The question isn’t whether this works. It doesn’t. There’s promise, and the band is good, but the feel is NPR at the Apollo, and Stone’s showy, half-trained vocals are pumped so high in the mix that it’s difficult to concentrate on anything else. The question becomes, then: To which biz trend can blame best be assigned? First up is the…
Melody-averse and largely instrumental, Santo Gold seems much more experimental on paper than it sounds on disc. Even without vocal hooks, though, the group remains strangely accessible. It’s a short-lived spell — these cryptic tunes are almost impossible to memorize, even after several listens — but while they’re playing, the songs’ lull-and-roar dynamics are often absorbing. It’s encouraging that Santo…
The unearthing of long-lost musical gems continues to fascinate. Case in point: the Michael Yonkers Band’s Microminiature Love. Slated for release by Sire in 1968, the album was deemed too bizarre by label suits and then shelved. Sub Pop now gives Microminiature Love digital life with six strong bonus cuts. These Minneapolis cats churn bile like fellow ’60s garage rockers…
Michael Franti is the Chuck D. that time forgot. As the mastermind and mouth behind the Disposable Heroes of Hiphoprisy, the Spearhead leader created one of the most poignant political screeds of the early ’90s, “Television, the Drug of the Nation.” After DHH imploded, Franti continued under the Spearhead banner, matching knee-deep funk and buoyant beats long before the…
Over the Rhine just released a sprawling double album that’s rootsy, drugged-out and imbued with a subtle shot of pop sensibility, and its principal creative team consists of a married couple. All comparisons to Fleetwood Mac end there, though. Linford Detweiler and Karen Bergquist don’t squabble over who’s next on syringe duty, and they don’t show any signs of fracturing…
Satan, cowboys, high-octane liquor and heroin. These are the things that Supersuckers are made of. But the Seattle-by-way-of-Tucson quartet has more going on musically than your average band of burnouts. Signed to Sub Pop during the height of grunge mania, the group has managed to persevere long after most of its peers have died or moved on. With a scorching…
Christine Kane’s career jump-off is the kind that makes aspiring songwriters sigh. She was writing songs and waiting tables when a singer-songwriter friend canceled at the last minute and asked her to fill in. She did, the club owner booked her for two weekends a month for a solid year, and presto — this Asheville, North Carolina, singer had a…
Indie band breakups, hiatuses, temporary disbandings and momentary lulls are a boon for those who mourn the way that most fractured, critically acclaimed bands never seem to roll into town before the arguments start. This week we get Franklin Bruno, former lead singer of Nothing Painted Blue. He’s currently Jenny Toomey’s keyboard player (her latest, Tempting, gathers twelve of Bruno’s…
In 1992, a Massachusetts college sophomore opened fire on his classmates, wounding four and killing two. He was wearing a Sick of It All T-shirt. Fortunately, the New York-bred quartet hasn’t let a little thing like homicidal stigma slow it down, expanding its audience by touring alongside the platinum punks it helped spawn, including Rancid and Helmet. SOIA’s fifteenth album,…
Like him or not, trumpeter Wynton Marsalis remains one of the most recognized and respected ambassadors of American jazz over the past twenty years. Marsalis’ take on the art form is seen as overtly puritanical by some critics, but there’s no denying his influence across the genre and beyond. Though he’s no longer the “young lion” of yore (circa his…
Benefit shows are a monthly staple on local club calendars, with well-intentioned musicians donating their services to raise funds for everything from charitable organizations to injured friends to the upstart magazines that plan to document their artistic accomplishments. Tribute shows pop up a lot, too, with bands paying heartfelt homage to the recently deceased or hamming it up with a…
Papa M plays minimalist folk, sounding like Richard Buckner might if someone finally talked that tortured troubadour off the ledge. David Pajo, the singer-songwriter behind both this project and previous incarnations M and Aerial M, sells strings of clichés about red-ruby lips and singing hearts with his world-weary delivery and earnest phrasing. And that’s all great, but the show’s…
Somewhere, Over the Radio… Kansas City is a shithole. Maybe that’s too harsh. It’s a nice place. If you like gun racks and mud flaps. It isn’t even a city. It’s a no-horse backwater surrounded by withered cornfields, sagging buildings, wife beaters in wife beaters and punch lines like “I was just helping the sheep through the fence, officer.” It’s…
In the music-geek cult movie High Fidelity, record-store clerk and arch-rock-snob Barry (played by Jack Black) scorns a customer’s request for Stevie Wonder’s “I Just Called to Say I Love You.” “Ooh, I’m sorry, is your daughter in a coma?” Barry inquires, mocking the befuddled, out-of-touch dad asking for the record. “There’s no way she likes that song,” Barry huffs,…
Daniel Partner plays old-school American dance music. He is also exceedingly particular about how authentically he presents it. Cast out your visions of a DJ spinning Detroit techno circa 1982 and fussing over a vintage Adidas tracksuit. Partner goes way, way further back than that. Call his the oldest school. He’s a banjo player who performs sheet music first published…
What a new feel-good sports movie called Radio contrives to move us is just fine — that’s what feel-good sports movies are supposed to do. That its makers choose to move us in the style of a linebacker sacking a quarterback is not so good. After enduring this flagrant emotional blitz, you may feel like throwing a penalty flag. Adapted…
Given the way the United Nations has taken a beating in the American media over the past year or so, it may not be a bad thing that Beyond Borders is, at heart, a two-hour infomercial for Kofi Annan’s organization. As a call to action, the production has already worked on at least one person: star Angelina Jolie, who…
Panel discussion: I’d like to think that most people don’t get their information from cartoon strips. Unfortunately, reading one of your letters to the editor, that would appear to be the case — particularly the hyperventilating, sexist, racist nitwit Edie Harrison in the October 2 issue, who thinks that the president “robs” citizens and spends “all that money to kill…
The Strip was marveling recently at the kinds of things that show up in the Sunday edition of The Kansas City (Red) Star. The October 12 issue was simply chock full of remarkable goodies that taught us several things: Chuck Gusewelle’s cat is old. Rhonda Chriss Lokeman thinks California Governor Gray Davis is an “icky poo.” Editor Mark Zieman is…
Clay Chastain thinks we mock him. If only it were that simple. Ten years ago, while Union Station rotted and the “civic leaders” trying to save the landmark looked lame-ass at best, Chastain seemed like a hero. Relentlessly driving his petitions, he stood outside grocery stores and forced everyday people to care about the city’s gigantic monument to failure. Unable…
It’s been ten years since Mary Kletchka noticed that the house next door was starting to slump closer to her two-story duplex at 2744 Holmes. Kletchka called city officials to report the problem. Now seventy years old, she has spent the past decade watching the house lean toward hers in freakish slow motion while city codes enforcers and dangerous-building inspectors…
Last July, Mark Huffer stood in the basement of the Metropolitan Missionary Baptist Church on Linwood Boulevard and tried to convince the large congregation of angry bus riders looking back at him that he felt their pain. They weren’t buying it. Huffer, director of the Kansas City Area Transportation Authority, was there to announce what most people in the audience…
The Night Ranger beat requires constant contemplation of the word scene, an overused term that makes us break out in hives. With so many diverse subcultures and urban tribes in Kansas City, what constitutes a scene? Whenever we hear the word, we can’t help but think of the bar crowds we so dearly love to mock — i.e., the tanorexics…
While Bravo! Cucina Italiano (see review) runs like a well-oiled machine on the Leawood side of 119th Street, an independent restaurant on the same street is going through a turbulent spell in Overland Park. Altizio’s Italian Restaurant (10142 West 119th Street) lost charismatic chef Mike Saluzzi on October 2, after a long-simmering disagreement with owner Frank Bushek came to a…
