Thursday, November 6, 2003 Let us now speak of the six-year hippie phenomenon. The six-year hippie discovers classic rock, incense and the methodology of forming dreadlocks (with beeswax, during second-period English) when she’s sixteen years old or a junior in high school, whichever comes first. She reads Herman Hesse’s Siddhartha and has a vague admiration for the Beat poets. At…
Kiss Me Kate is Shakespeare made hummable by the music and lyrics of Cole Porter. With such songs as “Too Darn Hot,” “Another Op’nin, Another Show” and “I Hate Men” (not a condition ever suffered by Kiss Me Kate’s composer), the show turns The Taming of the Shrew into a play-within-a-musical about warring theater stars forced to mount a production…
Even when people were watching Will Ferrell on television every Saturday night, they weren’t seeing Will Ferrell. They saw no more than a glimpse of him, beneath wigs and behind glued-on beards and buried under characters who became almost better known than he during his seven years on Saturday Night Live. There were, among so many, cheerleader Craig, the…
Media and scandal are drawn to each other like crows and roadkill. As long as there’s a speck of gristle left, there’s an angle. Such is the meaty center of The Front Page, Ben Hecht and Charles MacArthur’s creaky 1928 play, the longevity of which may alone have moved it into the status of a classic. In its time,…
Eye Theory’s Vagrant Flock at first feels like Godsmack Jr., then Korn Lite. After that, the mind wanders — did I turn the oven off? The album contains some promising elements — the staggered waves of grinding, driving rock and the loud-quiet-loud-quiet vocal interludes — but the brooding, chugging, pounding, screaming, whispering interplay makes for a block of sound that’s…
It’s the same with men, horses and dogs/Nothing wants to die. So croons Kurt Wagner in his cover of Tom Waits’ “The Fall of Troy” on the two-disc compilation The Executioner’s Last Songs, a collection about death and dying, killing and being killed. An uplifting listen, to be sure. Put together by Jon Langford and the Pine Valley Cosmonauts, the…
What has Jimmy Fortune, the former Statler Brother responsible for “Elizabeth” and “More Than a Name on a Wall,” been up to since the Statlers retired in 1999? Why, rerecording “Elizabeth” and “More Than a Name on a Wall.” Even without the Statlers’ harmonies, the songs sound just as syrupy as they did during Bush I. There’s pleasant new stuff…
Songs you like played slower. And that’s when you’re lucky. For the first half-hour, it’s songs you half-recall from Jerusalem, ground through with all the urgent fire your grandparents bring to the sack most nights. Then there’s a speech detailing the big boy’s political thoughts (the gist is he has them) and then a fairly kick-ass “Harlan Man” that crunches…
You’ll know if you’re an Ima Robot fan within seconds after frontman Alex Ebert introduces the band’s self-titled debut by saying, “Here’s a story for the kids.” That’s because Ebert sounds exactly like former MTV VJ Jesse Camp channeling Johnny Rotten, a trait that’s either annoyingly endearing or simply annoying. If the album started off with “Dirty Life,” maybe it’d…
Kings of Leon’s biography reads like a made-for-TV movie. Three sons of a United Pentecostal evangelist and their cousin grow up nomads (sometimes living out of the back of a car) and hone their musical skills in churches between Oklahoma City and Memphis, then settle in Nashville and eventually earn a record deal with big-city label RCA. Now a gang…
Judging from the braggadocio inherent in this album’s name, Quasi’s Janet Weiss and Sam Coomes — also Sleater-Kinney’s drummer and a musical amigo of Built to Spill and the late Elliott Smith, respectively — must think highly of their fifth record. Unfortunately, the duo doesn’t back up this bravado with the mind-blowing music expected of the expletive-charged title. The beat-poet,…
At the risk of losing all credibility, I have fallen hard for Junior Senior. It was infatuation at first listen; these Danish id savants’ Day-Glo dance ditties struck me like NutraSweet lightning and made me feel like a fourteen-year-old girl digging her first CD rather than a 41-year-old man reviewing his 987th album. Sharing Andrew W.K.’s superhuman will to party,…
Following the death of founding Mule and former Allman Brothers Band bassist Allen Woody in 2000, drummer Matt Abts and guitarist Warren Haynes — himself a member of the ABB — have spent the past three years looking for a suitable replacement. In that time, Gov’t Mule released two tribute albums to Woody (The Deep End, Volume 1 and Volume…
From hardcore to classical, most genre terms tend to sound self-congratulatory. “Intelligent dance music,” though, really breaks new ground in back-patting contortionism. Basically, the IDM realm includes computer-created compositions and other electronically enhanced symphonies. What distinguishes these tunes from techno — and what makes the “dance” part of the description highly dubious — is that IDM tracks seldom establish a…
Bluegrass evokes images of working in the fields, whittling on the front porch, swinging at a square dance and occasionally thinking impure thoughts about your cousin. Nickel Creek’s bluegrass is something the same and completely different. The California trio has earned plenty of plaudits from pundits as well as a Grammy for its ability to meld traditional bluegrass stylings with…
The Beatles’ “Blackbird” isn’t actually ornithological in origin; rather, the “black bird” in question is a singer, and the lyrics pay obtuse tribute to the civil-rights movement. The contemporary chamber sextet Eighth Blackbird was more forthcoming about its moniker, revealing soon after its christening that its members were inspired by the Wallace Stevens poem “Thirteen Ways of Looking at a…
Kids today don’t know it, but there was a time when Soul Asylum wasn’t a synonym for Tom Petty. When Paul Westerberg plugged in and it mattered. When rock bashed out by punk-loving losers wasn’t just rock but rock and roll, with a bounce to it, an abandon and a glee, with a crash and clatter and drummers banging too…
Given that Cheating Kay, a relatively recent import from Columbia and hardly the best-known act in the metro area, scored an upset reader’s poll victory in the Pitch’s Best Of Kansas City issue, skeptics might judge the group guilty of the gerund that opens its name. But there was no cheating involved; this is an underground success story about a…
See that name up there in bold print? Penis Flytrap. Now check out the photo. Creepy, huh? If you still need motivation, here are a few more factoids: Vocalist Dinah Cancer once engaged in casket copulation with Mötley Crüe drummer Nikki Sixx; the group’s song “Party Time” accompanied boisterous, brain-eating action in Return of the Living Dead; Cancer hails…
Like a Christmas-caroling group still making the rounds in January, an organist gigging in the weeks after Halloween must overcome substantial listener burnout. But there are good and bad post-holiday leftovers: chocolate bunnies (but omnipresent tinsel grass), Christmas presents (but credit-card bills), turkey sandwiches (but violent indigestion). Voodoo Organist’s spooky tones, like candy night’s top treats, are just as tasty…
Raised in Orange, New Jersey’s passionate House of God Church, where his parents were leaders of the effusive Pentecostal parish, Robert Randolph found his true path to salvation from an unlikely source: the pedal-steel guitar. Randolph often found himself spending more time on street corners than in the sanctuary, but eventually he was called back to the church at age…
Six Feet Under likes soaking in warm bubble baths, curling up with Danielle Steele’s latest and taking long, romantic strolls on the beach. And skulls. And corpses. And blood. All that’s to be expected when you’re a prince of darkness in the subterranean subgenre of death metal. Six Feet’s latest effort, Bringer of Blood, continues to flaunt the band’s sunny…
The Prairie Dogg finds the dirt on smelly clothes, noisy kids and if bigger is better with Mark Pirro, bassist for the colossal choral-pop ensemble known as the Polyphonic Spree. PD: So how many people are really in Polyphonic Spree? MP: I think most of the people in the band don’t know for sure how many people are in the…
I’m a heartless bastard. I double-park in handicapped spaces. I speed up at crosswalks. I belch at funerals. I relish taunting orphans and clubbing baby seals. I refuse to tip. I don’t floss. And I have $50 that says the Pope doesn’t make it till Christmas. Cynicism is my defense mechanism, so fuck off. My modus operandi is pissing in…
