For fifteen years, Max Cavalera uncorked gravelly shouts and played precisely destructive riffs for Sepultura, a band whose name is the Portuguese word for “grave.” The group’s moniker became all too appropriate when it fired Cavalera in 1996 after a management dispute and watched its artistic vision and career decompose. While Sepultura’s Against, fronted by new singer Derrick Green, absorbed…
If Arista Records had better promoted Sister 7, the live album that singer Patrice Pike has been mixing in the studio for a week would be the band’s contract-fulfilling kiss-off. Instead, what Pike describes as a “valentine for our fans” (which will be released on April 10, a couple of months after Sister 7’s Valentine’s Day show at The Hurricane)…
When Onwardcrispinglover last graced these pages, the band’s members were enjoying a lifestyle befitting their rock-star status, going to fancy parties and dating models and mediocre yet crazy-hot actresses. OCG was living so large, in fact, that our intrepid reporter J.J. Hensley couldn’t even score an interview with anyone from the band, having to settle instead for a chat with…
Shiner singer Allen Epley stood on the low-rise stage of the unfamiliar venue and briefly sized up the audience. Closely packed spectators crowded the floor directly in front of him, while a more generously spaced but still sizable contingent spread to the far reaches of the rectangular room. Pleased with what he saw, Epley proclaimed, “It’s great to be playing…
When Monique Danielle recorded her first CD, Resolution, she opted for a focused R&B approach that set her soulful vocals to catchy radio-ready backdrops. Though it was an impressive debut, Resolution didn’t hint at Danielle’s full range — she boasts a résumé that includes everything from a stint in the chorus at the Lyric Opera to a part in a…
Everclear is as good as a generic band can get. Even when the group adds glossy production, strings, sampled beats or rootsy twang, its songs still come off sounding like the type of three-power-chord grunge-pop that even Green Day has started to abandon. The melodies are always memorable, and lead singer Art Alexakis has the art of apolitical yet socially…
Dolly Parton is probably the most significant figure in modern country music. Her story traces both the music’s deep Southern roots and its crossover dreams, and as for singer-songwriters of emotional complexity and cultural significance, only Merle Haggard can touch her. That should be old news, but what makes it worth repeating is that Parton’s making some of the finest…
In the time it takes to ask “What the hell are lieder?” Don Byron both answers that question (they’re “intimate art songs”) and proves that in the right hands, a clarinet can be the most sensual and expressive instrument in the world. Locally, BCR’s Reverend Dwight Frizzell has helped spread the clar inet gospel, but on a national scale, Byron…
In early incarnations, the Rock*A*Teens were the post-Jody Grind torch-song home of Kelly Hogan. Since she departed, the R*A*Ts have absorbed slick mid-’60s pop and beaten it brutally with layers of distortion and reverb, stretching and blurring various keyboards beyond recognition and leaving the bubbly hooks stricken and scarred. The end result is like a machine made of parts from…
Many music connoisseurs were introduced to Sonny Landreth’s steel guitar on John Hiatt’s Slow Turning, but Landreth is one of those musicians who have played with everyone, including a host of blues and Cajun giants. Landreth’s previous solo outing, 1995’s South of I-10, pushed his intricately fretted swamp romps to pleasurable new peaks, but fans of that record will find…
After poking fun at such paragons of ’60s trash as Jacqueline Susann’s Valley of the Dolls, Late Night Theatre shoves its mitts into a slightly updated pillbox and extracts 1983 Drill Team Massacre. The troupe’s latest production is filled with the music and trends of the period, and, however dated fingerless gloves and Madonna’s “Lucky Star” seem now, they…
Ripe with the glossy angst of heroin chic, Noah Stern’s film The Invisibles is lyrical, bohemian and maddening. Michael Goorjian (Newsies, SLC Punk) and Portia de Rossi (Ally McBeal) — he’s a rock star, she’s a supermodel — spend the movie’s entire ninety minutes in a Paris apartment after she rescues him from a postconcert overdose. They’re both rehab…
Sara is quirky and free-spirited. That, at least, is the premise of the hilariously wretched new weepie Sweet November, of which Sara, embodied by the breathtaking Charlize Theron, is the heroine. But if you’re smart enough to run in terror at the threat of a movie character who’s quirky and free-spirited, have no fear. The evidence offered of said…
Lance Barton, thin as paper and frail as fine china, is such a horrific stand-up that during an amateur-night performance at the Apollo Theater, he is booed with so much force — the audience whips up its own whirlwind — he’s literally knocked off the stage. Lance’s manager insists he’s a failure because he’s afraid to be himself: Lance…
“Lamar Hunt is suddenly obsessed with winning. (Chiefs personnel) are getting faxes in the middle of the night from Lamar, at 3 and 4 in the morning. For some reason, I don’t know what it is, but Lamar has been driven and is driving his people because he wants to win, win, win, win, win. So it’s not just about…
Imagine the Chiefs coming off a Super Bowl victory (okay, imagine real hard) and inviting their season-ticket holders to a midweek open house practice session where the front door is locked, the best players on the team are absent and there isn’t a chair, bench or bleacher for any fan to sit on. Then imagine not one of the invited…
Rush Job Ball buster: For three years, I covered JaRon Rush while he was at Pembroke Hill. As far as Greg Hall’s article was concerned (“Drooped Dreams,” February 1), that was probably one of the most destructive articles I’ve ever seen because Hall wasn’t doing anything more than just kicking the guy when he was down. There are a lot…
No relief in sight: Headaches just keep coming as a result of The Star’s cost-cutting early retirement offer to longtime employees (Kansas City Strip, January 25). At the end of January, the paper held a going-away bash at the Doubletree Hotel for the 51 workers who had taken the buyout package, but any of their still-employed colleagues who might have…
Sometimes, usually out on the golf course near his home in upstate New York, Dan DeCarlo feels terrific, far younger than his 81 years. He’ll thwack the ball, reflect upon his 55 years of marriage to the same beautiful woman and occasionally contemplate a life spent drawing and creating some of comicdom’s most enduring and endearing characters—among them, Archie,…
Here’s the old story: Back in the 1880s, the United States government began taking American Indian kids from their families and sending them to a boarding school on a thousand acres of crops and swampland in Lawrence. Up until the 1950s, the government forced the Indians to farm like white people, to do manual labor and to be Christians. Many…
The Kansas attorney general’s office has charged KCK foster home owner Christine Allen with five counts of mistreatment of a dependent adult, after an investigation by the office’s Medicaid Fraud and Abuse division. Officials shut down Modern Concepts, Allen’s adult foster care home for the mentally ill, in November after a state trooper discovered the squalid home while returning a…
Is the world ready for John Robinson: The Movie? Two freelance writers — both forty-something women — were glued to their seats all week at the Johnson County courthouse during the alleged serial killer’s preliminary hearing, taking notes and mingling with the media as they each angled to, yes, make a killing on Robinson by writing books on his life…
If a proposed Olathe ordinance passes later this month, it won’t matter whether that’s a gun in a reveler’s pocket or simply a stiff sign of happiness — a night-spot owner could be arrested and his club closed down for harboring the horny. City officials have taken what can only be described as a hardened stance against “entertainment clubs” after…
On weekday mornings at a quarter after 8, a white handicapped-accessible van trundles down Vine Street, an industrial row in Harrisonville. It rolls past the RB Industries saw-blade manufacturing plant and ChemSyn Laboratories, where technicians mix toxic anticancer drugs. The van pulls to a stop in front of a squat ocher building and a blue plastic sign: Casco Area Workshop…
