For the first time since releasing The Border of Heaven, which smartly pairs Celtic music with cowboy ballads, Connie Dover will share her sterling vocals with a Lawrence audience Saturday night. On songs such as the angelic “Last Night by the River” and the revised hymn “Wondrous Love,” Dover’s voice soars, breathtakingly impressive in its clarity, range, and emotional strength….
As she checked into the Madison Renaissance Hotel in downtown Seattle, Beth Scalet saw “women with every conceivable color of hair” and felt a twinge of anxiety. It was the opening night of the Rockrgrl Music Conference, and she was scheduled to perform a showcase at the Liquid Lounge in the lush new Experience Music Project rock museum. Scalet was…
King Prawn’s record cover shows multicolored Gummi Bears being dropped into a blender, and although there’s some truth in this packaging (the music is bright, sugary, and nutrition-free), this band’s brand of ska — with a bit of dub bass, punk guitar, violin, and cello thrown in — is not nearly as eclectic as the metaphor suggests. Any Jamaican record…
Sean “Jay-Z” Carter is the George Lucas of rap. His debut, Reasonable Doubt, can be compared with American Graffiti — a solid, focused mainstream debut. His recently completed series, volumes 1 through 3, is his Star Wars trilogy. And his latest release, The Dynasty, plays out like The Phantom Menace. It’s a nice piece of ear candy, but it’s too…
Today’s top pop acts don’t care much for subtlety. Instead, overproduced, irresistible hooks pummel their way into unsuspecting listeners’ heads. No matter how obnoxious, these songs cannot be ignored. “Faded,” soulDecision’s catchy first single from its debut album, requires a few listens to truly take hold, but its sincere white-boy pseudo-funk soon proves inescapable. And while the hit/miss ratio might…
Imagine going to church and seeing Andre “Dre 3000” Benjamin and Antwan “Big Boi” Patton standing in the pulpit about to address the congregation. That service would be much like the duo’s fourth release, Stankonia — an unconventional, refreshing change. Stankonia is the first major cosmic shift in rap since De La Soul’s 1989 classic, Three Feet High and Rising….
There are certain places one expects to find electronica, such as New York and Los Angeles. Wichita, Kansas, better known as a breeding ground for such alt-country groups as Split Lit Rayfield, is conspicuously absent from that list. Yet residing in this reliable hotbed for Midwest-themed acts is the singularly named Gooding, who dabbles in synthesized symphonies. However, at the…
Talib Kweli, the most mispronounced name in the rap game (it’s “Tah-lib Kwa-lee”), is talking much faster than he raps, trying to cram his insights about various issues into a brief time frame. It’s hours before he hits the stage at the House of Blues in Los Angeles as part of the OkayPlayer tour, and the Brooklyn native has a…
Tell me again I’m everyone I know I am, Eleni Mandell sings on the mariachi-flavored “Never Know the Party’s Here” from her aptly titled new disc, Thrill. But the singer doesn’t need a suitor — or the rock press, which has been wildly supportive of Mandell — to reassure her that her two albums capture a remarkable variance of personae…
There tend to be two poles when it comes to making semiautobiographical movies about one’s childhood, and both are designed to make the viewer cry. There’s the “those were the good old days” approach (see My Dog Skip or Stand By Me), usually depicting the time in a young boy’s (or, more rarely, girl’s) life when some great lesson was…
The soon-to-be-talked-about sensations in Darren Aronofsky’s Requiem for a Dream include three or four flashing, near-subliminal montages that combine an eye’s iris and dilating pupil, an extreme close-up of heroin cooking in a teaspoon, and a sucking hypodermic needle; a surpassingly frightening sequence in which Ellen Burstyn, in the midst of amphetamine hallucinations, tries to make sense of her…
There once was a man, and he called himself Seuss Who wrote the best children’s books ever produced. With drawings elaborate, and tales subtly moral Of his greatness, not even this critic would quarrel. Alas, he’s now dead, and so all is not groovy, For someone said, “I know! Let’s make us a movie! The story’s too short, but who…
Rhymes with ‘Rich’ Class warfare: I don’t dispute that Chantal McCorkle’s experience in jail is unpleasant (Allie Johnson’s “Chantal’s Angels,” November 9). I don’t dispute that her sentence is a little overboard in proportion to the crime. What offends me is the assumption that she committed no crime, that she was an innocent bystander and should be able to walk…
A crisis of the constitution: Who had the worst manners on election night? From among the many, many candidates, we’ve selected Kansas Representative Dennis Moore, who took his concession phone call from challenger Phill Kline live on television. KMBC Channel 9’s cameras had doggedly pursued Moore as he made his very poky way through the crowd — but when Moore…
Comedian Chris Rock has a very funny routine called “Upside Your Head.” In it the “perp” takes a number of people hostage in an office, creating panic as to who will get hit upside the head. The essence of the joke is that sometimes a person gets so frustrated with others’ idiocy that he loses all control and goes…
Maria Reyes welcomed the opportunity to become a volunteer in the battle against HIV/AIDS 10 years ago. “I knew it was going to eventually hit my community,” says Reyes, who is of Mexican descent. For her efforts the past decade — including street outreach programs for the homeless and the undocumented immigrant poor at the Guadalupe Center— Reyes last year…
Scooting along back roads in north Kansas City, Jim Bynum’s compact car is a cocoon of clutter. Strewn around the back seat is the detritus of a busy life: wax cups from fast food restaurants, empty packs of cigarettes, candy wrappers. Among the debris are photocopies of newspaper articles detailing an environmental issue of growing national concern: the use of…
No one likes to be seen as the roadblock to a revolution. The unfortunate soul—or the dumb bastard—who chooses to impede progress is likely to be mowed down by those charging toward tomorrow. He will become a thing to be wiped off the shoes of those who march, march, march forever onward. Woe to the little man who obstructs big…
Steak out new territory: Beef is definitely back in style, and new steakhouses are popping up throughout the metro. New LongHorn Steakhouses (see review, page 43) are scheduled to open soon in Liberty and Lee’s Summit. But Kansas City has always been a steak town, thanks to its historic connection to the stockyards. Over the past decade beef fell in…
The opposite of mad cow disease appears to be infecting the brains of some restaurant owners around town. It’s not exactly a disease, but rather an obsession: to open as many new steak restaurants as possible in an area that’s already saturated with them. For example, the upscale Capital Grille, part of the Atlanta-based Rare Hospitality Inc. restaurant group, is…
9 Thursday Although he used to be the leader of a band that never got to finish a complete song while playing intros and exits on The Tonight Show, Doc Severinsen has developed a multidimensional career in the years since his flamboyant wardrobe and sidekick shtick overshadowed his musical talents. Severinsen has been busy recording, performing with symphonic, pop,…
Art-crawl regulars who are tired of the same ol’, same ol’ — tepid wine, a few ceramics here, a few paintings there — should note that the place to start on November 10 is The Warehouse. For one night only, the West Bottoms space features Kansas City Art Institute students (and Plaza neighbors) Olen Hsu and Kathinka Willinek. The…
“You can know everything from looking from the outside but understand nothing,” says Sergei Khrushchev — who saw plenty from the inside. The 65-year-old Khrushchev is the son of Nikita Khrushchev, who served as the Soviet Union’s premier from 1958 to 1964 and died in 1971 at the age of 77. A key Cold War figure, Nikita Khrushchev was given…
Those who have theater in their blood all tell a similar story — the day they caught the bug. Costume designer Georgianna Londré — whose credits in the past two months include Art at the Unicorn, Gatherings in Graveyards at The Coterie, and Late Night Theatre’s The Birds — was about 5 years old. Her mother, Missouri Repertory Theatre’s dramaturge…
