Working Class
Attention, wage slaves! When it comes to workaday lunches, you downtown types are a distinctly unimaginative bunch. According to our entirely unscientific survey, even the more sophisticated among you — who would rather pluck their eyelashes out, say, than dine on Stouffer’s mac-n-cheese — are wimping out when it comes to the midday meal. “I’m…
Warrior King
Ever since the ruff and gruff raga DJ Shabba Ranks started having crossover reggae hits in the early ’90s, much of what has followed in his wake has elevated style over substance. What reggae’s been missing is simply good songs. Which is exactly what makes Warrior King’s full-length debut so compelling. The irresistible title cut’s…
Bullies With Badges
Annalisa Melari stepped outside to find a front yard coated in the red and blue lights of a dozen police cars. A helicopter buzzed overhead, its searchlight probing the backyard. The cops gripped scowls and batons as they marched up the porch. Her house party was under siege. No one seems to know why they…
Art in the Alley
Captains of industry, take notice: Vico, the white-collar watering hole and upscale lunch spot downtown on East Sixth Street, is still serving your favorites — think luscious crab cakes and fusilli sauced with vodka cream — but the place is more stylin’ than ever since being purchased in mid-October by partners Scott Beebe and David…
Godspeed You Black Emperor!
Like Godspeed’s four prior releases, the Steve Albini-produced Yanqui U.X.O. is a sprawl. Five loosely named tracks span 75 minutes, each detonating as loudly and awkwardly as the cluster bombs at the end of the album’s title (U.X.O. stands for unexploded ordinance). The best of these is the two-part closer “Motherfucker=Redeemer,” which begins with Godspeed…
Sympathy for the Deuce
The most remarkable aspect of the 1999 biography Tim Couch: A Passion for the Game is not that it took two authors to think up a title that bad. Or that the subject was just a pup of 22 when it came out. It’s the revelation that, in his home state of Kentucky, Tim Couch…
Rutgers to Riches
“If we could, we’d stay right where we are now and live it forever,” Thursday singer Geoff Rickly gushes from a stop in Billings, Montana. With Thursday’s 2001 breakthrough album, Full Collapse, continuing to move over 5,000 copies a week (more than 150,000 total), a prime slot on last summer’s Vans Warped Tour still bringing…
Napalm Death
Most pioneers will eventually be outdistanced by those who follow them. But Napalm Death is the exception to that rule. This band isn’t just holding its ground; Order of the Leech is the best thing it’s ever put out. Words From the Exit Wound, the 1999 album that was the band’s last for Earache, was…
Kosher Jam
The trio onstage is cute the way pop bands should be: clean-cut and blond and baggy-jeaned. The music is loud and good, part Weezer, part Barenaked Ladies, with a pinch of Dave Matthews. It’s tough to understand the words, but that doesn’t stop the crowd from singing the chorus with gusto. It might be any…
Sons of Sahm
Until late last year, the Bottle Rockets’ career had proved to be just as combustible as their name. Their last release, 1999’s Brand New Year (Doolittle/Universal), had sporadic moments of brilliance, but its shiny hard rock licks and greasy power-boogie jams couldn’t hide the uneven songwriting and production. The group was warring with Doolittle (its…
Jay Kool
In the early ’90s, while fronting his speed-metal side project Body Count, Ice-T explained that he could relate to death metal because it was mostly white boys talkin’ shit — and that gangsta rap was young black men doing much the same. Thus, if a band like Cannibal Corpse is the musical equivalent of Evil…
Encountering the Beast
Richard Kwiatkowski possesses that most honorable Midwestern trait: He’s a good worker. “He spent six years in one job, so obviously the supervisor was happy with his performance,” says his brother David, a retired Cleveland cop. But last spring, Richard got laid off from a factory shipping department, where he worked through Kelly Services. He…
Happy Daze
If mainstream rock is a total downer, maybe that’s because your life is, too. That seems to be the cynical logic that radio executives have followed over the last decade in programming largely “unmelodic angst music,” as OK Go frontman Damian Kulash Jr. puts it. Speaking by phone from a quaint old hotel in Baton…
Mortisha’s Secret
“How shall I say this without offending you?” asks Mortisha’s Secret singer-guitarist Todd Shay on his band’s latest, and we can relate. “I’ve been listening and watching, and I don’t like what I see,” he adds a few moments later, encapsulating our thoughts precisely. Which isn’t to say that this middle-of-the-road modern band is awful,…
Rollback Smiley on Strike
It’s time for a Wal-Mart union: Scene reporter Martin Kuz did an excellent job exposing the problems that Wal-Mart causes in our community [“The Wal-Mart Menace,” September 4]. While Wal-Mart produces smiling faces on its constant television ads, all is not smiles behind the walls at Wal-Mart. When workers try to improve their standards by…
Rooked in Advance
Yeah, we know that a music critic complaining about his job is as appealing as Fred Durst whining about the Playmates crowding his Serta. We should probably content ourselves with all those free Trans-Siberian Orchestra passes and the gratis Dio DVDs, and leave the griping to the people who work for a living. But there’s…
A Meal for the Ages
Good Queen Bess probably never had it this good. Sirloin of beef draped in a Madeira wine sauce. A medley of root vegetables roasted to tenderness. A stein of hot wassail sprinkled with cinnamon and nutmeg. Even in this age of drive-through burgers and frozen pizza, a classic Elizabethan feast would make most of us…
No Room to Spare
One of the best spots for cheap beer and free music, Lakewood’s Green Room, has closed its doors after only a year, due to continuous noise complaints. At a recent Saturday-night show featuring the McShitz, Pride of Ohio, and Black Ark, cops allegedly showed up before the bands even started playing and warned the club…
Idol Chitchat
Nikki McKibbin isn’t quite sure where she’s going or where she wants to be. The American Idol finalist may return to Texas. Or she may pursue singing and acting elsewhere. One month into the American Idols Live! tour with nine other almost famous singers, all McKibbin knows is that last summer’s hit Fox TV show…
Lou Barlow
Critics may think of Lou Barlow as the original indie rock nerd, a tattered-sweater-wearing doofus making love to his four-track after being rejected by the hot cashier at Piggly Wiggly. But with celebrated bands like Sebadoh, Sentridoh, and the Folk Implosion behind him, Louie’s left a massive wake of largely home-recorded pop, as largely tossed-off…
Run, Rabbit, Run
Three years on, the besieged phenomenon has been rendered beloved. Now, when slick bizzers in suits and cell phones speak of Eminem and “gross” in the same sentence, they’re talking only receipts, merchandise, profit. The man, just touching 30, is merely the latest crossover franchise doing brisk business at the local CD outlet and movie…
The Blasters
It’s hard to avoid feeling sentimental about the Blasters. In the early ’80s, they were among only a few bands that made roots music important for young people. (Historical note: It wasn’t called “roots music” back then.) But such feelings should be suppressed, because the Blasters themselves were so determinedly anti-nostalgic. Early in their career,…
Fatale Detraction
It’s possibly more ironic than Brian De Palma realizes that his latest movie, Femme Fatale, features a down-on-her-luck mother who was “replaced” seven years ago by her less benevolent, reputation-destroying, jewel-stealing doppelgänger (both played by Rebecca Romijn-Stamos). When you look at De Palma’s output, it becomes increasingly more believable that the director himself was replaced…
Ozomatli
A year or two ago, on an episode of HBO’s Sex and the City, Carrie and company were hanging out at a hot little local bar where Ozomatli was playing. Strangely enough, none of the beautiful people were dancing, which seemed even more unbelievable than the fact that Ozomatli would be the house band in…
To Die For
Death is too often taken literally, and this unfortunate perspective is sustained by much cinema, despite the medium’s dubious kiss of immortality. There’s easy drama in tragedy and grisly ends, but only rarely do moviemakers successfully deliver symbolic death. Happily, director George Hickenlooper (The Big Brass Ring) and screenwriter Philip Jayson Lasker (a regular back…
18 Visions
As far as its records go, Orange County, California’s 18 Visions are just one more metallic hardcore outfit in an oversaturated market. But live and in person, 18 Visions’ “fashioncore” style gives the band a definite leg up. Count on catching the group members in tight black shirts, tighter black pants, and studded white leather…
The Scarlet Isle
Listen up, retards: Killing time is over. Melt down your weapons, now, forever. Wouldn’t it be nice if that sentiment echoed around the world? Well, certainly it does, every day, but weapons have a nasty tendency of drowning out sensible words. For this reason, Bloody Sunday, a resonant film from director Paul Greengrass (The Theory…
Lords of Acid
The Lords of Acid are into whips. Chains. Leather. European hotties who whisper naughty come-hithers. And sex with multiple ambiguously oriented partners, all while under the influence of illegal substances. Ya know, the usual. Yet even without lyrics like “Put me on your burning spear” or “I wanna sit on your face,” the talented Lords…
East Meets Least
At first, it’s like a trip to F.A.O. Schwarz on blotter. Two 12-foot inflatable pink rabbits are stationed at the show’s entrance; their giant heads, scrunched against the ceiling, form an archway. On the other side is the freaky “Mr. DOB in the Strange Forest,” a big plastic mouse surrounded by colorful doe-eyed mushrooms. But…
Soundtrack of Our Lives
Its very name gives you a clue as to the scale of Soundtrack of Our Lives’ ambitions. Formed from the ashes of Sweden’s very own garage rock heroes Union Carbide Productions, Soundtrack has gone on to shoplift tricks from virtually every other rock band of distinction — prog, Southern, psychedelic, glam, what-have-you — over the…
Love Is Strange
Here’s an unlikely concept for you: A clown, a fool, and a tramp journey to find love — all the while singing the ancient Song of Songs and throwing in anachronistic impressions of Bogey, Bergman, and Dietrich for good measure. Clearly, this would have to be the most irritating theatrical concept since Roberto Benigni was…
Vader, Immolation, the Berzerker, and Origin
This winter is going to see at least two seriously heavy underground metal tours. For those who can’t wait for Nile’s early 2003 jaunt with Napalm Death and Strapping Young Lad, this week’s lineup should tide longhairs over. Headliner Vader is supporting Revelations, possibly the heaviest thing it has ever released and a huge leap…
As the Screw Turns
Even in these post-Halloween days, when half-rotten jack-o’-lanterns and crumpled paper skeletons sit at the curb awaiting trash pickup, there’s nothing like a good scare. And few stories over the ages have been genuinely creepier than Henry James’s classic story of corrupt valet Peter Quint (R.I.P.) wrestling with a neurotic governess for the soul of…
Björk
A best-of compilation and boxed set rolled into one, Björk’s Family Tree is something of a two-headed hydra. Hardcore fans will likely consider the Greatest Hits disc inadequate — a Björk for Dummies — whereas they’re probably the only ones who will appreciate the five EPs that make up the balance of the collection. Divvied…
See, Hear
The best thing about turning 80, insists the maestro who has been making music for movies for half of the medium’s lifetime, is that you no longer have to lie about anything to anyone. It’s too late for lies; the clock will no longer forgive deception. So you may feel free to ask of this…
Add N to (X)
British trio Add N to (X)’s music has a piquancy rare for musicians obsessed with obscure electronic library music, krautrock, easy-listening auteurs, and avant-garde composers. While they may own shelves of Pierre Henry, Jean-Jacques Perrey, and Can albums, the members of Add N to (X) also realize the importance of sleaze and sex in their…
