You Ain’t Talkin’ to Me, a three-disc set that collects 40 sides from Charlie Poole alongside 32 cuts from the banjo plunker’s contemporaries and descendents, is a great next step for anyone interested in exploring the roots of country music beyond Jimmie Rodgers and the Carter Family. Some will want to squeeze all of this under the umbrella of what…
Whether comparable to scratching an itch you didn’t know you had or merely grating, Scout Niblett’s music is for ears already inured to stark blues experiments by her fellow Brit P.J. Harvey. But Niblett is more fun than her predecessor, as befits a singer who takes her first name from the vivacious child narrator of To Kill a Mockingbird. On…
After several EP releases, The Secret Migration collates a series of crystalline, gossamer work by Johnathan Donahue and his confreres and illustrates the repeated lyric Life is but a dream. Providing escapist hymns with merit, the disc proffers pastoral lullabies for the end of Gen X now on the verge of real adulthood. It’s the perfect soundtrack for folks trapped…
Just two short years ago, Rilo Kiley was playing tiny rock clubs in support of The Execution of All Things — an album that foreshadowed the quirk-rock resurgence by merging bittersweet twang, aching riffs and whimsical orchestration. The Los Angeles quartet, realizing the potential of Things, has graduated to bigger concert venues, thanks to last year’s More Adventurous, which incorporated…
It’s been more than a decade since Lenny Kravitz released a decent album. His latest offering, Baptism, is adrift in knee-slapping religious themes that make Stryper sound like Shakespeare. But you gotta give it up for the Lenster’s live show, where the retro-schlock king transforms into everything great about his influences. He does the James Brown squealing-bandleader bit, the sexrobatic…
Donna Tucker, one of the more accomplished jazz singers in the Midwest, has recently carved a niche as the most popular lounge act in the history of the Westin Tokyo. But don’t go comparing her to the indecent chanteuse in Lost in Translation. Tucker has been a pillar of class since her reign at one of Dallas’ top jazz spots,…
“You gotta hear this one song. It’ll change your life, I swear.” Shortly after Natalie Portman spoke those words to co-star Zach Braff in Garden State, a lot of people’s lives were changed — most notably, the members of the Shins. From humble beginnings in Albuquerque, New Mexico, the quartet has spent the past eight years touring clubs and changing…
Breakups are a bitch, but sometimes they’re easier to swallow when you’ve got a backup plan. Dave Gedge — the perennially heart-wounded Englishman with the nifty wit and magnetic croon — went through a double-bummer recently when he split with longtime girlfriend Sally Murrell, who also just happened to be the keyboardist in Gedge’s most recent outfit, Cinerama. Because Gedge…
When Jaguares, one of the biggest rock bands in Latin America, adopted its jungle-predator moniker in 1995, after the lead-singer dreamed he was rocking out inside a jaguar’s mouth, there was no way its members could have predicted they’d be playing inside a Kansas City stable ten years later. Alas, here they come to try their hand in the great…
Because our music scene is unquestionably more kick-ass than anything going on in St. Louis, a visit by an act from our arch-rival’s domain feels as strangely surprising as waking up with Jamie Lee Curtis after going to bed with Regis Philbin. Missouri won’t be the only state to carouse with So Many Dynamos, though, because this peppy, experimental dance-punk…
At a P-Funk show, always three-plus hours of nonstop music, people become who they really, truly are. Women splurge on $135 extensions and $20 concert portraits, then sweat ’til the knots untie and the dye seeps out of their dresses. Men whose pelvises went MIA in office chairs a decade ago inexplicably relax that one magic spot in their backs…
Is the area’s most creatively brutal ensemble, Dark Matter drops polyrhythmic funk, death metal and thrash into an ominous blender with erratically spinning blades. On Thursday, May 5, it celebrates the rerelease of its stellar, long-out-of-print debut, The Ultimate Killing Machine, with a show at El Torreon. To mark the occasion, bassist Dave Tanner reflects on the most memorable moments…
There’s a special type of fan whose devotion borders on obsession. Columbia, Missouri, native Dave Muscato’s muse is the seldom-seen Fiona Apple. Muscato’s Web site, FreeFiona.com, has attracted attention from The New York Times, Rolling Stone and Newsday, among others, for Muscato’s efforts to force Sony to release her latest, Extraordinary Machine, which was recorded in 2003 and allegedly shelved…
Few things are sadder than aging punk rockers attempting to cash in on their misspent youth, especially their desperate act of trying to recapture the glory days of fickle preadolescents with disposable incomes. Such is the lot of Good Charlotte and Simple Plan, purveyors of a Splenda version of pop-punk so lightweight that only Top 40 radio will touch it….
The Pitch has been accused more than once of trying to sell the idea that Kansas City has culture. The charge is usually leveled at us by people, many of them young and burned out, who came of age here and are tired of all the clubs and galleries, bored with the fountains and boulevards, sick of the Overland Park…
Veda took the stage at the Madrid Theatre April 24 to polite applause, the sort of greeting that’s expected when a local act, even a popular one, is presented as the first group on a three-band “mystery bill.” Some of the more optimistic members of the crowd expected Nine Inch Nails, the White Stripes or P.J. Harvey. (Harvey’s appearance would…
In Ridley Scott’s latest costume epic, Kingdom of Heaven, there are two heavyweight bouts on the card: Christianity dukes it out with Islam in 12th-century Jerusalem and, in a more parochial punch-up, Good Crusaders battle Bad Crusaders for the soul of the church. By the time the last Saracen ax-swinger has been boiled in oil and the last severed Templar…
Much of Crash, an L.A.-stories portmanteau about the suffocating embrace of racism, is hard to watch and harder still to listen to. Director and co-writer Paul Haggis’ characters say and do things they shouldn’t. Theirs are internal monologues shouted over bullhorns — lines peppered with racial epithets and soaked in the greasy sweat of hatred for anyone who gets…
Not Fonda our cartoon: Mr. Ziegler can enjoy his freedom and draw his little cartoons in part because American men and women serve in our armed forces and die to protect his freedom today, as they did during the Vietnam War (Backwash, April 28). He should apologize to veterans for his latest cartoon and especially apologize to the VFW. Have…
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: Do you know yet if you’re straight or gay? Samantha Overland Park Dear Samantha: Just about all of my chromosomes are splitting like atoms at Chernobyl, but I can’t…
Mannequins with distant stares have modeled wigs at Gigi’s on Grand in downtown Kansas City, Missouri, since 1984. But if the city’s Tax Increment Finance Commission has its way, the owners of the shop, Chung Hoe Ku and his wife, Myong Suk Ku, will be forced to pack the heads in boxes and vacate the premises. The TIF Commission is…
What a triumphant journey awaits Mustafa Akyol. Kansas taxpayers are footing the bill to bring the Istanbul resident to Topeka as one of 23 witnesses scheduled to testify this week before a subcommittee of the Kansas State School Board in its unorthodox “trial” over science teaching standards. (Fortunately, Akyol happens to be in Washington, D.C., on other business, so Kansans…
