Blue Merle’s singer, Luke Reynolds, sounds exactly, uncannily, absurdly like Chris Martin of Coldplay. So much so that the experience of listening to the Nashville band’s Island debut, Burning in the Sun, starts with bewilderment, moves to annoyance, then progresses to laughter. A look at the album cover reveals that Reynolds not only employs Martin’s same warbling falsetto and cotton-mouthed…
Former Shiner bassist Paul Malinowski co-produced Open Hand’s You and Me, which explains the California-based band’s fluency with the Kansas City sound. In addition to replicating the cryptic rhythms and mysteriously veiled melodies of albums that sat on Groove Farm’s local shelf a decade ago, You and Me bears a striking likeness to current alt-radio darling Queens of the Stone…
With its disco beats, fluttering falsettos and sexually ambiguous stage presence, Mindless Self-Indulgence enraged Korn fans and Insane Clown Posse’s juggalos while touring in support of 2000’s Frankenstein Girls Will Seem Strangely Sexy. Enduring an MSI set seemed painful for followers of those headlining bands, but that inconvenience pales next to its own fans’ torturous wait for the Frankenstein Girls…
The late, lamented pre-Stepfordization Sassy magazine sounded its “Cute Band Alert” whenever it encountered talented musicians who were also adorable. More than any other active group, Omaha’s Tilly and the Wall would have deserved Sassy’s virtual unicorn-shaped rubber stamp of approval. Everything about this quintet is aww-inspiring, from its name’s origin (swiped from a children’s story about an ambitious mouse)…
Built to Spill’s singer-guitarist and ultra-casual maestro Doug Martsch just took the kind of extended hiatus that makes fans fear the worst. “Of course, there was that rumor going around,” he says, “but we always knew we’d get back together in a couple of years.” He’s speaking from a sidewalk in New York City, where his band has landed on…
Dan Kaufman never worries about having an audience. “In every town there’s at least a hundred weird people,” he says from his home base in New York City. “There is an underground, and that’s been our salvation.” Though Kaufman’s band, Barbez, is more accessible than much of the experimental rock and abstract techno rattling throughout the underground, it’s hardly mainstream….
A couple of Tuesdays ago, Colin Leipelt was standing on the stoop of the red-brick building that houses his soon-to-be legendary loft, across from a gravel train yard in the West Bottoms. Prepared for the loft’s fourth or fifth show with a wad of bills for change, the bearded and tanned Kansas City Art Institute alumnus broke twenties and talked…
Like political conventions, most CD-release-party concerts use a manufactured festive atmosphere to compensate for the lack of suspense. Bands usually road-test their works in progress, so fans have already heard most of the material by the time the group unveils it. Conner, though, is good at keeping its creative process quiet. Most of the tracks on the Lawrence group’s just-issued…
If it’s been awhile since you’ve seen a great work of art, perhaps you’ve forgotten: It feels euphoric. Such is the glorious, heel-kickin’ boost of Look at Me, by French writer-director-actress-superhero Agnès Jaoui. Look at Me — with its impeccable script, finely tuned acting, and astonishing emotional integrity — is film at its finest, and it does what art is…
“Somewhere, this could all be happening right now,” spoke the narrator in the trailer for the first Star Wars movie (later known as Episode IV: A New Hope), and to those who were small children then, the words rang true. To a whole generation, the Star Wars trilogy could never be mere movies; on a transcendent level, they were…
Brush off: I don’t know what his relationship is with Tom Deatherage but I wanted to respond to Bill Erickson’s very personal attack (Letters, May 5) of Bryan Noonan’s article “Well Hung” (April 21). Mr. Erickson has a right to his opinion, but his critique is inaccurate. There is nothing phony or feigned about Tom Deatherage. He can be crass…
Jimmy the Fetus Hey, kids, Jimmy the Fetus here, your guide to moral values in the Midwest, helping everybody see that what we learned in Sunday school really matters. Dear Jimmy: The born-agains at my school keep going on about this “intelligent design” stuff, and they get in these long arguments with our biology teacher, Mr. Melton. The poor old…
This past Friday, the KC Strip found itself sitting alone in the empty public pews of a courtroom in Liberty. There, a judge was considering such matters as what effect sexual intercourse with former Royals manager Tony Peña might have had on the parenting skills of a northland mother. On the witness stand was an attractive 23-year-old woman from the…
We could write all kinds of stories about Kansas City designers: The cool things they’re making, the shops they’re opening, the chain stores they’re one-upping. But as with most really good art, the work speaks for itself so beautifully that it seems a shame to go on and on about it when we could just as easily use our pages…
We’ve always had a thing for libraries. Yes, we are that dorktastic. Not only are we the ones hanging out there on weekend afternoons, reading People and US Weekly — um, we mean, New Republic and The Economist — but we absolutely love books. Especially an endless supply of free ones. So when we heard that an exciting new group,…
David Rabinovitz likes firm buns. He requires them, actually, for the fat, juicy hot dogs he’ll be serving at the new joint he’s opening this month in Westport. The 30-seat dog-o-teria, called Relish, is taking over the long-vacant venue at 4116 Broadway that for many years housed Tivoli Video and, after that, the ill-fated Bavarian Corner and Fishing Hole restaurants….
One of the reasons I’m not crazy about eating in Japanese steakhouses is that I don’t like sharing tables with strangers. It sounds snobbish, but it’s really more Freudian than that. It’s a lingering dread that dates back to my high school cafeteria, when I always wound up sitting at a long communal table (in a dining room that looked…
SUN 5/15 Old-school punks love their lawsuits. First, members of the Dead Kennedys battled singer Jello Biafra for royalties, then Dictators frontman Handsome Dick Manitoba went all cease-and-desist on Dan Snaith’s band Manitoba. Snaith obviously doesn’t have trouble titling things, as evidenced by songs such as “Tits and Ass: The Great Canadian Weekend,” so he rechristened his outfit Caribou. Longtime…
SAT 5/14 Though it enlisted everyone from mashed-potato-wrestling strippers to backlit-screen-silhouetted dancers to electronica-spinning DJs, Chakra (1308 West 11th Street) couldn’t sustain its early attendance figures and folded before reaching its first anniversary. Undaunted, another dance-minded venue has set up shop in Chakra’s massive empty shell. The new spot, Rust, won’t introduce itself with a corporate-sponsored, swing-band-soundtracked bash the way…
SAT 5/14 Among the many benefits of dog ownership — cuddling, face licking, eternal love and devotion, to name a few — is a rarely discussed downside. We’re talking about the shit. It’s a dirty job, and your dog isn’t going to clean it up himself, which is where the K-9 Club comes in. This local pooch play group has…
SAT 5/14 Father David Altschul wants to erase Troost Avenue’s shoot-’em-up image from the minds of Kansas Citians. Altschul, a Troost resident since the ’80s and a priest at St. Mary’s of Egypt Orthodox Church, wants to replace that ghetto not-so-fabulous image with what he says he left the suburban malaise of Leawood for: the “mosaic of human life.” That…
The two owners of the Acme Bicycle Company have as many old bike parts in their Crossroads shop as they have reasons for not using the new ones. “These are both derailleurs,” Christi Lynne says, holding a gear-shifting device in each hand. “See the difference?” Both derailleurs bear the same trademark. One is a forged steel relic from the ’70s…
Thursday, May 12, Sure, it’s easy to make lawyer jokes. Know how to save a drowning lawyer? Take your foot off his head. But we can’t hold too much against the attorneys of the world when they’re helping others — and poking fun at themselves. How many lawyers does it take to change a light bulb? How many can you…
With his far-out posters and totally cosmic paintings, Peter Max helped define the visual landscape of the flower-power era. He painted America’s first 10-cent stamp, gave a Boeing 777 the Max treatment (think splashy colors and a prominent signature) and has been the official artist of big-time events as varied as the New Orleans Jazz Festival and the Super…
