspiring Rock Stars The GitterPicker String Factory operates on this firm principle: Hand-picked guitars are better guitars. GitterPicker’s acoustic and electric instruments are hand-tuned to perfection by a luthier (that’s music talk for professional guitar technician). “Basically that means that all our guitars are playable and sound good,” says owner Laura Radcliff. “A neck…
Spy Gamey
Since global and national conspiracies are all the rage these days, they would seem rich territory for theatrical comedy. Indeed, if we can’t laugh at the people who lie, cheat, and steal to augment their political leverage and line their pockets, what’s the fun in being a powerless peon? Of course, it’s incumbent upon the…
Cave In
By the late ’90s, hardcore’s roots in punk and thrash had taken a backseat to a by-the-numbers formula of rehashed Slayer breakdowns that focused less on talent and innovation than on a will to stomp. However, throughout the mid-’90s, Cave In bandmates had been hammering out new ideas in the basements of their Methuen, Massachusetts…
Our top DVD picks for the week of November 22.
AVP: Alien Vs. Predator — Unrated Collector’s Edition (Fox) Cheaper by the Dozen: Baker’s Dozen Edition (Fox) 8MM 2 (Columbia/Tristar) Extreme Makeover: Home Edition (Buena Vista) The Honeymooners (Paramount) Keane: Strangers (Interscope) King Kong (1976) (Paramount) King Kong: Collector’s Edition (1933) (Warner Bros.) King of the Hill: Season 5 (Fox) The Last Days of Pompeii…
Weighting . . .
or those of us who dug Rob McKittrick’s recent comedy Waiting . . . , Just Friends offers some good news: Ryan Reynolds and Anna Faris are together again as a dysfunctional couple. He’s a slick music executive named Chris Brander, still traumatized by the “Let’s just be friends” speech he got from the girl…
Capsule reviews of current area theater presentations.
A Day in the Death of Joe Egg — Did you hear the one about the couple with the severely handicapped child? That’s not a surefire intro to a joke, but it is the setup for this 1960s play, which shows how a British family uses humor — often of the blackest sort — to…
Clutch
Clutch’s latest LP, Robot Hive Exodus, isn’t in progress a minute before the band name-checks REO Speedwagon, Kansas, and Boston. The Maryland brute squad is near the top of the list of contemporary bands that, in a perfect world, would be staples on classic-rock radio. Clutch often gets labeled a jam band, mainly because it…
Art of the Raw Deal
It’s been three months since Don and Ann-Marie Powers have cooked a meal. Where their kitchen should be, there are exposed beams and bare plywood, the only evidence of the remodeling job that is barely started, but won’t end anytime soon. Last spring, when the Powerses wanted to overhaul the kitchen and bathroom of their…
Spell It Out
Richard Gere? That’s the first thought that came to mind upon learning that Mr. Salt-and-Pepper-Sexy-Buddhist-Wasp had been cast as Saul Naumann in Bee Season, the film version of Myla Goldberg’s best-selling novel. In the book, Saul is an oppressive and learned Jewish patriarch, a cantor and student of mysticism, whose text-strewn home office is off-limits…
Capsule reviews of current area art exhibitions.
NEW In the Middle of the Way — It’s hard to say whether the problems with Anna Konik’s video project are intentional. If they are, Konik needs a sharper editor; if not, all she really needs is some technical assistance. Konik, a Polish artist participating in Spaces’ World Artist Program, shadows Clevelanders who are homeless…
Unwed Sailor
Looking for a good, er, reflective time, sailor? In the 1960s, instrumental rock bands were common, and a select few persist to this day. (The Ventures are definitely still worth seeing.) Then that British Invasion (Beatles, Stones, etc.) happened, rendering instrumental bands hip as pompadours. But in the past decade or so, bands with little…
Highway To Hell
After September 11 and Hurricane Katrina, everyone presumably agrees on the importance of disaster planning. Everyone, that is, except the braying farm animals of the Ohio Legislature. Sometime in the next two years, shipments of spent nuclear-reactor fuel will start crisscrossing Ohio on their way to a storage site in Skull Valley, Utah. And this…
All Yours
Most movies intend to entertain or inform us, or maybe take our minds momentarily off personal problems — that bullet-riddled body in the trunk, say, or Aunt Edna’s arrest for shoplifting doughnuts. Presumably, no picture really means to make an airtight case against children. But after sitting through the witless, terminally irritating remake of a…
A Splash of Tequila
Tall, elegant, and draped in heavy tiaras of salt, the margaritas at Las Barras were bracing, ice-cold beauties. This we knew even before the waiter spilled a trayful of them into my lap. But if you ever want a yardstick to determine how well a particular restaurant’s food measures up, a lapful of mixed drinks…
Ashlee Simpson
By proclaiming I Am Me, Ashlee Simpson, that product of the teen-pop machinery, is trying to recover from her meltdown on Saturday Night Live last year, when she walked offstage after a technical glitch revealed that she was lip-synching. Naturally, the move has invited hoots of derision from pundits tired of a marketplace saturated with…
Closet Case
DVD — Trapped in the Closet: Taking overindulgence to a new level, everybody’s favorite alleged pedophile/piss-fetishist R. Kelly expands his bloated “urban opera” to a dozen chapters. But damn if it isn’t engaging! Kelly’s song cycle becomes a 12-part music video (directed like a stylized soap opera by Jim Swaffield), in which infidelity, paranoia, and…
A Family Adrift
riter and director Noah Baumbach has made three light films — one so slight (1997’s party-hopping Highball), it didn’t see release till five years after its completion, and even then it sneaked onto video-store shelves credited to a pseudonymous writer and director. There was nothing on his filmography — not even his co-writing credit with…
New Menu Brewing
Can a well-seasoned chef find true happiness in an Ohio City beer garden? Can “pretzel chicken” survive a culinary makeover? And, most important, can customers seeking sausages and fried calamari learn to love braised lamb shanks and sous vide salmon? Drop in at the venerable Great Lakes Brewing Company (2516 Market Avenue, 216-771-4404), and see…
Pat Travers
The first requirement of a rock guitar god is to, well, rock, and not many can match Pat Travers on that point. With chops to rival those of most any peer, Travers released a string of successful mid-’70s and ’80s albums, picking up a slew of fans with his versatility and radio-friendly voice, but mostly…
We’re @&%$#@!
As the prehistoric scholar Grog once remarked upon encountering a hungry Brontosaurus in the forest, “We’re so &%$#@*.” His words are perhaps apropos for the situation we now confront in Cleveland. Two weeks ago, we elected Frank Jackson as mayor. With the linguistic skills of the president and a record of achievement rivaled only by…
Countdown to 12
Some films leave an indelible impression upon the heart and mind. Innocent Voices is one of those films. Set in El Salvador in the early 1980s, during that country’s protracted civil unrest, the movie depicts the nightmare of warfare through the eyes of an 11-year-old boy. The fact that it’s a true story, based on…
Gettin’ Crafty
Xavier Mosley was flipping through a scrapbook belonging to a friend’s father when he noticed the yellowed clipping. It was an old interview with Duke Ellington, and the legendary jazzman’s advice on dealing with commercial pressures and critics struck Mosley as both contemporary and profound. “He was asked what he thought about the response to…
Legends of Cleveland Metal
A night of metal the way it used to be, the Legends of Cleveland Metal show will feature members of Breaker, Shok Paris, and Black Death. Classic Cle-metal bands from the Auburn Records roster used to play the Pop Shop, located beneath the Cleveland Agora, on Saturday nights. The Pop Shop’s gone, but the guy…
Take That
Now, who’s the bumbling slacker? In Rebecca Meiser’s November 9 article “Kid Gloves,” Scene chose a strange approach for a smear article: Find the people starting a new business, then attack their inexperience. In Ms. Meiser’s eagerness to highlight our inexperience and paint us as bumbling slackers, she neglects to mention that Richard Baron, CEO…
Blues Warrior
When Janis Joplin was asked by her mother why she screamed so much when she actually had such a pretty voice, the rock and blues legend replied, “I have to save my pretty voice in case I ever end up in Las Vegas.” The thought of a middle-aged Janis in a sequined peach overblouse, bi-stretch…
Comeback Clips
Video killed the radio star in 1981. By the end of the ’90s, though, 120 Minutes was dead; The Real World had shown MTV that reality doesn’t bite viewers so much as it addicts them, and the music video had become irrelevant to everybody but the Total Request Live crowd. Thanks to Apple, though, it…
Pat’s in the Flats Annual Thanksgiving Jam
Here’s all the excuse you need to execute the admittedly nigh-superhuman feat of dragging your butt off the couch after all the turkey and a long nap: Pat’s in the Flats’ Annual Thanksgiving Jam. Not only does this all-killer-no-filler affair have two of the city’s hottest indie-rock squads on the bill — Coffinberry and Roué…
Flick of the Tongue
Fans of A Christmas Story will remember Scott Schwartz as Flick, the 14-year-old kid whose tongue got stuck to a flagpole. But most don’t know that Flick grew up to become a talent agent for porn stars. For a while. “It was the phone calls at three o’clock in the morning,” he says. “These girls…
Critical Fatwa
All hail Chuck D! Oh, how the uptight and old white pundits parsed his every word. From the days of “jungle rhythms” to the French riots of today, the frightened, white, and withered have shat themselves over black music. But some musicians deserve protection from the beshat more than others do. So, for attempting in…
Aiden
Horror-themed music ain’t what it used to be. The Misfits sang about zombies with such ghoulish conviction that even their “whoa-oh” harmonies sounded like the eerie moans of the undead. Now there are the goth-punk goofs of Aiden, whose Nightmare Anatomy generates less terror than you’d find in It’s the Great Pumpkin, Charlie Brown. The…
This Week’s Day-By-Day Picks
Thursday, November 24 We’re all for spending Thanksgiving with the family. But there’s nothing wrong with a little me-time today — preferably spent on the links. There are several opportunities to sneak away and sink putts, since three Cleveland Metroparks Golf courses are open from dawn to dusk: Shawnee Hills (18753 Egbert Road in Bedford…
Sound Advice
Rock and Roll Purgatory is Cleveland’s most kickass ‘zine, a down-and-dirty deluge of all things rock. Publisher Ben Lybarger names some titles you need. What have you been listening to lately? The new Starvations album, Gravity’s a Bitch, is outstanding in a grizzled sort of way: alienated and dark roots-punk with strong whiffs of Gun…
Various Artists
Certain things in life invite the most diminished expectations possible: children’s books written by celebrities, the pizza at Chinese buffet restaurants, Oberlin College athletics. And, of course, compilations on hip-hop vanity imprints. But this collection from Big Boi’s renamed Purple Ribbon Records bucks conventional wisdom, marking the pragmatic half of OutKast as that rare rap…
Quilts From Hell
Greg Der Ananian, the creator of the “punk-rock craft fair” Bazaar Bizarre, hand-stitches pillows emblazoned with obscene words and phrases. “I remember walking past his pillows,” recalls Shannon Okey, who’s organizing this weekend’s Bazaar Bizarre outing at 1300 Gallery. “And he had cocksucker embroidered across one of them. Too bad I didn’t have the money…
Last Word
What’s the most overhyped local band? “Mushroomhead. They’re good, but really no better than a lot of bands out there, such as Audiblethread or Sindust. I respect the boys, especially for doing what they can to help other local bands. But they get so much attention that other good local metal bands kind of fade…
Maceo Parker
The baddest alto sax in R&B/funk history is back (albeit on a German label). Maceo Parker, featured saxophonist in James Brown’s great 1960s band, has crafted a classic-to-be platter of old-school, deep-groove-laden funk. Parker blows fierce and jubilant with his tastily tart, sinewy tone, while his touring band throws down an invigorating matrix of terse,…
All That Glitters
Fri 11/25 Sue Gibbons has wanted to revamp Grid/Orbit’s Friday-night entertainment lineup ever since she became the gay dance club’s general manager a year ago. This week, she’ll get her wish at Disco & Drag, the bar’s new weekly drag king-and-queen show, which features a rotating cast of Cleveland’s butchest male impersonators and their glittery…
Money Where Your Mouth Is
Band: MALPA (http://www.geocities.com/malpape/) Hometown: Cuyahoga Falls Sounds like: “Remember that commercial where the gorilla tosses luggage around his cage? Mix those sounds with experimental noise drone — aka Primate Electronics.” Fun fact: “There is no fun. This is war waged by the Bott Corporation.” Playing: Friday, November 25, at the Lime Spider, Akron Why you…
Kate Bush
Kate Bush has always bridged the cozy with the stratospheric. As the title of her first work in 12 years suggests, the two-disc set Aerial strays a little further into the ether than some of her previous albums. While the sweepingly operatic second disc seems to be an ode to a sunset, infused with meditations…
Speed racers
11/25-11/27 Nearly 100 mountain-bike racers pedal for a $1,000 prize this weekend at the Bike Authority Cyclocross. The competition takes place on a two-mile track of pavement, grass, and dirt in a Broadview Heights city park. The five bikers to complete the most laps in an hour will split the money. Typically, the fastest racers…
