Ted Leo looks like that guy with the best notes in every college class. His Cheshire-cat grin and slight frame look sharp but not dangerous. Wrong-o. This Washington, D.C., native and proud Irish-American has the punk chops, Celtic blood and blue-eyed soul to write the kind of blood-pumping anthems that have been MIA since My Aim Is True. His latest,…
As both proud purveyors of the New Orleans brass-band tradition and genre-defying experimentalists, the Dirty Dozen Brass Band has spent the last quarter-century bringing the noise and funk to some pretty unlikely places. From Widespread Panic and the Black Crowes to David Bowie and Modest Mouse, this brazen bunch of musical eclecticists has been the big brass gun for hire…
When musical-military historians and competitive-concert pundits look back on 2004, they’ll recall the colorful contenders for the Club Wars Championship. There’s Swill, the group that proved even men in makeup can be tough on crime (“Sex Prison,” “Kill Kill Kill”); Sidewise, the Lawrence-based band that makes education an issue with its simplistic take on Tool’s sound (remedial math rock); Messed…
Tom Shimura is a typical guy with typical frustrations. But the man better known as Lyrics Born refuses to let annoying telemarketers or his dwindling friendships and finances get the best of him on his acclaimed debut, Later That Day. The Tokyo-born Bay area MC injects a George Clinton-sized dose of funk into his speedy delivery of raspy rhetoric and…
What happened to us, Better Than Ezra? We used to be so close. I earned my first black eye defending your honor. I was at your concert — back when your sweet sounds were pumping through my heart and across the radio waves — and some methed-up skank at the show started talking trash about you. I knocked her ass…
Heartache’s a bitch, but it’s nothing that Mr. Jack Daniels can’t fix. Soul ache’s a different story. And there’s nothing like listening to Emmylou Harris to help you realize just how perversely good being alone can feel. The honey-voiced Harris returned to her songwriting roots on 2000’s Red Dirt Girl — her first record of mostly original material since 1985’s…
Beware the blues purist. His is a pompous, joyless lot whose appraisal of the music must meet stringent criteria to determine its authenticity — and, thus, its worth. The blues must be played in tin-shed saloons, performed by withered men with faces carved from oak, voices cured in whiskey and nicknames served with a shot of hilarity and a chaser…
KMFDM is not that different today,” says Sascha Konietzko. “We’re still not serious. There’s still a lot of cheeky stuff going on.” These are not exactly words you expect to hear from one of industrial music’s most uncompromising and outrageous trailblazers. Even those with a passing familiarity with KMFDM might be baffled by its frontman’s insistence that his band isn’t…
Every band has a story. The Electras are no different. The group, formed in 1961, was composed of prep school students Andy Gagarin, Jack Radcliffe, Peter Lang, Jon Prouty, Larry Rand — and former presidential hopeful John Kerry. For two years the band played versions of classic garage and surf tunes at parties, dances, ice cream socials and the occasional…
A week after seeing Bridget Jones: The Edge of Reason, no memory of it remains, save some scribblings in my notebook. This woeful, forgettable sequel to a beloved relic among singletons and smug marrieds — for whom book and movie play like holy scripture — has all the charm of a canceled CBS sitcom. It would be inaccurate to call…
The witless inanity of After the Sunset is so numbing that the sole reason for any living creature — man, woman or household pet — to sit through it is to marvel at the speed and variety of actress Salma Hayek’s costume changes. After an opening sequence in Los Angeles, this failed jewel-caper comedy takes up residence on a…
In vein: As someone who has been in a recovery program for nearly twenty years (with periods of going “back out”), I felt that the way Nadia Pflaum described Amber’s story was right on (“Too Young and Too Pretty ,” November 4). So very sad that the ending quoted a friend saying “It’s better that she did it to herself.”…
Earlier this summer, the 6200 block of Wabash was a horrifying place. Holes yawned in the middle of porches. At one house, the chimney’s missing bricks left a jagged scar from the ground to the roof — and a view into the house. Discarded mattresses and tires piled up between the sagging homes. In some front yards, the weeds were…
Pitch writers fanned out over the metro area after the polls closed on Election Day, ready to cover the big story in case Missouri deadlocked and turned into the next Republic of (Hanging) Chad. But it didn’t happen. By 10 p.m., Missouri had gone for Bush, Bistate II was dead, Cleaver was hanging on to his thinning lead, Kobach was…
Oh, the gnashing of teeth. The sky-is-falling predictions of hell-on-earth to come. The tears, the whining, the prostrate grief. Yeah, you know what the Strip is talking about. No one bawled harder after last week’s election than Joe Posnanski. The Kansas City Star sports columnist sounded like a stuck pig after Bistate II went down, losing in four of the…
In a profession where felony convictions outnumber advanced degrees, boxing promoter Joe Kelly is a freak. Kelly, a 26-year-old Pembroke Hill alum who is working toward a graduate business degree at the University of Missouri-Kansas City, attended a boxing match earlier this year and left the event feeling that it lacked panache. Where were the fighter introductions? he wondered. Where…
OK, we’re starting a movement to change the name of Halloween to Slut-o-ween, based on the many scanty costumes we saw over the course of the weekend. Sure, we’ve done the sexy __ look in the past. But, ladies? Lingerie is not a costume. And is it us, or are pimps ‘n’ hos so mid- to late 1990s? The whole…
When Jeff Fitzpatrick, who owns Café Maison (see review, page 37), told me he worried that potential customers might consider his cozy French bistro too far east, it didn’t occur to me that many restaurants east of Main Street don’t get the attention, particularly in the media, garnered by their western neighbors. Take the soul-food buffet restaurant G’s To Please…
One sodden and dismal night in Paris, I made a terrible mistake. I grudgingly agreed to indulge my traveling companion’s fantasy to venture into one of the city’s seediest neighborhoods to see the fabled Moulin Rouge nightclub. For some reason, he had imagined it would look exactly like the magical set of the 2001 Baz Luhrmann musical Moulin Rouge! You…
THU 11/4 In 1957, almost five blocks of Kansas City, Kansas, were demolished to make room for Interstate 70. Sure, the shortcut shaved ten minutes from the drive to St. Louis, but it cost scores of houses and small businesses in a neighborhood called Strawberry Hill. Down but not destroyed, Strawberry Hill is seeing renewal. A showcase for Civil War…
11/4-11/5 Hipsters looking for an outmoded pastime to subvert might consider reintroducing the world to sticker collections, those books lovingly tended by young girls as a way to honor their prized scratch-‘n’-sniffs, Hello Kitty puffies and glittery unicorns. The updated sticker book would definitely include reminders of erstwhile bands (Pavement, perhaps?) and at least one “Andre the Giant has a…
THU 11/4 As rustic rockers in Okkervil River and slow-moving saddies in Shearwater, singer-songwriters Will Sheff and Jonathan Meiburg pair vulnerable vocals with emotionally wrenching scenarios. Whereas Okkervil builds to a boil, however, Shearwater lets its sorrow simmer. With Winged Life, Shearwater develops backdrops of spare piano and plucked strings into elaborate arrangements, often ending with enchanting instrumental passages. Sheff’s…
TUE 11/9 Ski bums are hot. When they’re not schussing down the slopes, they’re just the right amount of lazy (we hate those ambitious types), plus they have good hair and pink cheeks. Even though we don’t, um, ski, we’re still heading to the Snow Creek Ski Area informational meeting at 7:30 p.m. Tuesday just to check them out. The…
With his easy smile and crinkly eyes, we took Michael Converse for someone who was just as likely to be the center of attention at a party as he was to be holed up in his studio. With his thoughtful, laid-back style, he didn’t immediately strike us as the type to work his ass off. But everyone tells us that’s…
