Some of the year’s best local groups and artists didn’t put out an album in 2005 but were nonetheless present, winning fans and making the scene like firefighters in the old River Quay. This list is an abbreviated way of honoring musicians who were crucial to Kansas City’s musical culture but only recorded a few songs, available online and elsewhere….
With recording costs, promotional opportunities, gas prices, air quality, the availability of places to swim in the summertime, and the likelihood of finding a bartender who can mix the perfect martini being what they are now, many bands are using EPs as a way of hooking people up with their music on a budget. These EPs rocked as hard as…
In 2005, the growing popularity of Web sites such as Myspace gave area artists the ability to network with both fanbase and colleagues. It also helped position them for national attention. On December 16, local producer Miles Bonny announced on his own Myspace page that he had pulled the plug on the online KC hip-hop community he helped create. “Lawrencehiphop.com…
Listening to these records again to compile a list of Kansas City’s best damned roots, rock and pop records of 2005 was like injecting fresh chemicals into the bloodstream — I discovered much I’d never heard before and much that I hadn’t enjoyed the first time around. Understand that what follows are just the opinions of a few exhausted and…
Microsoft isn’t described as an underdog very often. But in the world of video games, Sony’s PlayStation is king and all others fight for scraps. While Microsoft’s Xbox managed to bump the once-great Nintendo into third place, it nevertheless remains a distant second to the PS2, which commands an installed base of almost 100 million units. But the Redmond giant…
The year 2005 may be the last hurrah for this generation’s aging consoles, but sugar, they’re going down swingin’. The PlayStation 2, Xbox and Game Cube age gracefully, pushing their hardware to the limit one last time and developing some brilliant games in the process — from tear-jerking, giant-slaying adventure to piss-in-your-pants zombie horror. The Highlander swore there could…
Until this year, nature documentaries generally found their homes at PBS and Animal Planet, enjoying modest audiences made up of children and scientists. Then came March of the Penguins, which earned close to $80 million at the box office and is still playing in some areas six months after its release. That’s a long run for a bunch of tubby…
What a difference a year makes. In 2004, Michael Moore’s Bush-bashing Fahrenheit 9/11 was not only the most-watched and most-debated doc in release but also among the highest-grossing movies of the year. This year’s most-watched and highest-grossing documentary was, of course, March of the Penguins, which was about as contentious as a cotton ball; your kids are probably watching the…
Amid Hollywood’s zillion-dollar explosions and computer-enhanced trickery, plenty of quieter, better films sneaked into theaters virtually unnoticed this year. Some of them never made it to local screens, but many have since made it to the video store. Balzac and the Little Chinese Seamstress This lyrical film from Chinese director Dai Sijie, who based the drama on his own semi-autobiographical…
When your movie critics’ tastes range from Jane Austen to Rob Zombie, there’s bound to be some turbulence come awards time. Perhaps not surprisingly, determining the year’s best films is something of an imprecise science here: Our top movie was anything but a unanimous pick among critics Luke Y. Thompson, Melissa Levine, Robert Wilonsky, Bill Gallo and Jean Oppenheimer. This…
If you go to Rotten Tomatoes, the Web site that compiles more than 100 film critics’ reviews each week, you will find at the top of the “Certified Fresh” list a single movie that was the very best reviewed of 2005. It was not a remake or a sequel, it didn’t cost $200 million, and it didn’t star a…
The week after Christmas is a metaphorical hangover, as opposed to the literal hangover that follows New Year’s Eve. The gifts are unwrapped, there are none forthcoming in the near future, and the daunting thought of paying for those shopping sprees is just starting to settle in. Tonight at Dark Horse Tavern (4112 Pennsylvania, 816-931-3663), forlorn patrons can self-medicate with…
Last month in this column, I wrote about the sad fate of Caliente, the Cuban restaurant that developer Kerry Duffin and chef Peter Castillo had completed in the Crossroads District. Duffin hadn’t secured enough parking spaces near the 103-year-old building at 103 West 19th Street, and the Board of Zoning Adjustment declined to hear Duffin’s second application for a parking…
One of the big archaeological discoveries of 2005 was a food product. That’s right, a 4,000-year-old bowl of noodles turned up this year at a dig in China. At about the same time, a somewhat less momentous find was made in the lower level of the Plaza III steakhouse on the Country Club Plaza. While renovating the basement space…
Absurd Person Singular Kansas City’s singular Mark Robbins directs and acts in this dark yuletide farce, in which three British couples of varying stations celebrate three consecutive Chirstmases. At each party, our perspective is limited to the kitchen, meaning we get more kvetching than celebrating. Despite big, door-slamming laughs, what concerns playwright Alan Ayckbourn is how the classes chafe as…
Beautiful Fractals Barista and visual artist Leto Blackman apparently isn’t shy about self-promotion. As the general manager of the coffee shop that exhibits his work, Blackman has taken advantage of the position’s perks. One of them is the response he hears from behind the counter as customers — primarily coffee drinkers, not necessarily art enthusiasts — react to his art….
Blue Christmas, Kansas City painter Jane Pronko’s exhibit at the Late Show, is a sweet and melancholy ode to despair. Pronko uses the elements of a modern city — sidewalks, streets, automobiles, buildings — but removes the many denizens of the urban landscape to create frequently stunning images of individuals in isolation. Most are of New York City, but…
Around this time of year, the Night Ranger’s mission statement becomes clear: Do not be That Girl at the office holiday party. Which, as we can all agree, is really an impossible goal (thank you, open bar). Yes, ’tis the season to drink, be merry and drunkenly hook up with your co-worker or your platonic date to the party. We…
Like the ends of good stories, the changes in the best pop songs are both surprising and inevitable. Over the too-short half-hour of The Actor, Evan Saathoff’s first fullish-length release, we’re treated to songs that lift to stirring bridges and choruses that we’d never have predicted. But we know in our guts that they could only have gone this way,…
If any tweeters got blown during the making of this EP from local MC Dante Everglade (who also goes by the alias Negro Scoe), it wasn’t because of Dante’s cutting lyrics or aggressive spittin’. Everglade is foremost a groove guy — his words are secondary to the flow. At least, that’s how he comes across on Blown Tweeters. (The style…
Les Fossoyeurs (self-released) There are dead live albums, and then there are live live albums. Leave it to a sweaty pack of elder Frenchies whose name translates as the gravediggers to understand the difference exactiment. Just a few days after throwing down a series of off-the-hook shows in Kansas City this past spring, the inimitable Fossoyeurs headed south and recorded…
Some soul singers have sung their joy — Sam Cooke and Stevie Wonder not least — and made their best art. But Anthony Hamilton comes from a bluesier tradition, with a lilting, earthbound voice that knows struggle, and he comes with a masterwork in 2003’s heavy Comin’ From Where I’m From. His latest, Ain’t Nobody Worryin,’ is not as cheery…
On paper, great pop-and-roll all sounds the same, no matter how much you play it up. You’ll insist that the Supernauts’ vocals soar, the guitars crunch and the melodies gum up in your brainstem. You’ll be like, Damn, these guys dig punk and T. Rex and great big shimmery glam hooks. And they probably have such killer record collections they’d…
Normally, it’s door-draw suicide for a local group to play several shows in the area within a short timespan. However, when one of the events is something bigger than the band, such as the Brick’s New Year’s Eve bash, it’s entirely understandable for a group to double-dip into the concert calendar. Darling at Sea won’t exactly rile up December 31…
