Hell’s Pit is allegedly the final installment of the Insane Clown Posse saga, the last of the band’s six “joker’s cards.” Pit debuted in the Top 20 on the Billboard album chart and has sold more than 100,000 copies in its first few weeks of release. The album cover boasts that Pit is the “darkest horror rap album” in the…
The Libertines have already earned a reputation for being the UK’s most notorious louts, garnering splashy headlines for canceled gigs, breakups, arrests, stints in rehab and, of course, enough drugs to make them honorary members of the Keith Richards Society. The quartet’s appetite for self-destruction has earned it comparisons to volatile Brit greats such as the Sex Pistols and Oasis,…
Green Day hasn’t had much to offer since its ode to youth combustibility (Dookie) and its backhand to the underground-punk backlash (Insomniac). Nimrod, best known for the prom-night sap of “Good Riddance,” was phoned-in spew. Warning posited the band as agit-pop dad rockers willing to play bar mitzvahs if all else failed. But Green Day avoids its third straight irrelevant…
In a world where Britney Spears merits headlines every time she takes a dump (or gets dumped), Holly Golightly breezes in like a Category 5 blast of fresh air. The English-bred chanteuse is everything Spears tries so hard to be — sexy, mysterious and, above all, talented. Following on the heels of her masterful 2003 effort, Truly She Is None…
Duran Duran has endured as one of the few survivors of the fabricated “new romantic” movement that produced such dubious hairspray queens as Spandau Ballet and Adam & the Ants. Solid material and a strong live show put the band over the top in the Atari age, but some usual suspects — egos, cocaine, etc. — eventually unraveled the lipsticked…
There’s just way too much that you can read into this album. Yes, this month marks the one-year anniversary of Elliott Smith’s suicide — not that his death came as a huge surprise to fans of his music. But even as bitter as Smith’s songs could be going down, they always left the sweet aftertaste of beauty and hope. From…
It’s usually bad news to become a granddaddy at an early age. There’s nothing graceful about being a 30-year-old with senior citizen lineage. But just a few albums into its career, Earlimart wears its Grandaddy-sounding status well, like an aging actor with a dignified silver streak. Seems like just yesterday that Earlimart was stirring up trouble with prickly punk tempos…
When the Indigo Girls covered Neil Young’s “Down by the River” on their live 1200 Curfews, they rendered his tale of misogyny and murder impotent merely by making it their own. For Amy Ray and Emily Saliers, the focal point of a career spanning nearly two decades is to give clear voice to the marginalized by marrying simple music with…
You have your disaffected goths, and you have your indie hipsters. Just about the only place where the twain shall meet is the Faint’s live extravaganza. At the Saddle Creek synth-heads’ recent show in Boston, brooding souls (those sporting a Bella Morte shirt) mingled with scads of fashion victims (a pixie wearing a peach prom dress). Video screens projected artsy…
Gentlemen, when you’re sitting on the back porch scratching your head and trying to decipher the complexities of your woman, let some Angie Stone kick in. As Aretha was to old school, Stone is to contemporary soul. She’ll teach you everything about being Her Man. Or Anybody’s Man for that matter. Just pop in “My Man” from her latest, Stone…
Coheed and Cambria produces more than just complicated prog-rock. Its members aren’t merely musical geeks, either. They are epic musical geeks. And the strange fruit of their conceptual labor is simply good, though hardly simple, music. The band’s songs thematically follow the adventures of two fictional characters (yup, Coheed and Cambria) in a post-apocalyptic world. Think comic books. (No, really….
Dear Mirah: We need to talk. K-Han has become an old, major-label peon. Same with Zack de la Rocha, who, as far as anyone knows, is living in Trent Reznor’s studio. Ani is played out. The left needs a new hero, and I think that someone is you. I’ve got your shit all up in my iPod, the precise-but-pottymouthed-folk-goddess-under-scary-trumpets stuff…
PD: Hey, Dave, it’s Nathan from the Pitch in Kansas City. DK: Who? Um, we’re supposed to have an interview? Huh. I didn’t know that. But let’s do it. If only because I’m a Royals fan. The Killers are associated with Vegas, but you’re really a Midwest boy, aren’t you? That’s right. I’m from the heartland. Pella, Iowa, doesn’t sound…
I deserve the contaminated candy. The lollipop coated with cooties. The Butterfinger basted with Ebola virus. The razor blades hidden in the candied apple. I haven’t done anything wicked lately to warrant such a fate — unless you count my “Angel of Mercy” phase at that nursing home in Sarasota — but I need to be punished for my persistent…
It’s hard to find rock stars who look like rock stars anymore, even at the club-circuit level. But that’s not to say that all band members lurk in witness-protection anonymity. The costumed clowns sporting masks, makeup and other ostentatious accessories leave little doubt they’re on duty. (It can be painfully awkward to stand next to one of these Slipknot spawns…
Colin Meloy was not a normal boy. He loved books — Stephen King, Ray Bradbury, Piers Anthony — and had a rather unsettling fascination with ax murderers. A 7-year-old Meloy wrote, directed and starred in his own play, The Bloody Knight, which he describes as “basically a half-hour bloodbath set in the Middle Ages.” In junior high, Meloy preferred the…
The Grudge bears the imprimatur of Sam Raimi but, alas, neither his sense of fun nor his smarts. The wunderkind director behind the Spider-Man and Evil Dead franchises has followed in the path of Robert Zemeckis and Joel Silver with their Dark Castle releases, launching his own lucrative spook factory, Ghost House. However, serving as co-executive producer, he has begun…
Maybe it’s the mark of a great film that it can affect an audience member even when he sleeps through the entire thing. Such was the case with my father at a recent preview of David O. Russell’s I Heart Huckabees, a philosophy lecture masquerading as a comedy in which shrill Lily Tomlin and mop-topped Dustin Hoffman play existential…
Ministry of sound: Regarding Kendrick Blackwood’s “Walking on Water” (October 14) : I saw the cover of the Pitch in the foyer of Kmart and said (loudly), “Finally!” My reaction to every interview with Robert Rogers that I watched last year was that of fear. He is the scariest man I think I have ever seen. Last year, the nice…
Threads Off the rack and on the town. Jackson County Republican Headquarters, Independence, 1:45 p.m. Thursday Jenna and Barbara Bush had arrived fashionably late, entering the bunker-sized room with an entourage of buzz-cut Secret Service guys. Nearly fifty red-white-and-blue-trussed supporters waved political signs beneath the low-slung ceiling. The Pitch’s fashion expert, a straight guy named Bud, had attended the volunteer…
I haven’t read Connie Morris’ book, From the Darkness: One Woman’s Rise to Nobility. It’s out of print, but the online book-jacket synopsis suggests that Morris is a woman of extreme grace. “From sexual abuse and violence at the age of 12, to a miraculous conversion and recovery, Connie Morris’ remarkable story will inspire and transform you,” it reads. There…
Come on, Kansas City, THINK BIG! We’ve heard the radio ads. We’ve seen the television commercials. We gotta get behind this Bistate II tax hike and think like the BIG LEAGUE CITY WE OUGHTA BE! How did Kansas City Star civic crusader Yael Abouhalkah put it? Oh, yeah: We gotta jump on the County Question 1 bandwagon for the sake…
“I really hope and pray that every one of you die a slow and painful death from the next terrorist attack,” George Bush says, addressing a jeering, hissing gathering of greasy garage-rock fans. “Fuck you and go to hell.” “Dumb whores,” adds Dick Cheney. The president and vice president are wearing dresses. Their faces are rubbery, their eyes vacant, their…
The limousine carried just one occupant as it rolled through sun-bleached Santa Monica, California: a short, plainly dressed woman with graying hair and a gap between her front teeth. The driver at the airport had held a sign with his passenger’s name on it because he knew he would not recognize her. Rachel MacNair was not famous. MacNair is a…
