Broken Cowboys packs plenty of twang, but this trio is far too chipper to blend into KC’s alt-country circles. So the Cowboys took an alternative route to name recognition, battle-of-the-banding its way to the state championship at the True Value Country Showdown. Don’t laugh — past contestants have included an up-and-coming Garth Brooks and a green John Michael Montgomery….
“Hello, we are the tour band from Tokyo, Japan, named Electric Eel Shock.” So begins one of the most entertaining press releases in music history. Although fractured English provides some of this document’s charm, the group’s amusing album (Maybe … I Think We Can Beat Nirvana) and song titles (“Do the Metal”) prove it has mastered the words that…
A soundtrack just isn’t a soundtrack without Kenny Loggins, and Soundtrack of our Lives is 100 percent Loggins-free. But you can’t hate the group for that. Nor can you lump it in with the unwashed Swedish invaders, because this Oasis-approved outfit’s sound is much more refined. The Soundtrack started in 1995, when three former members of bad-trip proto-punkers Union Carbide…
Fredericksburg, Virginia, native Keller Williams has carved out a wide and comfortable niche for himself among the ravenously faithful jam-rock set over the past ten years, marrying the traditions of the singer/songwriter/guitarist with a liberal dose of modern technology. By combining loop effects with an impressive capacity for technical fireworks and a jester’s sense of daring experimentalism, Williams already has…
There’s always been a pecking order among Latin jazz musicians that values ethnicity before talent, where Cubano or Puertorriqueño is a more important designation of ability for players than their actual musical chops. Following Tito Puente’s passing in 2000, critics were quick to begin the search for the next king of Latin jazz, and as ridiculous as it sounds, the…
With the likes of the Beastie Boys, R.E.M. and John Mellencamp putting ham-fisted anti-war songs online, the search is on for an antidote to humorless, tuneless protests. The front-runner turns out to be “All You Need Is Hate,” a gloriously subversive anthem the Scottish quartet the Delgados (pictured) released overseas last year and here this spring on its brilliant…
In college towns, bands come and go. They play around town for a bit, maybe tour, decide to get on with life and break up for one reason or another. Die-hard fans, assuming said group is lucky enough to have any, preserve fond memories of their concerts, reserving hope that these long-gone musicians will reunite and transport them —…
There’s a telling moment during the “meet the band” bonus video on the Music’s debut CD in which drummer Phil Jordan, the group’s deftly frantic center, explains that it was listening to the Chemical Brothers that got him into playing drums. That BPM focus helps these four barely twenty-year-old lads from Leeds, England, to create a sound as driven by…
Stacey Earle and Mark Stuart come from the folk-roots tradition that allows married couples — think Gillian Welch and David Rawlings, Buddy and Julie Miller, Robin and Linda Williams, and maybe even Sonny and Cher — to work and prosper together. Stacey, Steve Earle’s youngest sister, met Mark in the mid-’90s, when he was playing with her brother’s Dukes. The…
When former Arista-crat Clive Davis took over the Gadjits’ label, RCA, last November, heads were destined to roll. Unfortunately, among the decapitated were the Gadjits’ champions, and the well-traveled Phillips brothers (singer Brandon, bassist Zach and drummer Adam) decided to seek their fourth label in as many years rather than have a new handler mismanage their affairs. The last…
Last November, Iowa-based singer/songwriter Greg Brown married his way to a deeper level of interest within the local music community when he exchanged vows with local folk hero Iris DeMent — right here in Kansas City, no less. It’s not that he didn’t have fans here before, though last fall’s show with DeMent was his first in the city proper….
Douglas Green left Kansas City in 1979, eventually becoming a theater director in Los Angeles. When he decided to apply his craft to film, he did an L.A. kind of thing, placing ads in Variety and The Hollywood Reporter. He was seeking scripts for an “ultra-low budget” project. Still, in a town where parking valets have production deals pending, Green…
While admitting to being neither a giddy young girl nor a particularly stupid adult, this critic will review What a Girl Wants as objectively as possible. Accidental love-child Daphne Reynolds (Amanda Bynes) has spent her seventeen years thus far as a native New Yorker holed up in Chinatown with her bohemian musician mother, Libby (Kelly Preston). The two make…
A man, peering through the scope of a sniper’s rifle muffled by a silencer, holds hostage someone he considers an evildoer. They communicate by telephone. The sniper insists that if his prey disconnects for any reason, he will shoot to kill. To prove he is not merely a lunatic who dialed the wrong number from a distance, the gunman…
No, Kay: Regarding Tom Davis’ letter in the March 20 issue: First, Tom, get your tongue out of Kay Barnes’ ass. Only dogs do that. Well, hell, Tom, even you can appoint committees or spearhead plans for four years. Hell, man, Barnes — in comparison to previous mayors — has not done a damn thing for the city. And putting…
One recent Saturday, while plowing through a healthy dollop of baba ghanoush at Jerusalem Bakery near Westport Road and Roanoke, we looked up and saw a little boy with his head wrapped in bandages. Then we saw a lady with a blood-caked face, wailing at the newsmen who were aiming their microphones at her. She pointed at a crater full…
If it weren’t for the money, the day would have been perfect. It was the kind of celebration Joey Arena’s parents would be able to tell him about when he was old enough to understand the way a community supported him, holding a “life party” for a boy who’d had heart surgery five weeks earlier and was doing great. On…
It’s Valentine’s Day, and Peregrine Honig is spreading the love. In a picture window at her Fahrenheit Gallery in the West Bottoms, white lights and soot-stained aluminum letters spell out MOTEL against a red-velvet backdrop. Earlier tonight, men cruising the deserted streets for prostitutes stopped and pressed the buzzer. Honig sent them away. She isn’t running a no-tell motel….
