This Week’s Day-By-Day Picks
Thursday, September 25 You’d expect the Cuyahoga County Library to take action around Banned Books Week, and that it has: It’s created exhibits, on view at branches across town, that detail the historical and political significance of the thousands of books challenged or barred by a group or state over the past 25 years. There’s…
Art Attack
If you had to describe This Moment in Black History in a word, “immediate” would be a pretty good one. On record and especially at its incendiary live shows, the band shakes up bodies and brains with a sound that’s impossible to ignore. It’s short, fast, and incredibly aggressive. “Arty hardcore,” guitarist Buddy Akita calls…
Voices Carry
Nobody has to memorize lines in From Here: A Century of Voices From Ohio. “It’s more of a reader’s theater,” explains Judy James, an organizer of the statewide production that stops this weekend at the Happy Days Visitor Center in Boston Heights. But the project isn’t theater in its putative sense: The actors, plucked from…
Sounds of the Soul
Countless historians, critics, and dictionaries have tried to concoct the consummate definition of blues music, but perhaps B.B. King put it best in his 1996 autobiography, Blues All Around Me: “The blues was about survival.” Rooted in the hearts of desperate souls — those tormented by heartbreak, social injustice, and death — the mere articulation…
Songs for Swingin’ Lovers
9/26-9/27 Michael Rogaliner’s too young to remember the Rat Pack. But when he heard a recording of Frank Sinatra crooning “Fly Me to the Moon” one night, the weekly Fabulous Midnight Martini Show was born. “It just seemed to be the kind of music that was cool to listen to,” says Rogaliner, the show’s director.…
Whores No More
Ray Terry has beaten death before. During the very first tour of his hardcore thrash trio Allergic to Whores, the van driver fell asleep at the wheel, smashing into a pair of trees at 75 mph. Terry suffered a broken hand, and A.T.W.’s ride was reduced to scrap iron and a pool of antifreeze. Most…
Battle Lines
SUN 9/28 Dylan Corlett is a fan of the Cincinnati Bengals, which makes him a rare sort of bird in any town, let alone Cleveland. Jim Breckenridge can’t figure out his college buddy — especially when it comes to the Battle of Ohio Party. Corlett and Breckenridge are glued to their stools at the Cleveland…
Phantasy Comes True
Lakewood’s Phantasy Theatre will return to hosting concerts after a decade of inactivity. The comeback, fueled by concert giant House of Blues, begins with an October 10 show by the reunited God squad Stryper. Other notable bands scheduled for this fall include Ween, Gov’t Mule, and Los Lobos. In the ’80s, the Phantasy was a…
Scream Scene
9/26-10/26 The man responsible for making Cedar Point scary for its HalloWeekends knows better than to frighten little children. “We don’t do blood and gore,” says John Taylor, manager of graphics services at the park. “We try to not give kids nightmares for the rest of their lives.” Instead, Taylor helps transform Camp Snoopy into…
Tsunami Bomb
With the mainstream’s full-nelson embrace of pop-punk set to go the way of the economy any day, Tsunami Bomb might be the genre’s last remaining band. The Northern California quartet certainly has all the right moves: fun-loving spirit, an affinity for the road, and songs as catchy as the common cold. Of course, it doesn’t…
Elvis Costello
Last year, Elvis Costello released When I Was Cruel, one of his best recordings since the ’80s. This year, the mercurial, pop-besotted Costello seems to want to be taken seriously, and North is serious indeed. It also sounds like a collection of love songs memorializing his engagement to Diana Krall, the Canadian chanteuse who’s made…
Holy Collector’s Market!
SUN 9/28 Sunday’s Cleveland Comic and Sci-Fi Convention will have its share of comic book nerds — though not as many as in years past, says organizer Jeff Harper. Young people who are into comics these days tend to be savvier and more socially adept than their comics-wielding progenitors, he claims. Credit Hollywood for part…
The Mahavishnu Project
The Mahavishnu Project’s primary focus is the fiery jazz-rock that guitarist John McLaughlin made with the remarkable Mahavishnu Orchestra. But the way it improvises and recombines Mahavishnu tunes suggests its story will grow beyond Live Bootleg, its only album so far. As with the original Mahavishnu recordings of the ’70s, the music on Live Bootleg…
Atmosphere
Most hip-hoppers have a pathological need to present themselves as invulnerably hard and supremely masterful. Atmosphere MC Slug (Sean Daley) would rather turn his drunken encounters with women, uncool Minneapolis upbringing, and awry tour adventures into witty, poignant verses. This approach has snagged Atmosphere a chunk of the emo demographic (note the group’s move from…
New Noise
SUN 9/28 In Japan, Aki means “autumn.” At the Cleveland Museum of Art, it means eclectic songs from around the world. Its Aki Festival of New Music is a two-month string of performances and lectures by more than 60 composers. Looking for a Sunday-afternoon brass band concert? You won’t find it here. The fest kicks…
Helicopter Helicopter
Boston bands and girl-boy sass go together like peas and carrots, from the fuzzy howls of Pixies pair Kim Deal and Black Francis to Letters to Cleo’s tart power pop or Damone’s bubblegum metal. Such is the indie-rock legacy perpetuated by Helicopter Helicopter, a quartet poised to break out of the New England scene that’s…
Integrity
Now 15 years down the road, metalcore pioneers Integrity still kick plenty of arse. But something ugly and destructive lurks on To Die For. Following two ill-conceived, electronica-damaged releases, frontman Dwid’s on-again, off-again vehicle has returned to form just in time to join the trend it helped spark. They’re still ahead of the curve, but…
Lowbrow, Meet Eyebrow
The script for The Rundown has lingered for more than a decade and was originally a Patrick Swayze vehicle, well before those wheels fell off. Universal Studios revived it because the studio knows what it has in Dwayne Johnson: a gold mine made of bulging biceps, a man who was a formidable franchise as wrestling…
Chris Duarte
Line up the key details — Texas, Stratocaster, big-balls blues-rock, ever-present echoes of Hendrix — and you might rightly expect a Stevie Ray clone. But while Chris Duarte knows his way around a Lone Star shuffle and possesses moves and chops sure to please a crowd of SRV devotees, the 40-year-old Austin resident spends as…
Roger Hoover and the Whiskeyhounds
Golden Gloves sets a high standard for the alt-country scene in these parts. Granted, there’s not really anything new here: The solitary, sometimes love-crazed, sometimes just-plain-crazed protagonists inhabiting songs such as “Behind These Walls,” “Kisses for Free,” and “Dead Man’s Shoes” have shown up in many an outlaw country tune. But Hoover makes them fresh…
Tuscan Raider
The dumbed-down movie version of Frances Mayes’s best-selling travel memoir, Under the Tuscan Sun, is a virtual case study of Hollywood’s irrepressible urge to lower the bar in the hopes of upping the take. Mayes’s 1996 book is a nicely written, carefully observed meditation on buying a decrepit Italian villa with her husband, fellow writer…
Grand Buffet
Before cult figures Wesley Willis and Sole handpicked the band as tour support, Pittsburgh’s Grand Buffet kept busy building a 30-foot android (allegedly), fronting the NYHC-inspired live-band side-project Wesley Sniper (definitely), and cutting karaoke renditions of album-rock classics (hilariously). More recently, the alt-rap duo beat De La Soul to the finish line, completing hip-hop’s first…
‘Liberal Pukes Like You’
Connie Schultz is prettier than her headshot in The Plain Dealer would suggest. She’s also more comfortable with smiling than you might think, an approachable, chatty woman with a fondness for expansive answers to simple questions. But she’s interested in your thoughts as much as her own. So it’s hard to understand what it is…
Jest Politics
When it comes to political nightmares, our demonic imaginations are always trumped by reality. Over the years, numerous fictional works have conjured images of conniving, brilliantly twisted political leaders who mean to destroy the United States. But all it’s taken to actually push our country to the brink of disaster — economically and in almost…
The Little Killers
For those who prefer their garage rock of the grimiest ilk, Crypt Records has always been Valhalla’s gutter — a label that throughout the ’90s was flooded with bands of bile-caked four-chord crunching and piss ‘n’ vinegar invective. Well, after dumping a goodly amount of promo dough into the Dirties’ record back in 1997, then…
Mark Shapiro
Spring-loaded outfielder Coco Crisp drains a sports drink and slams the empty bottle in a clubhouse trash can. Though the receptacle reaches only to his waist, Crisp leaps in the air, exaggerating in the manner of a professional wrestler delivering a boot to the knee of a dazed opponent. Otherwise, all is quiet an hour…
Fresh & Funny
Seems like everything has expiration dates these days, from the born-on dates on six-packs to the wilt warnings on bags of shredded lettuce. But one product that has always needed an expiration date is sketch comedy. The talented Second City troupe has been guilty of dredging up skits that were so wrinkled and rotten, they…
Nada Surf
In one of 2003’s best musical surprises, Nada Surf — a band that has struggled to exorcise the memory of its 1996 novelty hit “Popular” from the record-buying consciousness — has released a disc with the healing power of a dozen Max von Sydows. Like Spoon’s brilliant transistor-radio pastiche Kill the Moonlight last year, Nada…
Selling Juls
Rick LaCourse looks like you’d expect a man who fishes for a living to look: bulbous nose, blond mustache, and sun-chapped lips. He has a grin as broad as his back and enough funny stories to outlast a pack of smokes and a pot of coffee. But it’s his wife who’s getting the attention. Julia…
Little Snarlings
Yoshitomo Nara is a hot Japanese import. There’s a boyish charm about the 43-year-old artist, but it’s his depictions of moody kids and their dogs that wealthy collectors and teenagers find irresistible. A pop-culture icon in his native land, Nara hit U.S. shores in the late ’90s, as part of the Japanimation tsunami that brought…
OutKast
Beatles parallels are a record reviewer’s best friend and worst habit. But it’s just too tempting, when listening to the fascinating sprawl of OutKast’s double-length latest, to consider it urban music’s heir to The White Album — and not merely because the Georgia duo of Big Boi and Andre 3000, who each contribute a solo…
Banned in the U.S.A.
Evangelical Christians have long had a fetish for banning things. Be it books from schools, computer access from libraries, or Jews from country clubs, the thinking seems to be that evil disappears if you just can’t see it. One of their biggest scores came earlier this year when they convinced Wal-Mart to dump men’s magazines…
The Reel Who
The publicity materials sent in advance of the at-long-last release of The Kids Are Alright on DVD suggest that the maker of the 1979 documentary about The Who has been on the lam–in the rock-and-roll witness relocation program, perhaps, far from the long windmilling arm of justice. A “recluse” is how the press release describes…
Dave Matthews
Solo albums from guys who lead their own bands are always tricky. What’s the difference between a Tom Petty record and one by Petty and the Heartbreakers? Not much besides a few new names in the liner notes. Sound, vision, and style are almost identical. On his first solo CD, Dave Matthews ditches the band…
Letters to the Editor
Why Not Me? Affirmative action — the great tie-breaker: Marty Gitlin is not alone [“White Man’s Burden,” September 3]. I’ve work for the City of Akron for 20-plus years, 18 of those in the same department without promotion. I have five years of college, and have spent another three years training for certain aspects of…
Full-Belly Blues
Well, I went out las’ night (Ba-BA, Ba-ba) To score me some eats. (Ba-BA Ba-ba) I stopped off at Wilbert’s (Ba-BA Ba-ba) And found some real treats. (Ba-BA Ba-ba) The chorizo-stuffed peppers (Ba-BA Ba-ba) They call Cherry Bombs, (Ba-BA Ba-ba) And a grilled grouper sangwich (Ba-BA Ba-ba) And spicy lasag (na) — All were great!…
Rufus Wainwright
Pop music’s biggest opera fan — and most notorious romantic — Rufus Wainwright has nevertheless steered wide of naked emotional brutality on his previous two LPs. For all the sentiment of his undeniably personal songs, it was Wainwright’s boyish enthusiasm for his panoply of musical ideas that carried the mood. On Want One, the sprightliness…
Gluttony Is Our Friend
Americans are fat pigs. For some reason, this is supposed to be a bad thing. Never mind that being the world’s lone remaining superpower isn’t as fun as the brochures would suggest. Sure, we get to blow up small countries once in a while. But it’s hard to get fired up over that big win…
Grand Prix Fixe
As if running an upscale downtown dining room like One Walnut (1801 East Ninth Street, in the Ohio Savings Building; 216-575-1111) weren’t risky enough, well-seasoned chef and restaurateur Marlin Kaplan is boldly leading where no other Cleveland chef has thus far dared to tread: the prix fixe dinner menu. While fixed-price “tasting menus” are standard…
Enter the Dragons
It’s a good time to be a pirate. Johnny Depp, as a kinda-fey swashbuckler in Pirates of the Caribbean, has made peg-legged, hook-handed, eyepatch-wearing scoundrels cool. And Noland McFarland, who plays pirate Captain Scaliwag in Dragon Tales Live: Journey to Crystal Cave, loves every minute of it. “There are many ways to play a pirate,”…
Talk About the Passion
It’s been proposed that two distinct types of music fans came of age in the 1980s: the separate but equal followers of U2 and R.E.M. The argument can be entertaining, and it’s also ultimately pointless. But there’s good reason why one might perceive that a distinction still exists between the two audiences. U2, with its…
