Mythical Best: a band that should get free lattes. I was inexplicably frustrated this morning, so after cranking out some copy, I plugged my head into my iPod, turned up the Replacements and walked down to drink my lunch (medium latte with skim and a Walker Red, neat) at JP Winebar and Coffeehouse. It turns out that a barista there…
Beowulf & Grendel (Anchor Bay) The Book of Daniel: The Complete Series (Universal) Bratz: Passion Fashion Diamondz (Fox) Con Man (Docurama) Curious George (Universal) Danger Mouse: The Final Seasons (A&E) Daniel Boone: Season 1 and Season 2 (Goldhil) Dark Shadows: DVD Collection 26 (MPI) Dracula: 75th Anniversary Edition (Universal) Drop Dead Sexy (Lionsgate) The Fast and the Furious: Tokyo Drift…
Football is a game of inches. The same goes for the Madden series. Each fall, a new Madden game arrives, with a roster update and an incremental change in the game-play formula. Last year brought a “cone of vision” for the quarterback, which mostly just annoyed the fans. Madden NFL 07 is no exception to the trend. The game…
The Big Animal (Milestone) It’s a simple yet lesser known law of comedy: Camels are always funny. There are the jaws that drool and chew side to side, the front legs that move like a human’s, the humps — but mostly it’s the eyes: There’s something of Buddha in a camel’s eyes. The Big Animal has earned attention for…
The American Songbook: Music of the 1920s and ’30s The good news about the new season at Quality Hill Playhouse is that there’s not much news at all. Everything’s as it should be, with director, pianist and master of ceremonies J. Kent Barnhart and three cabaret pros gliding through the best of George and Ira Gershwin, Cole Porter and Jerome…
Elissa Armstrong: Objects of Innocence and Experience Lawrence artist Elissa Armstrong takes the lighthearted concept of “sit-arounds” (or “set-arounds,” depending on how rural your accent is) —decorative objects, including porcelain unicorns, free-standing arrangements of dried flowers and Precious Moments figurines — and flips it on its innocent little head. For this show, the Alfred University-educated ceramist (and University of Kansas…
Robin Beard’s work recalls childhood moments — making strings of hair or wormy things out of Play-Doh, or watching lit-up, oozy snakes uncoiling along a sidewalk on the Fourth of July. Only now, they’re up on walls at the Dolphin Gallery. Beard’s ceramic pieces, at first glance, don’t appear to be ceramic. Some parts are made of porcelain ribbons…
For whatever reason, men have been dressing like women ever since someone thought to sort the loincloths into his and hers piles. Sometimes it’s for getting laughs, sometimes it’s for getting off, and for centuries — from kabuki to Shakespeare — it’s just been a way to get through a play. In our time, an actor in drag is…
Watching The Guardian, you will learn that the U.S. Coast Guard’s rescue swimmers rank among the bravest and least heralded of military personnel, selflessly hurling themselves into raging currents or hurricane swells to save a single human life. But even these knights in neoprene armor probably couldn’t rescue an audience from The Guardian’s torrent of watery clichés. There’s the grizzled…
Sweet, crazy and tinged with sadness, Michel Gondry’s new feature, The Science of Sleep, is a wondrous concoction. The tricky romantic narrative — in which Gael García Bernal plays a hapless, Chaplinesque madman — may be reminiscent of Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, which Gondry directed from Charlie Kaufman’s script. The look, however, harks back to Gondry’s music…
When sushi chef David Loo packed up his knives and left the Sushi House last year to open his own restaurant, he took his Hot Temptation Roll with him. “It’s one of the things my customers love the most,” says the broad-shouldered, Malaysian-born owner of Kaiyo. “It’s a signature item.” Hell, if I had a Hot Temptation Roll, I’d…
It’s hard for us UMKC grads to get excited about football. When we ‘Roos are forced to pledge allegiance to a team during this time of year, we have to gridiron-glom elsewhere. Right now, we’re all about National American University. We’re so looking forward to the big game against DeVry. Thanks to a new bar in town, though, we might…
For most of the ’90s and well into this decade, London’s Paul Oakenfold was reputed to be the biggest DJ in the world. “Oakey” is probably best known for a famous trip he took in 1987 to the party island of Ibiza in the Mediterranean, where he found a love for electronic music and emerged a highly sought-after party DJ…
Pirates and sailors sang sea chanteys as work songs — morale boosters devised to provide the necessary rhythm for pulling anchor, hauling line and hoisting sail. Chanteys were also the foulest, loneliest, most murderous ditties of the past four centuries: proto-punk rock. Some soundtrack! Rogue’s Gallery compiles 43 such songs at the behest of Pirates of the Caribbean’s Johnny Depp…
Protégé of Woody Guthrie, teacher to Bob Dylan, inspiration to Mick Jagger, 75-year-old Ramblin’ Jack Elliott bulldozes the mountain-size pile of weepy singer-songwriter albums this year with ease on his 20th-odd release, I Stand Alone. Damn right, this Grammy winner stands alone. The album’s cover art depicts the grizzled folk archetype in a cowboy hat and bandanna standing against wild…
It’s difficult to pinpoint exactly what Mark Linkous’ voice sounds like. He uses vocal effects with the same calculation a kidnapper would on a phoned-in ransom demand. For this fourth chapter in his Sparklehorse saga, he returns with some notable guest stars, including Tom Waits, Steven Drozd (the Flaming Lips) and DJ Danger Mouse, but you wouldn’t know it. Linkous,…
Opening every show with a sample from what has to be one of those old-school Halloween sound-effects records — complete with hooting owls and other things creepy — Black Christmas knows how to set the mood. Yet the band members, having culled their interests in horror films and progressive rock, are looking beyond kitsch — the ever-expanding pedal boards of…
The blues-rock duo is hardly a novelty these days, but Louisiana’s Deadboy and the Elephantmen stands up to the best of them. Dax Riggs, whose sinister lyrics and soulful vocals once fueled death-metal acts such as Acid Bath and Agents of Oblivion, now teeters between swampy Delta stompers and garage folk with one finger planted firmly on the doomsday button….
Now that we’ve all forgotten about the Strokes, let’s take a moment to remember the Strokes. In the fall of 2001, the New York City quintet sat poised (and posed) at the crossroads — of rock and fashion, indie sound and commercial fury, shampoo and conditioner. With a bag of Scrabble tiles for names and a salon’s worth of dirty-chic…
American fans may have left this early-’80s Canadian postpunk originator for dead, but the band’s cult in Europe hasn’t waned, and it remains hallowed up north. Nomeansmo still tours annually in Europe, but it’s been nearly six years since the band released a record. So maybe it’s the nonexistent expectations, but its 14th album, All Roads Lead to Ausfahrt, is…
If you like a side of brains with your beats, Qwel and Quaazar of the Typical Cats are as cerebral as underground Chicago hip-hop gets. In Qwel’s world, backpacks clang with heavy Krylon cans, faces are hidden deep in the recesses of hoodies, and everyone has a comeback ready in case of a word war (You couldn’t beat me to…
Since 1996, Calexico frontman Joey Burns and drummer John Convertino have been pushing steadily out from the margins of the lo-fi art-rock world of Giant Sand and the Friends of Dean Martin (their former groups, and two that shaped their Southwestern tones and otherworldly eclecticism). The band’s newest album, Garden Ruin, surges like a flash flood over the pair’s mariachi…
I t’s nice to see that AOL has moved on from bombarding our mailboxes with dial-up disposables to promoting indie music. Its online music show and podcast, The Interface, recently featured Denmark prog-rockers Mew, who open for Kasabian Tuesday at the Bottleneck. You can download the band’s exclusive AOL session, which includes acoustic versions of tracks from the recent And…
If you happen to run into Kenn Jankowski on the street during the next few weeks, try to give the guy a break. He’s not arrogant; in fact, he’s usually a very well-mannered young man. It’s just that the lead guitarist and keyboardist for the Golden Republic has a new love: his latest project, the Republic Tigers. Listening to…
