Because a band whose name implies a terroristic threat against the Statue of Liberty would probably meet significant resistance in George Bush’s post-9-11 America, San Diego’s the Plot to Blow Up the Eiffel Tower was wise to choose a moniker that insults another nation’s symbol. These days, Americans could hardly be called Francophiles, anyway. Carried out by four artsy jazz-punk…
Like a Grand Guignol version of Gwar, Sleepytime Gorilla Museum may be too scary and weird for our roots-rockin’, boom-car-bumpin’ Midwestern hills to handle. Resplendent in bestial, gothic pageantry, this charismatic, terrifying New York performance-art-rock troupe combines perverse, homemade instruments with bass, drums and guitar to produce intricate, thunderous and downright demonic music, narrated by the Wagner-meets-Waits vocals of black-toothed…
Life of Agony (pictured) pioneered the high-volume broken-home ballad. These days, many heavy-group singers croon while their compositions burn, but on 1993’s River Runs Red and 1995’s Ugly, Keith Caputo’s operatic anguish made him a total freak in the grunt-dominated hardcore-hybrid scene. This week, LOA returns with Broken Valley, its major-label debut and its first original-lineup release in a decade….
Kicking the wheels off their skateboards and heading for the beach, the boys behind the Oranges Band have made this year’s perfect summer album. Freshly squeezed with sing-alongs about riding waves and dealing with sharks, The World & Everything In It hangs a perfect 10 with a tidal wave of four guitars and a lush backdrop of Beach Boys-inspired harmonies….
The CMT network just named the Nitty Gritty Dirt Band among the top 20 country bands of all time, up there with the Carter Family, Bill Monroe and Johnny Cash. The band isn’t necessarily a hit maker, however. After more than 30 years, “Mr. Bojangles” and “Fishin’ in the Dark” remain its most recognizable songs. But the Dirt Band has…
Like fellow 2004 Band Scramble survivor Silver Shore, Anvil Chorus has made only a single alteration to its drawn-from-a-hat lineup. But it’s a substantial one. Byron Huhmann, formerly the driving force behind Onward Crispin Glover (and an eerie dead ringer for its namesake), gives the group a versatile second guitarist. Power-pop riffs have been Huhmann’s bread and butter for more…
Onstage at Lincoln Center, Wynton Marsalis can rattle off celestial Dizzy Gillespie solos like he’s brushing his teeth, but “A Night in Tunisia” just sounds better on a pool-hall jukebox. That’s because flashy suits and Ken Burns films, though musically and historically true, just aren’t hip. It was the DIY nature of indie and punk — the modern equivalent of…
Once you get past the way opening song “If You Believe in Christmas Trees,” with its fey title, its Masterpiece Theatre trumpet overdubs and Richard Davies and Eric Matthews’ crisp elocution, recalls Spinal Tap’s “(Listen to the) Flower People,” Cardinal weaves a bit of a spell. The 10-year-old album, here given a loving reissue with 11 bonus tracks and liner…
In the span of five years, Chris Martin has gone from irritating bloke mewling about yellow stars to movie-star boinker and fruity-name bestower. Inside the music business, he’s also seen as the man most likely to resuscitate the industry, and X&Y, the latest from Coldplay, offers the breath of life. Songs such as “Square One” and “Speed of Sound” start…
In some unknown language, De Novo Dahl might just mean the perfect band (or perhaps Roald Dahl’s nipple). But in the common parole of modern music, this six-member Nashville band seems destined (or determined) to labor in obscurity. A ponderous double helping of mouthwatering pop, Cats & Kittens is a two-disc delight that was two years in the making, so…
Most likely, only diehard fans cared that the Beta Band disintegrated after last year’s poorly received Heroes to Zeros. But the Scottish band’s legacy — opening for Radiohead, being name-checked by John Cusack in High Fidelity and, most important, crafting hippie-dippie psychedelic dronefests — is evident on the debut disc by Engineers. The London quartet layers hypnotic vocals, lullabylike rhythms…
The most impressive thing about Cowboy Troy’s major-label debut is what it took to make a black country-rapper feasible. Hip-hop, the great assimilationist art, had to become the dominant musical form. A long line of experiments, from Charlie Daniels’ spoken-word songs to Timbaland’s hoedowns with Bubba Sparxxx, had to lay the groundwork for this collision of marketing-savvy genres. It still…
The White Stripes’ fifth album is a collision of authenticity and progress. On the one hand, tracks such as “I’m Lonely (But I Ain’t That Lonely Yet)” and the hayloft square dance “Little Ghost” proudly display the blue-collar grit the duo perfected on four previous albums — discs soaked in Nashville heartache and vintage Victrola blues. On the other hand,…
When you’re in the middle of a shitty breakup, crashing on a friend’s brutally uncomfortable, puke-brown, pull-out sofa, absorbing yourself in piles of work in order to avoid breaking down into self-indulgent sobbing, let me tell you, the last thing you want to hear, two days before a do-or-die deadline, is that the leader of the fifth band-of-the-moment you’ve written…
Rosa Parks won’t be suing Earatik Statik anytime soon. The Chicago hip-hop trio name-checks the Civil Rights activist in the chorus of “Makin’ Moves,” which proclaims the group to be makin’ moves like Rosa Parks from the back of the bus. Fortunately, unlike a certain interstellar hip-hop duo from Atlanta, Earatik Statik doesn’t have the deep pockets that warrant a…
Historically, Wichita has been a lonely place for live-music addicts. But Dan Davis, arguably the biggest concert junkie in southern Kansas, is working to change that. “My older brother snuck me into the Replay when I was around 18 to see his band and a couple of other bands play,” Davis says. “It was the first time I stood,…
I never thought I’d say this, but Wakarusa is going to kick ass this year. I had written off the four-day music festival (six-day if you count all the prefestival concerts) as nothing more than playtime for the kind of people who are unable to contribute to civilization’s progress but make up for it by ridding their diet of meat,…
It’s not easy fronting a band that’s the darling of the rock press. Just ask Spoon frontman Britt Daniel, who’s busy collecting five-star accolades for his group’s latest effort, Gimme Fiction. The love that critics heaped upon Spoon in the wake of 2002’s Kill the Moonlight helped make Fiction, which arrived in May, one of the year’s most eagerly awaited…
About a year ago, buzz started building among horror fans about a French slasher movie titled Haute Tension about two girls who go to a country house and are terrorized by a maniac in workman’s coveralls. Dimension Films quickly signed 25-year-old director Alexandre Aja to remake Wes Craven’s 1977 mutant-cannibal-redneck flick The Hills Have Eyes, and Lions Gate sealed the…
The consequences of marital discord in Mr. & Mrs. Smith go way beyond sleeping on the couch or maintaining icy silence at the breakfast table. Thanks to a cartoonish premise by British screenwriter Simon Kinberg — and the dictates of the summer movie marketplace — the battling Smiths of the title go at each other with knives, fists, high-caliber…
Take it from a real pro: This letter is in response to “Measure for Measure” of last week (Letters, June 2). I guess the point Mr. “I’ve been playing longer than most of the audience at El Torreon” was trying to make is valid, in that a decent monitor mix makes your experience as a musician more enjoyable. As long…
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: I knew Newsweek was full of shit. There’s no way you can flush a Quran down the toilet. It gets stuck every time. But I’m finding that if you…
The Strip takes it upon itself, from time to time, to point out the behind-the-scenes tribulations at this town’s newspaper of record, The Kansas City Star. So naturally, folks with the big daily’s juicy secrets tend to come to us. But the latest dish about the Star really threw us for a loop. This was really flattering info about the…
Steven Parkus, Missouri’s capital punishment inmate No. 54, sits across a metal table from Wade Myers, a Florida psychiatrist, in an interview room in the Potosi Correctional Center, the state’s death house, about 70 miles south of St. Louis. Parkus rubs his eyes with shackled hands, rocks back and forth, smiles and jokes with Myers, seemingly unaware that he’s conversing…
