Anybody who has ever spent time in a college dorm knows that the rooms are barely large enough for two people. (This is a reference to real-life dorms, not the Dawson’s Creek variety, where living quarters are bigger than some houses.) Thus, when it’s said that the Close’s founders, guitarist and vocalist Brooks Meeks and bassist Dustan Nigro, started rocking…
For a group whose major claim to fame is being dumped by a major label, Ultimate Fakebook is busier than ever. This summer, the Manhattan, Kansas-bred power trio issued Before We Spark, a generous seven-song EP that includes fun extras such as videos and remixes. Singer and guitarist Bill McShane has also been moonlighting as a solo acoustic act,…
It was inevitable that Tech N9ne would eventually go Psychopathic on us. After all, the KC mic mauler already has a gravity-defying haircut, devil-themed CDs and an energetic live show that appeals to headbangers as well as to hip-hop aficionados. What Tech doesn’t have is a million Faygo-flinging clown kids buying his records, T-shirts and concert tickets. That might change…
Slayer is metal. Period. Twenty-one years into its illustrious career, the quartet refuses to latch on to anything remotely resembling a trend. No sampler or turntable wizardry, no bloated nü-metal ballads and nary a hint of rock-rap have crept into Slayer’s skull-crushing output. Instead, the band funnels raw power through truckloads of Marshall stacks and a mammoth, gong-adorned drum kit….
As part of the late, great Butterglory, Matt Suggs is hardly a stranger to Lawrence. When they called both Lawrence and Visalia, California, home, Suggs and cohort Debby Vander Wall created literate guitar-pop gems that progressed from the lo-fi charm of “The Skills of a Star Pilot” to the radiant noir of “Carmen Cross.” Three years after Butterglory broke up,…
When Napoleon’s army discovered the Rosetta stone along the banks of the Nile in 1799, little did it know that the tablet of black basalt would provide the first key to unlocking the thorny riddles of Egyptian hieroglyphics. “Perhaps someday,” the soldiers might have said, “this slab of carved symbols will lead to a group of ragtag, heavy-metal kids in…
It’s beginning to look as though the films of George Clooney are really the products of documentary crews following the actor as he leads his enviable life. In film after film, he’s seen dining with beautiful actresses in seductive surroundings: Jennifer Lopez in Out of Sight, Julia Roberts in Ocean’s Eleven and, now, Catherine Zeta-Jones in Intolerable Cruelty. He’s the…
The opening credits insist that Kill Bill: Volume 1 is “Quentin Tarantino’s 4th film,” but it’s actually No. 3.5. Until its proper ending arrives next February, it can’t be measured as a whole. Just when the movie gets going, it ends with an inglorious thunk. We’re left to wonder if it was worth the six-year wait since Tarantino’s last…
Can fall be the best season of the year? That was a rhetorical question, for the answer is yes. The weather is perfect — we can break out the kneesocks-and-skirt look — and Halloween, our favorite holiday, is upon us. But the main reason fall rocks can be summed up in one word: football. NFL, that is. Finally! The wilderness…
hough not many of the classic old joints remain, Kansas City has a colorful history of honky-tonks and roadhouses. There have been plenty of saloons in the River Market neighborhood over the last century (and at least a few legendary whorehouses, including the tastefully appointed Annie Chambers brothel at Third Street and Wyandotte), but things have been relatively tame since…
Back in the 1970s, I worked with a couple of dazed and confused waiters who liked to fire up their bongs every night and prattle on about their dream restaurant: a laid-back joint that would serve nothing but potpies. In their stoned reverie, most of the culinary creations would be made with the finest-quality sinsemilla, though there would be a…
MON 10/6 There are many things about David Sedaris that are funny. Among them is the fact that his French isn’t that bad. Reading Me Talk Pretty One Day, you’d think he was a total mess. But listening to the episode of This American Life in which Ira Glass visited him in Paris — fascinated by the fact that Sedaris…
FRI 10/3 San Francisco artist Jeremy Fish pays the bills with commercial illustrations for megacorporations such as Microsoft and Nike, but the work he is most proud of is the art he creates for skateboarders. “My introduction to art came through skateboarding graphics on boards, stickers and in magazines,” Fish says. “The Dalis and Picassos of my world were Wes…
10/2-10/4 Don’t let the name of the Faith Lutheran Church’s Giant Toy Garage Sale fool you. The church (4805 West 67th Street in Prairie Village) will not be selling toy garages of grand proportions. Nor is it a sale for enormous toys. The adjective giant is used here to describe the large scale of the sale, not the wares. The…
SAT 10/4 With the awesome biking trails in our region, it seems a shame not to take advantage. This weekend’s AIDS Ride (an AIDS Walk spinoff) should be a worthwhile way to spend an afternoon — and not for purely selfless reasons. AIDS Ride starts in Rocheport, Missouri, and follows the Katy Trail, which was converted into a biking and…
TUE 10/7 Even when Jonathan Lethem was transporting readers to dystopian futures, western landscapes on Mars, amnesiac road trips, scientific love triangles and adventures with Tourette’s-afflicted detectives, he was really headed back home to Brooklyn. Fortress of Solitude, Lethem’s newest book, is an epic novel about Mingus Rude and Dylan Ebdus — two kids with musical first names and opposite…
Hello. Liberal media here. It might seem a tad redundant for us to say so, what with The Kansas City Star’s constant socialist polemic, but we’re living in one of the darkest periods in American history. But that’s good news for lovers of satire — we happy-go-lucky folks who go to bed hoarse from watching C-SPAN and screaming, “Horseshit!” —…
Thursday, October 2, 2003 In the new venue called the Stray Cat (1319 Grand, 816-283-3338), the kids from Your Face present a noise band called Lightning Bolt. As usual, this collective of arty music lovers has brought us something fairly obscure that’s superhot in dark corners of bigger cities. À la Found Magazine, Your Face coordinators claim to have discovered…
Mark von Schlemmer’s Lawrence, Kansas-based Harvest of the Arts Film Festival has been happily diverse in its dozen years of existence. This year, he has a theme with sharper edges in mind. “I’m getting some things that are more politically minded,” he says. Like the saying goes, desperate times call for desperate measures. And there’s nothing more desperate than…
OK, so I didn’t expect Goldilocks and the Three Bears to be all that provocative. I figured that Theatre for Young America might, at best, enable this childless adult to retrace the story’s arc and purpose in the fairy tale canon. Frankly, I couldn’t even remember whether the story involved building houses of straw, donning grandmotherly drag or jumping…
For its final local show before relocating to Los Angeles, Moaning Lisa gets a fitting sendoff: A Beamount Club gig on Wednesday, October 8, with former Poison pretty boy Bret Michaels. Moaning Lisa never embraced Michaels’ brand of glamorama glitz or talk-dirty-to-me raunch. (He still indulges in the latter — “Loaded Gun,” from his latest solo album, is, for better…
Ten years and a British Invasion or two after their inception, the Super Furry Animals are still around, as eclectic, melodic and wonderfully cracked as ever, yet they remain inexplicably obscure on this side of the Atlantic. Maybe it’s because they lack Oasis’ surly edge, or Radiohead’s apocalyptic self-importance or Coldplay’s neutered delicacy. Then again, maybe it’s just because nobody…
It’s tempting, when listening to the fascinating sprawl of Outkast’s double-length latest, to consider it urban music’s heir to The White Album — and not merely because the Georgia duo of Big Boi and Andre 3000, who each contribute a solo set to this package, is the closest thing to the Fabs, creatively and ambitionwise, that hip-hop has produced. Big…
Pachyderm Studio is the birthplace of some alt-rock classics, including Nirvana’s In Utero and PJ Harvey’s Rid of Me. So it’s no surprise that an enterprising young group would want to book time there, as did Tora! Tora! Torrance! to craft its sophomore effort, A Cynics Nightmare. The title is right on target — any act with three exclamation marks…
