Unfortunately for local music fans, the regional reissue market remains largely untapped. Major and indie labels have searched their vaults and issued live tracks, demo takes and unreleased oddities from established bands. But longtime area scenesters who recall the influential output of long-defunct acts have nowhere to turn for tangible reinforcement of their memories. Many groups from the Kansas City…
Paradoxically, metal bands tend to take themselves too seriously, which keeps outsiders from taking their music seriously. It’s difficult to add levity to lyrics about ritual sacrifices, cannibalism and other gnarly topics, but even heavy outfits that aren’t death-obsessed burden listeners with tales of angst and alienation. The hard-stuff scene needs a real-life Spinal Tap, a group that can wink…
Not since the Beastie Boys swapped Budweiser for Buddhism have party animals so suddenly embraced social awareness like NOFX, a band whose only previous full-length foray into activism involved telling off feminists who denounced its sexist lyrics. Now, frontman Fat Mike has discovered his inner Noam Chomsky: I never looked around/Never second-guessed/Then I read some Howard Zinn/Now I’m always depressed,…
A long time ago, in a garage far away, a former member of the Blue Meanies quit playing rock music with puny humans and attempted to build the perfect robotic band. For this display of Icarus-level hubris, he was punished. His creations (DRMBOT 0110, GTRBOT666 and Automatom) overtook the man, now called JBOT, and placed a chip in his…
In one of 2003’s best musical surprises so far, 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 Surf’s Let Go…
Being a house DJ from Chicago is like being a rapper from the Bronx. The historical burden and fierce competition force artists in their respective cities to raise their game to unprecedented heights just to get a gig in their hometowns. When you’re female in a male-dominated genre such as house, you have to overcome even more onerous obstacles,…
Rick Springfield’s career-defining moment had almost nothing to do with Rick Springfield. Well, OK, he provided the song “Jessie’s Girl,” which was used to frightening effect in the coke-deal-gone-bad scene from Boogie Nights. Springfield’s own celluloid career has been decidedly less interesting than his musical output, though there are undoubtedly a number of Hard to Hold devotees out there still…
On its recently issued debut, January, the KC quintet 21 Reasons creates radio-friendly harmonic pop tinged with classic-rock influences. Acoustic guitars jangle, percussion toys rattle and the choruses are bigger than Sting’s ego. In less capable hands these ingredients can produce deathly dull chest-thumping anthems, but 21 Reasons has more in common with Dave Matthews and Counting Crows than…
In its five-year history, Boston’s Helicopter Helicopter has already issued five full-length albums, appeared on a slew of indie-rock compilations and crisscrossed the nation about a thousand times. Its 2001 breakthrough effort, By Starlight, offered a whirlwind sampling of raucous rock, and the band ratchets those tunes to the bursting point in concert. Having already established sizable followings in the…
The White Stripes and Jucifer are both coed duos. Backstreet Boys and the Rolling Stones are both all-male quintets. Obviously, compositional comparisons aren’t foolproof. Jucifer trudges through dense sludge like an elephant escaping a tar pit, out-louding nearly all of its peers despite the apparent handicap of limited instrumentation. Unlike the mojo-mongering Stripes, Jucifer never provokes purists to play “where’s…
The Billions’ music combines sterling pop melodies, steadfastly spiritual lyrics and unfailingly earnest vocals. Though that might sound like the stuff of Sunday-service sing-alongs, the Billions’ infectious exuberance needs no secular translation. With its hand-clap percussion and all-but-twinkling keyboards, the group’s latest disc could score film footage of cheerful dogs wagging their tails. Aptly titled Never Felt This Way Before,…
Lately, Kansas Citians have become nostalgic about the Pendergast era, the years when the booze flowed like Brush Creek during a flood and City Hall, motivated by a crime boss’ ever-waving fist, moved quickly on major projects. Pendergast, the recently formed quartet, might not have the muscle to wrangle a new arena, but it does manage to combine the twang…
Quick, what type of music currently dominates Kansas City? Jazz? Not so much. The 18th and Vine area remains alive, but this neighborhood doesn’t drive the city’s social scene the way it did decades ago. Country ain’t king, neither. Despite breeding some damn-fine club-circuit country crooners, the area hasn’t produced any big-beef arena entrées. Keep guessing. Hip-hop? There are plenty…
They say opposites attract, and that’s definitely true in the case of Norwegian singer-songwriter Sondre Lerche. Lerche comes from Bergen, Norway, a city on the North Sea where it rains about 300 days a year and is dark about 20 hours a day through the long winters. Bergen is a full 62 latitudinal degrees north of one of Lerche’s primary…
Occasionally I can be convinced that it’s the singer, not the song. I have no love for Britney Spears’ “Baby One More Time” but can’t get enough of Brit band Travis’ laconic cover, which squeezes out the single’s toxic sugar until it’s just a bittersweet lament. Sometimes an artist can find meaning in what seemed empty. But usually, the mediocre…
A lot of moviegoers see hyperactive Jim Carrey as the second coming of Jerry Lewis, but no one’s ever mistaken him for God. Clearly, he’d like to change that — at least at the box office. Hey, you’d feel the same way if your last movie was The Majestic. In Bruce Almighty, Carrey plays Bruce Nolan, a self-absorbed TV…
Speech therapy: Joe Miller’s series on the lack of compassion of the MSHSAA resonated with me (“War of Words,” May 1, and “Word War 2,” May 8). During my senior year at Wyandotte High School in Kansas City, Kansas, the principal used a mandate from the corresponding Kansas high school-regulating organization to disqualify me from debate and the National Honor…
The members of Late Night Theatre have earned an enthusiastic following with shows such as their all-male salutes to Alfred Hitchcock’s The Birds and Brian De Palma’s Carrie. But despite their remarkable ability to impersonate women, they’ve been unable to play a part in Mayor Kay Barnes’ vision for a more exciting downtown. Not for lack of trying. First, the…
Kansas City, Missouri’s $2 billion school-desegregation case is presumably all about kids. But a mere three teens showed up last week to listen to testimony in what could have been the final hearing in the 26-year-old suit. They’d recently been suspended from area schools. Their tutor, former school board member Lee Barnes, who has been teaching them about the…
Sue Cooper expects to turn on her TV one day, flip to Dateline and see Brent Barber’s face. “It’ll be one of those programs that talk about con artists and what they’ve done to people,” she predicts as she sits at her kitchen table, drinking coffee. Until just a few months ago, Sue and Frank Cooper, who did not…
As a former resident of Mission, this barfly contends that anything you could possibly desire can be found on Johnson Drive. Coffee? Fabrics? Mini golf? Fast food? All there. Which is why we were sad that we’d never discovered the Clarette Club when we lived in the vicinity. It’s on the back side of the Mission Mart strip mall —…
Most local Chinese restaurants — including Max’s Noodles & More (see review) — pass out fortune cookies as a kind of party favor to accompany the bill. “It’s a totally American custom,” says Richard Ng, the co-owner (with his wife, Theresa) of the four Bo Ling’s restaurants. “You never see fortune cookies in China or Hong Kong.” Anyone who has…
A couple of years ago, I had just finished dinner in a typical Chinese-American restaurant (the kind that serves ersatz “Oriental” dishes like lemon chicken and egg foo yong) with my friend Betty when the waitress came over with our check and two cellophane-wrapped fortune cookies. Betty rolled her eyes after she extricated her little paper message from within the…
FRI 5/16 This year’s Joey Ramone Birthday Tribute gets rocking at 7 tonight at El Torreon (3101 Gillham Plaza). For six bucks, local bands — Cretin, the Throttlers, My Unnamed Parade of Stars, Lust-R-Tones and Tanka Ray — perform classic Ramones songs. We hope, however, that they’ll be inspired (perhaps by audience requests) to give us more than “Ramones,” “Leave…
