Thursday, May 13 We don’t like sharing songs. When there’s a song that was written and recorded only for us to hear and then out of nowhere all of our friends think it’s their song? That’s such bullshit. At first we felt that way about the Cure’s “Just Like Heaven,” but then it became almost comical how many people were…
When Davy Rothbart came up with the concept for Found Magazine, a collection of random yet revealing lost artifacts, such as love letters and to-do lists, he knew he had a great idea. “People walk around every day, and there’s all this stuff around them that they just see as trash,” Rothbart says. “I see those as potentially fascinating notes…
The BFG As entertaining as it might be, The BFG isn’t about Badass Fearful Gangstas. The acronym stands for Big Friendly Ghost, the affable colossus who delivers dreams to children by blowing through their windows. In this children’s story by Roald Dahl, the BFG is a runt among the behemoths ruling the land, and if that doesn’t set him…
The African Art Experience It isn’t often that Kansas City audiences have a chance to see a collection of non-Western art as diverse as the one on display at the Belger Arts Center. The majority of the pieces in The African Art Experience are three-dimensional objects made of wood, clay, metal or natural materials such as woven and dyed…
In the fascinating and candid new book Colored Lights, composer John Kander, one of Kansas City’s greatest imports, says of his forty-years-and-counting collaboration with lyricist Fred Ebb, “Sometimes you fuck it up and sometimes you don’t.” Of course, he’s being modest — even the mediocre Kander and Ebb shows offer diamonds in the rough. Quality Hill Playhouse’s The World Goes…
Much like the repulsive Scottish dish haggis or the common sight of teenage boys walking down the streets of Italy holding hands, some aspects of European culture never make it to the States. And then there’s Liliom, the 1909 drama by Hungarian playwright Ferenc Molnar, which never gets imported because Rodgers and Hammerstein adapted it and set it to…
Bernice Steinbaum, who owns galleries in New York City and Miami, has been an art dealer for 25 years. She claims she can’t remember a single week of that time when at least one client didn’t ask to see a painting to hang over the sofa. “I have seen paint chips, fabric swatches, wallpaper samples, room layouts and architectural…
Every so often, Jupiter aligns juuussssssssstttt right. The universe balances, and the cosmos begets a band like Distance to Empty for the sole purpose of creating an album that makes you want to climb the highest peak and let out, so that all the world can hear, an emphatic, jubilant … yawn. There isn’t anything terrible about Distance to Empty….
If Blonde Redhead songs were films, they’d be subtitled art-house shorts populated by nameless Europeans — crackly black-and-white worlds, each devoted to a single emotion or existential idea, involving brushes with death, the juggling of fragile hearts, Old World architecture, foamy shorelines or high-speed Vespa chases. This cinematic, impressionistic bent has always been present in the New York City trio’s…
They may make their living as assistants to Strokes producer Gordon Raphael, but brothers Jay and Justin Braun don’t believe in taking their work home with them. Their band, the Negatones, is simply having too good a time to be confused with ye olde red-hot garage-rock pinups. And they’re all over the place on Snacktronica. “Flattened by the Sun” juxtaposes…
Munich’s Chris De Luca and Michael Fakesch (Funkstörung) are better known for their remixes (including those for Wu-Tang Clan and Björk) than for their own productions, which fuse playful melodies, granulated textures and fractured, Cubist electro rhythms into crunchy, metallic hip-hop. Disconnected is Funkstörung’s first album since 2000’s Appetite for Disctruction. By working with “real” musicians — trumpeter Nils Petter…
Icarus Line songs are like the louts you’d least like to share a cramped restroom with. They’re loud, sloppy and willing to take you out in order to high-tail it back to the bar to try more pickup lines. Not coolly detached or political like Black Rebel Motorcycle Club, the Icarus Line could still tour with that group and audiences…
Did you know that Tijuana rhymes with marijuana? Of course you did — you’ve heard Cypress Hill before. The Hill’s 1991 self-titled debut was a hip-hop landmark that altered the genre’s very structure. Within months of its release, everyone from House of Pain to Ice Cube was imitating the East Los Angeles trio. The group’s popularity peaked soon after with…
Pilot to Gunner likes to scrap. At least that’s what the liner notes of the band’s recent album Get Saved would have you believe. Bloody noses, black eyes, split lips — these are Pilot to Gunner’s commodities. But whereas the band has its share of fists-of-fury guitar squalor, its melodies are also emotionally sensitive enough to suggest that not…
Club Wars colonel Jim Kilroy failed to take hipsters by storm with last summer’s Westport Meltdown. Eleven bands at three clubs gave a game effort, but crowds were thin. This year’s similarly formatted Kansas City Rock & Metal Fest figures to lure more street soldiers to Westport, with 26 groups on six stages on the first night alone. Among…
The Damnwells sound pretty much exactly the way a “former Whiskeytown member” band (in this case, drummer Steven Terry) oughta sound. Not that it’s a bad thing. You can almost hear Terry saying, in Interview No. 657 on the subject, “You know, you might think the song ‘Assholes’ is about a certain spiky-haired guy I used to be in a…
Imagine John Lennon is still alive and well, meditating daily and semi-retired in a Tokyo suburb, calmly composing music for only the most gleeful of Nintendo games. If that’s imaginable, the music of From Bubblegum to Sky makes sense. FBTS is really just Mario Hernandez, who grew up in Japan and shares that nation’s sense of cheerful cultural plunder. But…
The ghoulish costumes and masks, the freaky-deaky stage show, the spewing geysers of blood and bodily fluids, the molten metallic grindcore — all of it started with GWAR. Well, OK, it probably all started with Kiss and Alice Cooper, but GWAR brought rock-horror showmanship to new highs (or lows) and paved the way for monster moshers like Slipknot. But unlike…
Dido wasn’t the first white girl to do the singer-songwriter thing with light electronica and pseudo hip-hop beats. Sophie B. Hawkins probably wasn’t the first, either, when “Damn I Wish Your Lover” went top-five in 1992, but at least she didn’t rely on a cracker rapper like Eminem to get her there. (Third Bass was probably busy at the time.)…
As neo-screamers Atreyu were finishing up their second album, The Curse (due in June), vocalist Alex Varkatzas was promising evolution. “We’re trying to make a different record,” he tells the Pitch. ” don’t do the same shit recycled.” The most pleasant revelations from the SoCal quintet’s upcoming disc are awe-inspiring slabs of metalcore — apeshit vocal jawing (“Right Side of…
It’s time for rock aesthetes to hoist a pint of stout to the British and their loss-leading attempts to break bands on these indifferent shores. Somehow, we’re lucky enough to get Clinic’s Liverpudlian art-punk, which is alternately scary and gorgeous, cranked-up and synthy. Too often, the group is compared to Radiohead, with which it shares a daft ennui and little…
Mary J. Blige still lives up to her played-out nickname, the Queen of Hip-Hop Soul, a dozen years after her landmark debut, What’s the 411? Blige has since endured a very public growth spurt from sassy hip-hop street kid to polished soul diva. Along the way, Blige’s best material has provided a stellar soundtrack that tells its tale without editing…
Nobody seems to have briefed Derrick Carter on the rules of being a world-renowned DJ. First, world-renowned DJs don’t come from the western suburbs of Chicago. They hail from dark basements hidden beneath the seedy underbelly of London. Second, famous DJs aren’t meaty black guys rocking backward hats. They are pale, malnourished white dudes wearing soiled T-shirts. Most important, superstar…
PD: Are you tired from pulling double duty with Cypress Hill and solo shows? DJM: No, it’s fun. I’m going out to the clubs a couple nights a week anyway, so I may as well be working. Do people expect you to spin Cypress Hill songs when you’re flying solo? Not really. The only real problem is that you go…
