A tight-knit, Oakland, California-based crew whose members have tasted major-label sweetness and bitterness, Hieroglyphics now wrecks shop on the down low. Regardless of its configuration, it deftly balances boho and street impulses. Hardcore hip-hop heads still revere Del Tha Funkee Homosapien for his 1991 debut I Wish My Brother George Was Here, but Del has also nipped the mainstream’s underbelly…
Made up of members of the Blue Noise Band, the Golden Arm Trio and Sun Vocina, Austin, Texas’ Grupo Fantasma melds its disparate influences over a roiling Colombian beat. The ten-piece group (likely a tight fit on Davey’s comfy stage) floats a three-man horn section and call-and-response Spanish vocals atop a double rhythm section. The rustic cumbia beat is always…
Like Gorillaz for the academic feminist set, Wynne Greenwood’s Tracy and the Plastics project uses fictional videotaped characters to simulate live performance. In this case, the players aren’t animated — Greenwood herself depicts singer Tracy, keyboardist Nikki and drummer Cola. Her personas are just one part of the audiovisual interaction; lo-fi images correlate exactly with her sounds, turning a cymbal…
Starting next week, a new guy will be writing this column. He has pledged to rave about all area acts, no matter how atonal or abysmal. He will go to every concert — time and transportation limitations be damned — and he’ll review every record and return every phone call, thanks to his copious consumption of Missouri-made meth. Oh, wait…
Uncle Kracker has played his fair share of crappy shows over the years, but he’s never been up shit creek — until now. The longtime Kid Rock confederate, who also has a marginally successful solo gig on the side, is coming to Kansas City for the Duck Derby. “What’s going on with this duck thing?” Kracker asks, phoning from his…
Are you happier now working alone — “Yes,” Beans replies, before we can even finish our first question. Are you sure? “Positive,” confirms the bald, bespectacled MC-producer (real name: Robert Stewart), who last year departed from the underground maverick hip-hop collective Antipop Consortium. “It’s a matter of freedom. I’d seen do a performance with Aceyalone … and it made me…
You gotta love John Sayles. No, really — you gotta, or else a mob of indie-minded cineastes will club you into submission. Sometimes it’s easy to comply, as with City of Hope and Sunshine State, both astute portraits of uniquely American class, race and real estate struggles boiling down to the burning question of identity. But sometimes Sayles loses perspective,…
Dave, a man who’s barely there, lulls his son to sleep with stories of a boy lost in the woods who escapes from wolves. Dave (Tim Robbins) was once that little boy, and the wolves were the two men posing as cops who put him in their car, threw him in a hole and molested him for days. The…
Barber chop: Regarding Allie Johnson’s “The Bellerive Tolls” (September 25): Oh, boy! Another one-sided story by the Pitch! Sloppy as usual. This article sounds like a witch hunt. I have lived at the Bellerive for almost four years. I have had some of the same problems as the other people complaining in your article. But no one’s perfect. I would…
Why are the liberal weenies at The Kansas City Star so freakin’ paranoid about this town’s reputation? The Strip nearly gagged on its cuppa joe a couple of weeks ago when it opened its morning paper and saw that the hand-wringin’ at the leftist daily had reached ridiculous proportions. “Woe is us,” the front page all but screamed across four…
When Christine Taylor-Butler told Kansas City, Missouri, School Board member Elma Warrick that she had recently enrolled her kids in public schools after a long, expensive stint in private schools, she assumed Warrick would be pleased. After all, Warrick has repeatedly urged Kansas Citians to give the embattled district a chance. Instead, when Taylor-Butler said that she’d enrolled her youngest…
The woman who wants you to think there’s a major pedophile priest scandal in Kansas City looks like she stepped out of a black-and-white movie. The pageboy haircut and conservative attire not only give the impression that Rebecca Randles is missing from some 1950s courtroom drama but also match her personality. Cautious and smart, she’s fully in control when she…
MON 10/13 Comedy as we know it teeters on the precarious relationships of people who would hate each other if they didn’t love each other: Akbar and Jeff, Bart and Lisa, Cousin Larry and Cousin Balky Bartokomous. Kapoot Clown Theater capitalizes on that same basic relationship, only with mime. Now, we know what you’re thinking. Mime: Who needs it? Well,…
SUN 10/12 Record-release parties are usually extreme efforts in cool. When held in bars or highfalutin clubs, they seem to be as much about getting lit and hooking up as they are about the band’s new album. Leave it to the Wilders, who specialize in “old time country,” to make the release party for their new Spring a Leak CD…
10/11-10/12 The first thing a kid thinks about upon hearing “Renaissance Festival” (just off Interstate 70 and Kansas Highway 7 in Bonner Springs; 800-373-0357) has to be turkey legs. It’s just us dirty-minded adults who think codpiece and guys in tights. Either way, this is the last weekend to indulge in Elizabethan fun. You’ll want to make sure the kids…
10/1-10/12 This weekend belongs to obscure sports that make up for their lack of mainstream popularity with an abundance of toughness and excitement. While the U.S. Australian Football League plays its rough-and-tumble championship matches, equally if not more underground Cyclocross competitors will be mounting, dismounting and mounting their bikes again at two racecourses in Kansas City. Cyclocross is kind of…
10/9-11/8 Around lunchtime, when workers are jetting back and forth across the skywalk at the Commerce Bank Building (922 Walnut), it’s obvious who’s in the lobby to look at art and who’s there to bank. The bespectacled chick in a bright-orange peacoat? Looking at art. The countless people in suits who are looking at her funny? Banking. The aerial photographs…
The coffee grinder and the worm never really disappeared. They just went out of style, then came back as second-rate dance moves. “You’ll never see somebody who’s really good at break dancing do a series of coffee grinders, ’cause that’d be lame,” says B-boy Vinnie, of the Lawrence-based crew Buggin’ Out — though he allows that you might see someone…
Thursday, October 9, 2003 Today’s Just Off Broadway production — titled It’s About Time — is actually not about time at all. It’s about a guy who reflects on his life: ups and downs, challenges and victories. And though this sounds a bit familiar, it gets interesting when you consider that it’s a life in one act, divided into three…
Matt Suggs says he’ll feel immediately at home when he rolls into Lawrence this Thursday for a gig at the Replay Lounge. “The second I get there, it’s very comfortable,” says Suggs, who spent five years in the college town between 1992 and 1997. “It’s so comfortable and easy. There’s a reason people stay for such a long time.” Like…
As the memories of those near-eternal summer days slowly fade into the damp drama of autumn, stop and say a silent prayer for all the young and ambitious pop singers out there. Summer jobs are always in ready supply when a catchy hook and a clever lyric are all it takes to inspire a drop-the-top, hit-the-road-and-just-drive type of adventure,…
The best songs transcend simple descriptions, arbitrary divisions of genre and even their original incarnations. That’s why the South Austin Jug Band’s treatment of Jimi Hendrix’s “Little Wing” sounds so right. There is also a responsibility on the part of the musician to honor the original essence of the tune, and, amazingly enough, the SAJB does that, too. From the…
A few years after the American folk revival had reached a curious crossroads of cross-pollination with both pop and rock, the inevitable result of the first British Invasion that manifested itself in the work of Bob Dylan and the Byrds, a second wave of British rockers was poised to hop the pond. This time, however, they weren’t just bringing R&B…
In all the 432,174 jokes about banjos, there’s not one that ends with a connection between that five-string noisemaker and punk rock. Maybe that blind spot is what makes Will Whitmore’s banjo songwriting so striking. It’s not as if there’s never been a banjo player as influenced by Minor Threat as by the Louvin Brothers (anyone out there remember the…
