With Busta Rhymes releasing Anarchy just six months after his previous full-length effort, in addition to his contributions to the Flipmode Squad albums, record-store owners might feel as if they’ve joined a mail-order Busta record-of-the-month club. If such an organization did exist, listeners who purchased Anarchy would immediately rue their failure to send back their slips in time and hastily…
A question is hidden in this MC’s name (“Can-I-bus’?”), and on his sophomore album he answers it convincingly. Canibus, a New York mix-tape king, can bust rhymes with the old school’s best. Many rappers mimic Rakim, but few do it with the sort of authority Canibus shows on the title cut, and his rapid-fire, concrete rhyming calls to mind the…
As far as commercial radio is concerned, the legends of country music might as well be dead and buried. However, in the recording studio, many of country’s greatest singers are proving that traditional country music is still very much alive. This is traditional country in the most vital sense of the word: It clearly draws thematic, musical, and spiritual inspiration…
Be not excited, pasty-faced geeks. Logan’s Sanctuary is not the cause for celebration science-fiction fans might think it is, because the soundtrack to the sequel of Logan’s Run offers music for a movie that does not exist. Second in Emperor Norton’s oddly fascinating fake-soundtrack series, following last year’s alleged blaxploitation movie score, Soul Ecstasy, Logan’s Sanctuary finds The Moog Cookbook’s…
Three weeks isn’t a particularly long stretch of time, but for The Appleseed Cast, which spent a meager seven days to record previous albums, it must feel like years. It makes sense that the group wouldn’t want to rush its follow-up to the critically acclaimed Mare Vitalis, but this lengthy stint in the studio has inspired the group to new…
Bursting onto the Brit-pop scene with one of the breeziest pop tunes ever recorded (“Alright”) and an equally lightweight video that saw its members making faces and jumping on a mechanical bed, Supergrass immediately established itself as a band of carefree, irreverent rebels, providing a low-angst alternative to moodier groups, such as Oasis and Radiohead, much the same way as…
The most impressive track on DJ Rice’s standout compilation album is “Evil Foreboding,” an intricate, multilayer cut laced with eerie creaks, whistles, and trickling piano melodies. A potent bassline rumbles beneath the horror-movie soundscape, and Little Sydds’ slow, steady flow provides an ideal vocal match. It’s the type of complex song that sounds as though it took days to…
It’s a close call. Dar Williams’ first disc in three years opens with a keyboard part that’s like the Hooters conducting Abba’s “Dancing Queen” by way of the theme from the Rockford Files. But then Williams’ voice takes over, leading a waltz to the chorus, where more layers of her voice swirl and swoon, and all is forgiven. The first…
The four austere, antiquated microphones on the cover of Boyz II Men’s fourth CD hint at the group’s approach on this album, a venture into independent songwriting and producing that sees it pursuing the maturation process its name suggests. Although arguably the most influential male quartet of the ’90s, Boyz II Men has worked under such star producers as Michael…
To paraphrase everybody’s favorite cuddly homophobe, 72-year-old Survivor contestant Rudy, the soundtrack to the top-rated reality program on which he starred is queer, but not in a homosexual kind of way. It’s just plain odd that there’s a market for this half-baked collection of wanna-be world beat, all of which sounds numbingly identical to the show’s theme, “Ancient Voices.” Titles…
Lee’s Summit-born guitar hero Pat Metheny, touring with a trio for the first time in seven years (he’s on the road in support of his 26th album, Trio ’99-’00), might not recognize the Folly Theatre when he enters the venerable building on Tuesday, October 10. After closing for the summer to undergo a $2 million renovation, the Folly reopened in…
Few groups from the OZZfest/Tattoo the Earth set have the patience (or, in many cases, the creativity) to construct a six-minute-plus song, but the Kansas City-based quartet More than Motive sculpts two such epics by invoking the spirit of Tool, the best of the bands in this sparsely populated category. “Indifferent Deride” includes so many twists and turns that it…
Loretta Swit seems to be having a great time at the helm of Song of Singapore, the faux-retro musical at The New Theatre Restaurant. The fourth M*A*S*H veteran to appear at a local dinner theater, Swit gets to shimmy and shake across the bandstand of the waterfront saloon, taking to the grooves like a doomed duck to an egg…
Andrew Vachss has seen the ugliest that humanity has to offer. He’s worked for the U.S. Public Health Service on a task force trying to eradicate syphilis. He’s done time as a caseworker for the New York City Department of Welfare. He’s been the director of a maximum-security prison for youth. And he has written 13 novels and numerous…
A hoary old movie cliché — blindness as both affliction and metaphor — is in the midst of a comeback that would make Bette Davis proud: Dancer in the Dark won Best Film and Best Actress honors at Cannes, positing Bjork as the going-blind factory worker Selma, whose son is similarly cursed (see review on page 37). And this…
5 Thursday As local organizing guru Sally Wolf says, “Organization literally sets us free to enjoy life.” And in her effort to help perpetually disorganized people finally enjoy their lives, Wolf will be holding mini-workshops at the top of each hour from 10 a.m. to 3 p.m. through Saturday at Organized Living (where else?), 9851 Lackman Road in Lenexa,…
American cooks love to tinker with tradition — but mixing up cultures in ethnic cooking is dangerous. I consider “pizza rolls” (pizza toppings baked inside wonton wrappers) to be as insulting as that cockeyed invention called an “Oriental salad” (salad greens with water chestnuts, canned mandarin oranges, and fried rice noodles) or, worse yet, the recipe dreamed up in…
John Wesley Hall believes justice is a myth taught in classrooms, a fable found in law books, as imaginary as the unicorn and the mermaid. The Arkansas attorney mentions case after case in which he represented an innocent who wound up imprisoned or, worse, executed; in the course of a 30-minute interview, he mentions half a dozen instances in…
Fast, cheap, and out of control: Pitch Weekly readers inevitably vote for Taco Bell as “Best Cheap Eats” in the paper’s annual Best of Kansas City readers’ poll. And why not? At Taco Bell, a single taco costs about 69 cents, where most full-service restaurants, including Alvarado’s Casa de Tacos (see review on page 47) charge well over a dollar…
Last spring, charmingly daft Icelandic singer Björk won the best actress medal at the Cannes Film Festival for playing a modern Joan of Arc slowly going blind as she recedes into a fantasy life of musicals playing in her head. Selmasongs, named for her character in Lars von Trier’s Dancer in the Dark (see review on page 37), has the…
I don’t even know your name, Madonna coos on “Impressive Instant” from her new Music. And for a few awkward moments, you don’t know Madonna’s name, either. It takes “Instant” and the title song, a pair of slickly produced come-ons that run her voice through the hip-hop meat grinder of vocal processing without tenderizing it, to remind you that as…
Matt Suggs is getting old, or at least he’s maturing, which makes him sound more like a fine wine than a preowned vehicle carrying a few hundred thousand highway miles on its odometer. The first evidence of this process — his rich pop-gem-studded solo debut, Golden Days Before They End — was released on his former band Butterglory’s powerhouse indie…
While Lester Bangs looks askance from a DJ booth in purgatory, the music he coined “punk” three decades ago has flatlined. Today’s punk is about tattoos and head shots in Alternative Press; the stain isn’t on the pants anymore, but on the music. When a revolutionary idiom becomes a star vehicle with a tarnished name, the only thing to do…
One afternoon, Brian Transeau received a phone call that would forever change his life and, without exaggeration, the nature of dance music all over the world. “I was making records out of my bedroom in Maryland, never having heard English club music, and came up with (my first album) IMA,” he remembers. “Some friends and I pressed up three tracks…
