Wakarusa Jam fans will want to pick up a four-day pass ($139) to the third-annual Wakarusa Music and Camping Festival. Anyone else should figure out which one or two bands to see, buy a day pass ($49 or $59 at press time) and consider whatever else you run into that day a bonus. Unlike Bonnaroo, which has gone even more…
It’s the summer concert season, which only makes it painfully clear that we live in the dead-ass middle of the country. Madonna, Pearl Jam, Radiohead — all of those hot-ticket tours are flying right over our heads while local marquees display only throwback bands. In contemplating the idea of hot-weather communion with pop dinosaurs, we logged on to iTunes and…
Summer is the season of high expectations and profound disappointments. That suntan looks more like sunburn, your beer stays ice-cold till the moment it’s opened, and fat guys are the only ones hanging by the pool in bikini briefs. So it goes with summer movies: Sequels to beloved faves have all the flavor of week-old popcorn, blockbusters make pennies…
If the Iliad were brand-new — if it were one of this summer’s beach-reading blockbusters — it wouldn’t be a swashbuckling saga of siege, slave girls and slaughter. That stuff might be in there, sure, but only as adornments to the main bit, which would be Homer yakking about how it feels to be Ionian. And a poet. And…
18th Street Fashion Show The block of 18th Street just east of Wyandotte is Kansas City’s fashion hub. The boutiques there — Birdies, Spool, Shuttlecocks, Habitat and, coming in June, Pidgeon — do their damnedest to keep our city’s residents from falling too far behind the ever-elusive curve. These clothes are colorful, cute and ultra-hip, so it makes sense…
If you can tell a society by its smut, then America in the 1950s wasn’t just a Frigidaire of repression. Hidden somewhere in the closets of Pleasantville and Peyton Place, after all, was a stack of fetish mags bearing the face, the hourglass figure — and all the mysteries — of Bettie Page. Here was a brunette Amazon in…
You know it’s hard out here for a screenwriter. You’ve got a surefire hit on your hands – an adaptation of the runaway best-seller The Da Vinci Code – and yet it’s all about talking and solving cryptic riddles, which isn’t exactly suited to a visual medium. It’s also a book that depends on revelation and mystery, but because…
In 1871, at roughly the same time that Kansas City’s most famous whore, Annie Chambers, was building her 24-room brick mansion at Third Street and Wyandotte, three other brick buildings were going up a few blocks away at the corner of Fifth Street and Walnut. This neighborhood, now known as the River Market, was, in the mid-1870s, also home to…
When I was a kid, there were certain things I knew as absolute truths. There was no such person as Santa Claus (“Who do you think works his ass off to buy the gifts around here?” my father would scream on Christmas morning. “Not Santa Claus. Me.”) If I swallowed bubble gum, it would permanently lodge in my intestines….
Of all the counties in the metro, Johnson County is our whipping boy. It’s just too easy — but also too fun — to deride its many stereotypes, from its sprawltastic ways to its SUV-driving suburbanoid residents. However, JoCo also has its pockets of coolness, such as downtown Overland Park, and on a recent Thursday night, we headed thataway with…
In the press material for Blackpool Lights’ first full-length, This Town’s Disaster, lead singer Jim Suptic describes the album like this: “This is just sincere, unpretentious rock music. We don’t have a gimmick; what you see is what you get.” In reality, his statement is only half-right — anyone familiar with the band’s background knows there are quite a few…
If you thought that the Stills were initially lumped into the same scene as Interpol and the Walkmen because of timing rather than musical similarities, the quintet cements that notion on Without Feathers. More Radiohead than the Rapture, Feathers finds the Montreal band more interested in creating expansive soundscapes than brooding in the corner. Maybe it has something to do…
The pot-‘n’-sex paean “Pure Morning” may have given British glam-rockers Placebo stateside recognition, and the irresistible single “Every You Every Me” (featured on the Cruel Intentions soundtrack) might’ve found its way onto quite a few mix tapes — but it’s albums like Meds that give the trio its staying power. Anchored by the inimitable voice of gender-bending frontman Brian Molko,…
When husband-and-wife team Jason Hammel and Kori Gardner — better known as Mates of State — released their debut full-length, My Solo Project, in 2000, it was much easier to think of the duo as a self-indulgent novelty. C’mon — they’re married, they sing sugary-sweet pop songs to each other, and their band has the word mates in its…
Before you go to the Emma Feel show, you should probably pull on your tightest black jeans. And don’t bother washing off the come stains. After all, these KC sludgepunk-funk purveyors are working on a level that is decidedly down-and-dirty. If you’ve ever been unsure whether you really wanted Iggy Pop or David Yow’s pants to come off, whether Curtis…
Vena Amori’s just-released The Seduction of an American Housewife purports to tell “the true story of the Dalton Murders.” Whereas the slayings of the Holcomb, Kansas, Clutter family recently received its second cinematic treatment (Capote, following In Cold Blood), the gruesome 1968 deaths of Crawford City, Kansas, natives Judith and Marilyn Dalton have remained shrouded in mystery until now, though…
Blending marching-band exuberance with under-the-bleachers rebellion, the music of Youngblood Brass Band constantly swells, pops and roars. The blending of jazz, hip-hop, reggae, funk and big band could get muddled in less capable hands, but the Youngbloods always seem to stay driven, even when meandering into virtuoso improvisations and beat-style poetics, complete with live MCing. Perhaps it’s the Madison, Wisconsin,…
A few steps behind fellow Oklahomans the Flaming Lips when it comes to fame, the Starlight Mints are no less creative — or weird — than their wild-eyed statesmen. The Mints’ first two albums showcased agile wordplay but found the band better at crafting stories with dolled-up arrangements than with lyrics. No less infused with horns and strings, Drowaton, released…
Artfully simple and nakedly, brutally literal, the folk-rock of Lowry derives its psychedelic feel from the strange streets of Brooklyn rather than from some mythic acid trip. But don’t our most sober, most real moments sometimes seem to be our most surreal and significant? Honesty and surrealism interweave in the songs of Lowry’s namesake bandleader, the Kansas City-born, New York-based…
Smoking Popes There’s an intense, unspoken connection among fans of Smoking Popes that’s not often seen outside frat houses and Freemason meetings. So when the Chicago foursome re-emerged in 2005, longtime devotees couldn’t wait to see if the band would still be relevant seven years after its demise. Fortunately, it is. A live CD and DVD — recorded at Chi-town’s…
Few rap outfits are as industrious as the Wu-Tang Clan. A clothing line, acting careers (sort of) and solo projects aplenty have kept the hip-hop collective busy. The group recently announced that in addition to the string of upcoming solo albums due in 2006, Ol’ Dirty Bastard’s posthumous LP, A Son Unique, will finally see the light of day. At…
Howdy, gals. Gretchen Wilson here. Back before I was Redneck Woman No. 1, I was livin’ in Pocahontas, Illinois, just tryin’ to pay the bills and find myself a good man. A friend gave me that datin’ guide, The Rules. If you ask me, that book ain’t never gonna snare you no man. These here are the redneck rules,…
A ratty cardboard box of trinkets and a few hardcover books tough enough to weather the weather are the only material possessions that Katie Euliss and her husband, Mike West — known together as Truckstop Honeymoon — managed to salvage from New Orleans’ now infamously flooded 9th Ward. “Our backyard was the levee,” says Euliss, the singer and upright bassist…
Record-store hopping — it’s what you do when you leave town and go to another, cooler city. At least, that’s how it felt after Kansas City’s top two record stores closed over the past couple of months. Sure, you could buy used vinyl at a few Half Price Books around town or at the efficiently maintained Vinyl Renaissance in Shawnee….
