Throughout June, the spunky cable network Trio saluted notorious artistic fiascoes, screening everything from old episodes of Cop Rock to a Madonna film festival. In its documentary Flops 101: Lessons from Show Biz, one case study was esteemed composing team Lynn Ahrens and Stephen Flaherty’s musical Seussical. It dissected the show’s loopy path from a troubled out-of-town tryout to its…
Do you want to be a suicide girl? When you click on that question at the Suicide Girls’ much-discussed Web site, you get the following sales pitch: Suicide Girls are unique, strong, sexy and confident women. Is this you? Well fill out this application and you just might have a shot at it. What you get, in addition to a…
Hector Moralez is a busy man. There’s the touring: Paris, Chicago, Madrid, Seattle, London, San Francisco, Barcelona — and Kansas City. There are the albums, both his solo discs and those released with French DJ and producer Phil Weeks as the duo Fries and Bridges. Yet the acclaimed DJ still finds time to be a geeky record-store employee, monitoring the…
How come Usher’s “U Got It Bad” is at best tolerable, but when Eugene Chadbourne and the Malachy Papers stretch the song out to nearly 8 minutes, it’s astounding? Is it the novelty? The kitsch? Maybe at first. But Chadbourne and the Papers invest as much in Usher as they do in Thelonious Monk’s “Epistrophy” on And the Wind Cries…
There are tons of great DJ Shadow bootlegs floating around on disc and vinyl, but the stunning clarity and seamlessly mixed content of the official Live! In Tune and On Time puts them to shame. This 20-track, 78-minute CD (packaged together with a 24-track DVD) is culled from a performance at London’s Brixton Academy during the 2002 Private Press tour….
Avril Lavigne’s sophomore effort will be one of the more scrutinized efforts of 2004. Industry suits are already wringing their wallets, wondering if the Canadian chanteuse will be able to repeat the success of her debut, Let Go. Does the 19-year-old Lavigne have the songwriting skills to appeal to the mallrat masses a second time? And without hit-making production duo…
Venerable IDM superpower Warp Records hasn’t discovered many new artists in recent years. Instead, it’s solidified into a pantheon filled with genre hall-of-famers like Autechre, Squarepusher and Boards of Canada. No shame in that (it pays the bills), but electronic-music heads lust for new blood all the time. So it’s exciting to hear Burnerism, Team Shadetek’s Warp debut, inject fresh…
The romance of I Am the World Trade Center bandmates Amy Dykes and Dan Gellar disintegrated during the recording of The Cover Up, and the evidence is all over this dance-pop slab. Dykes devotes her slightly blasé, slightly-off-the-rails vocals to lyrics that imply secret lovers unveiled, uncomfortable standoffs and the bitterest of men’s room graffiti: If you’re looking for a…
It’s hard to top the heaviness-per-square-sonic-inch of Slipknot’s second album, I.O.W.A. So Slipknot doesn’t bother trying. Presumably bored with out-ghouling the competition, the horrific heshers take a few left turns on Subliminal. Songs such as “The Blister Exists” feature everything a diehard ‘Knothead could ask for: blast beats, militant percussion, gear-stripping guitars and vocals from Corey Taylor that alternate between…
Subtlety is key on Wilco’s follow-up to one of the most acclaimed albums of the past decade. But A Ghost Is Born doesn’t feel pressured in the wake of Yankee Hotel Foxtrot. It is a dramatic departure in tone and texture, and it courses with low-key lyrical tension, which hints at the effect of the departures of guitarist Jay Bennett…
Advice for struggling musicians from Seven Mary Three: If you want your album to become an American standard, the kind of album that’s featured on jukeboxes everywhere from soda fountains to truck stops, don’t pussyfoot around with clever titles. Just call the fucking thing American Standard, as the band did its 1995 debut. It also helps to include songs about…
Manischewitz — the cheap Jewish wine, not the band — is a sickly sweet panty peeler beloved all along the East Coast. Manishevitz — the band, not the Kool-Aid-like grog — is an artsy Chicago glam-rock combo too few people know about. But like Roxy Music, the band’s clear inspiration, both excel at sweetening the perverse. The band manages this…
Some say nothing good comes out of Iowa except corn. Corn and corn-fed alt-country musicians, perhaps. Like the Nadas. The Iowa quartet represents all that is oddly pleasant and yet remotely forgettable about Middle America. But, damn — give credit where credit is due. The Nadas have survived a 10-year tenure of midgrade exposure and success by sheer force of…
Somewhere in the depths of the periodic table of elements — beyond uranium, plutonium, and the mighty lawrencium — is the heaviest of all the metals: Kilroyium. Its namesake — local promoter Jim Kilroy — is the stubborn smelting pot for all things hard and heavy in Kansas City rock. And now the man who brought you Club Wars…
With their shaggy haircuts, tight pants, Tiger Beat good looks an a guest appearance on The O.C. , it would be easy to accuse Rooney of being an alt-rock boy band. Dismissing them as manufactured pretty boys might be even easier given vocalist Robert Carmine’s Hollywood pedigree: his older brother, Rushmore actor Jason Schwartzman, used to drum for Phantom Planet….
You know Kelley Hunt. She’s like a sister. Or a friend. Or a neighbor. Because no matter how many times this blues goddess gallivants to clubs across the country or hangs with her buddy Garrison Keillor, Hunt is still that sweet Kansas girl at heart. Not unlike Dorothy if Toto’s keeper could only stop clicking heels and killing witches long…
I’ve been dead-on, dead wrong, dead broke and dead sexy. But never Dead Poetic. Then again, these fine lads have worked hard to grab a small slice of spotlight and get themselves signed to Tooth and Nail, home to fellow bleeding-heart rockers Mae, Emery and Anberlin. Then there’s Demon Hunter, a band whose members call themselves names like Sgt. Serpent,…
Pain heals. Chicks dig books. Glory lasts forever. What’s that? Chicks dig scars, not books? Bummer. The library geek can only mentally grope the women of fiction for so long. Eventually, the book nerd craves human interaction. Someone to discuss George Orwell’s use of symbolism in Animal Farm, or at least a person willing to role-play scenes from The Marquis…
How popular has Eamon’s foul-mouthed breakup song “F*** It (I Don’t Want You Back)” become? All you need to know is that even the song’s subject — the ex-girlfriend addressed throughout as a “ho” and a “burnt bitch” — loves it. Of course, Eamon is quick to note that the young lady in question doesn’t actually realize that the bitter…
Few things test the limits of human endurance quite like a four-day music festival. The first Wakarusa Music and Camping Festival at Clinton Lake State Park was almost as ambitious an undertaking for ticket holders as it was for the event’s organizers. Declared a rousing success by the festival’s staff and crew, the artists and the insatiable masses in attendance,…
Who else but morose Canadian director Guy Maddin would marry silent film, 1930s movie musicals, Prohibition, family melodrama, a critique of capitalist zeal and monster-movie gore in a surreal montage about sorrow that is, at times, hilarious? Nobody. The Saddest Music in the World is not a mainstream film. It will not allow you to lean back in your seat…
All you need to know about Spider-Man 2 is revealed in the opening credits, in which comic-book artist Alex Ross recaps the 2002 original in lavish, lovingly painted panels. Spidey and Mary Jane Watson are once again entangled in that now-iconic upside-down kiss; nutty Norman Osborn, out of Green Goblin garb, gnashes his teeth; a dumbstruck Harry Osborn discovers…
Marry quite contrary: I very much enjoyed C.J. Janovy’s “Queer Bait” (June 17). I am a straight Democrat who believes very strongly in civil rights, and I believe that gay marriage is a civil rights issue. I belong to a local political club for lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgendered Democrats and their straight allies. As a married woman, I recognize…
Last week’s hottest social event was the debate between Emanuel Cleaver and Jamie Metzl, and that’s not just because the audience overflowed a Penn Valley Community College auditorium on a humid summer night. The race is a bizarre one. Metzl and Cleaver are in a scrap for the seat held by Congresswoman Karen McCarthy, who has famously lorded over Missouri’s…
