The Girl Is A Ghost, Badge and the Chain Gang at Jerry’s Bait Shop in Lenexa. Hey girl, you wanna go to Jerry’s? There’s totally like hot guys there and cheap beer, I mean, it’s like always ladies night, and I hear there’s this KCMO indie band called The Girl in a Ghost, or something, playing and they like got…
So long, C&S? Weighty rumors have been circulating that the Cup and Saucer, a beloved River Market haunt (if you didn’t know that, you are a loser), will be closing soon. How soon, I don’t know. I do know that this news makes me feel dark inside. First and foremost, I like that place. The restaurant had good food, the…
Here’s a roundup of some of the noteworthy shows this weekend that didn’t make it into the preview coverage in this week’s Pitch music section. FRIDAY Recycled Sounds Farewell Roast at the Record Bar. Bid store owners Kurt and Anne a fond farewell, wishing them good luck as they embark upon new life-chapters — and then kick them in the…
The Caves and the Belles at Jilly’s. Bartender Tony D. said he was going to make Jilly’s a local music hotspot, and so far, his plan is working. I’ve seen four bands there so far on past Thursday nights, and despite the bar’s cramped, occasionally loud-as-hell space, it’s been a good time each show. Tonight brings the debut of the…
Bee Season (Fox) Best of 3rd Rock From the Sun (Anchor Bay) The Big Question (THINKFilm) Bustin’ Bonaparte (Freestyle) Dawson’s Creek: The Complete Sixth Season (Sony) Dirty (Sony) The Fallen (Anthem) Far Side of the Moon (TLA) Gorillaz: Demon Days Live (Virgin) Judges (Anthem) Little Manhattan (Fox/Regency) Liza With a Z (Showtime) Mae West: The Glamour Collection (MCA) Natural City…
On paper, Black sounds like a sure hit: Criterion Studios (the developer behind the spectacular Burnout games) designs a first-person shooter that does away with all that boring sneaking and instead focuses on the pure pyrotechnic appeal of a Hollywood-style gun battle. The game promised sub-woofer-rattling explosions, frantic gunfire in surround sound, and levels that realistically disintegrate as you…
The Mel Brooks Collection (Fox) Talk about taking the good with the bad; how else to describe a boxed set containing Blazing Saddles and Young Frankenstein (Brooks’ silly masterpieces), and Robin Hood: Men in Tights and History of the World, Part 1 (both overrated, even by people who can’t stand them). It’s an incomplete collection — no Spaceballs or The…
Give ’em Hell, Harry Writer Samuel Gallu flatters Missourians for being — like his Harry Truman — straight-talking truth tellers, so it’s my duty to report that this show is a heap of hagiographic piffle, giving us a gabby Truman who jaws at us from the Oval Office like we’re squatting ’round the cracker barrel. The KC Rep’s production is…
Blood Work When she was 7 months old, the daughter of Taiwanese artist Jawshing Arthur Liou was diagnosed with leukemia. Liou went on to document her struggle with the disease through the impressionistic images in these three video and sound installations. In “CBC” (an acronym for “complete blood count”), dreamy, soft-focus snowflakes fall while tiny people appear to run between…
The title of the Kemper Museum of Contemporary Art’s immense two-person show — Ping-Pong Diplomacy — is the term used to describe the cultural exchange of pingpong players between the United States and China in the early 1970s. The exchange program, designed to strengthen the relationship between the two countries, even helped prompt a visit to China by then-President…
You may not yet have lost your ardor and respect for the pressure-point hammer blow that Quentin Tarantino executed on American movies, but it’s difficult at this late date not to view him as an imperative inoculation with unfortunate side effects: gas, bloating, dizziness, delusions of cleverness. Imitators flock when coolness seems an everyman’s right, and because Tarantino’s achievement was…
“You want an easy job, go join the Red Cross,” someone says well into Thank You for Smoking, a gleeful farce about capitalist mendacity based on Christopher Buckley’s 1994 bestseller. The implication, made drummingly plain in the film’s every bon mot, is that our ethical barometers skew lazily toward goodness and that the toughest tasks, appropriate only for the…
Every time a brand-spanking-new restaurant opens in Kansas City, like Bonefish (see review), I feel the need to turn around and pay homage to a local joint with a lot of history. You know, the kind of restaurant that’s literally a survivor. Case in point: the 60-year-old Trolley Inn (11400 East Truman Road) in Independence, which started life as a…
Way back in 1964, when I listened to the Marvelettes sing the bouncy “Too Many Fish in the Sea” on my transistor radio, I was too dumb to figure out that the song was a musical metaphor for fresh boyfriend material (short ones, tall ones, fine ones, kind ones). I thought it was about, you know, fish. Not that…
In some circles, Sunday is a day of rest, and we hope by “rest” they mean “a whole day to drink before facing the drudgery of another workweek.” If that’s wrong, we don’t want to be right. So you can imagine our indignation when we heard that the killjoys at liquor control were determined to quash what few drinking options…
If Joe Good wasn’t born with a mic in his fist, then the doctor must have handed him one after pulling him out of his mama’s womb. That’s just how easy and confident his flow is on Hi, May I Help You?, his latest solo mix and one of two inaugural albums from Good and Mac Lethal’s joint enterprise, Black…
When reviewing one-trick ponies, there’s a dangerous factor that critics almost always forget to take into consideration — that one trick. Action Figure’s six-song EP Every Minute’s the End is a perfect example. On the surface, the Kansas City foursome’s debut might seem like simplistic, power-chorded pop-punk. And that’s probably because, well, it is. But the real danger in AF’s…
One thing about grandparents is having to listen to their stories over and over again. Garden Ruin marks Calexico’s 10th anniversary — a century in rock years — and proves that leader Joey Burns might finally be slipping into his songwriting dotage. The band has rehashed every possible element of itself, from quivering reverb and pseudo-shoegaze swirl to sourpuss folk…
After the critical lovefest that surrounded the Flaming Lips’ last album, Yoshimi Battles the Pink Robots, it would be easy to suspect that the band would wander down the same road of futuristic leanings, drum-and-bass and gargantuan stage shows, assured of the same success. But on At War With the Mystics, the Lips reinvent themselves; the band’s sound is leaner,…
The Spikedrivers love to act up — before, during and after any of their foot-stompin’, crazified country numbers. But the group’s singer-songwriter Jesse Henry, fiendish fiddle player Megan Palmer, guitarists Paul Brown and Steve Sweney, drummer Nate Anders, and ZZ Top-mutton-chops bassist Steven Fox do much more than toss their longhaired, sweaty selves around the sage. Their sound is a…
The UK Britpop zeitgeist seemed completely at odds with America’s music scene during the 1990s. But this decade’s UK resurgence (the Arctic Monkeys’ spastic suburban ennui and the Subways’ bratty, buzz-saw punk) more often than not aligns with the emo angst and punk pretensions of modern American upstarts — save for Nine Black Alps, who could easily find success in…
Having seen some of their elders wither on the Warped Tour, next-generation emo groups have decided to graduate from the genre before its shelf life expires. Matchbook Romance’s dubious debut, Stories and Alibis, nominated the quartet as “Least Likely to Succeed.” However, the band’s recent Voices transcends its whinecore origins. Matchbook Romance has taken its strengths — peppy percussion, fist-pump…
We really hate to use the phrase music collective, but how else to describe the members of Toronto’s Broken Social Scene? Supergroup? The Canadian Traveling Wilburys? We give up. Foxy BSS guitarist Jason Collett dipped his toes into solo waters with 2003’s Motor Motel Love Songs, a compilation of hazy folk-pop songs. His latest effort, Idols of Exile, is fleshed-out…
In the secular world, the closest parallels to gospel mogul Kirk Franklin are George Clinton and Prince. All three rule musical universes that they envisioned, created and control. (Franklin’s Grammy-winning latest, Hero, and Prince’s 3121 are a mere six innuendos and one Prince whisker apart.) But Franklin’s funk and sweetness answer always — and only — to a bigger ruler….
