The people over at KansasCity.com have already sounded off on their picks for the year’s best albums — except for Jim Kilroy, who preferred instead to list his top 10 favorite Club Wars winners. That’s just too rich. Our final report (top 10 or so local albums, with compelling commentary) will be in our December 28 issue. Don’t miss it….
Thanks for the comments to Tuesday’s post. I guess we’ll declare White Whale eligibly local. I was ready from the get-go to accept them as local, but some people groan when they see a local band that happens also to be on a decent label beat out unsigned locals. Now: Fresh from Mr. Postman: 9o.9 The Bridge: Live Volume 1…
After the Pitch reported November 30 that officials at the Kansas City, Kansas, Board of Public Utility had been expensing excessive meals, the utility’s Ethics Commission did exactly what it should have done. It began an inquiry. Mike Price, the chairman of the Ethics Commission, asked the BPU for a copy of the public documents provided to the Pitch. He…
AFI: I Heard a Voice (Interscope) Air Buddies (Disney) Ali Rap (ESPN) The Andy Griffith Show: The Complete Series (Paramount) Barnyard (Paramount) The Chronicles of Narnia: Four-Disc Extended Edition (Disney) A Dead Calling (Lions Gate) The Doors (Lions Gate) James Bond: Ultimate Edition Volumes 3 and 4 (MGM) John Wayne in Color (Legend) Lara Croft Tomb Raider: The Action Adventure…
Nintendo has achieved the impossible: My 50-year-old, non-gaming father wants a Wii for Christmas. Either I’ve been whisked to Bizarro World, or The House That Mario Built is on to something big. With the release of its oddly monikered next-gen system, Nintendo may just have revolutionized the way America will think about videogames. As promised, the innovative console immediately hooks…
Talladega Nights: The Ballad of Ricky Bobby (Columbia) This cut of Will Ferrell’s NASCAR comedy runs 13 minutes longer than the theatrical version, and that doesn’t take into account the deleted and extended scenes, outtakes, phony commercials, public-service announcements or gag reel. A movie that already seemed to be constructed from deleted scenes is well served by a DVD overflowing…
Christmas All Over the Place The title implies that somebody has to do some cleaning up — “There’s Christmas all over the place! Get a mop!” — and the show’s inventive staging almost guarantees it. Inspired by New York’s Paper Bag Players, Theatre for Young America’s holiday throw-down is like a gifted kids’ art class brought to life: The show’s…
Cryptozoology: Out of Time Place Scale A cryptid is a creature like Bigfoot or the Loch Ness Monster — that is, lost, rumored or thought to be extinct. Cryptozoology is a science — or pseudoscience, depending on whom you ask — that studies such creatures. A real-life cryptozoologist named Loren Coleman joins 17 artists from around the world in a…
Corrie Baldauf says her art is about “finding the things that make you feel alive.” For her, this feeling is evoked by patterns she sees everywhere — in nature, in the stories of a person’s life, in art. They run through all the work in Baldauf’s Documenting Circumstance. In the spacious accommodations at the Crossroads’ new Unit 5 gallery,…
A couple of years back, I attended a wedding in a double-wide trailer. I shit you not, Kansas City. Even better, it was a borrowed double-wide, lent by the best man so that all assembled might enjoy its roominess — twice the size of the groom’s cozy single — as well as the trampoline and aluminum swimming pool out…
Heath Ledger and Abbie Cornish play unbelievably gorgeous heroin junkies in Candy, a don’t-try-this-at-home melodrama adapted from Australian author Luke Davies’ aptly billed “novel of love and addiction.” Essentially, the film is Requiem for a Dream with a lot less of that overrated indie’s visual dazzle, though director Neil Armfield does put his smacked-out couple on one of those centrifugally…
About Will Smith’s estimable talents, there is no doubt. Six Degrees of Separation, Ali … um … “Parents Just Don’t Understand” — the man’s got skills to pay the bills, yours and mine and his. That he seldom uses them is dispiriting. This is an actor coming off a streak that includes, in order and with no omissions, Men…
All restaurant closings are bittersweet, but for Christian and Cristal Fuller, owners of the 11-year-old Iliki Café (6431 North Crosby Road), the sadness of closing their Northland restaurant was compounded with every e-mail and phone call they received from the restaurant’s loyal fans. “I’ve cried a river over this decision,” Cristal tells me, “and every time I cry, I tell…
Ask me what year Milk Duds were invented (1926) or the year the first salad bar was introduced in the United States (1971), and I’ll give you a few fun facts that might come in handy if you’re grasping for cocktail conversation. But even though I worked in Overland Park for 15 years, I never knew (or cared) when…
DJ Ian Frost moved to Kansas City about a year ago, having previously coordinated shows in Phoenix, Dallas, San Diego and Los Angeles. His friend DJ Kiko DeGallo has been playing records since his high school days in his native Cadiz, Spain. Together, the two new faces bring you Beat Drop, a Friday night outing (except for First Fridays) at…
On a Tuesday night at the Roxy, the Night Ranger got pulled onto the dance floor by a gregarious woman in a pink sweater who was celebrating her 32nd birthday. As Shakira warbled “Hips Don’t Lie,” a guy dressed in goth garb zeroed in on the NR. But the woman skillfully blocked him by turning around and rubbing against…
And so the theme continues: Ever since his smooth debut, Musicforthemorningafter, Pete Yorn has been obsessed with the day-as-life metaphor, moving through the a.m. hours of his career into his second collection — Day I Forgot — and now onto the recent Nightcrawler. Though Yorn took an afternoon nap on that second disc, his latest release recaptures the eerie, odd…
Had Black Tie Dynasty’s full-length debut, Movements, actually been released in the 1980s, John Hughes would have fallen all over himself to put the band’s tunes in, say, Pretty in Pink. Cory Watson’s earnest yelps and distressed tenor recall a young Ian McCulloch, a perfect match for Movements’ swooning (new) romance and sparkling bombast. Think U2 (“Antarctica”), Simple Minds (“Bells”)…
Considering that Kirk Rundstrom is having a difficult time playing Split Lip Rayfield shows on account of esophageal cancer, it’s a total mindfuck that he would dare to revive the blazing psychobilly of Scroat Belly. Birthed of an apparent vortex of musical touchstones in mid-’90s Wichita, the group (which also includes Split Lip’s Wayne Gottstine) sounds a bit like the…
With the October release of Mercy, Planes Mistaken for Stars’ seventh release in nearly 10 years, the band’s metal cred has grown again. For its first Abacus Recordings disc, the group worked with Matt Bayles, whose production credits include heavyweights Mastodon and Isis. The Denver quartet’s face-melting power is in no way diminished by the jump to a larger label…
In a world where YouTube is king, a band’s popularity can hinge on one clever video (case in point: OK Go and those treadmills). But for Omaha, Nebraska’s the Faint, multimedia isn’t reserved for some 15-year-old kid checking out bands while the porn finishes downloading on his parents’ dial-up; it’s an integral part of the live experience. On the group’s…
Army of Anyone is the next entry in the cycle of dudes from successful, now-defunct alt-rock bands of the 1990s forming 21st-century supergroups. The anyone in this army includes Robert Patrick, former frontman for buzz band Filter (“Hey Man, Nice Shot”), and brothers Dean and Robert DeLeo, Scott Weiland’s old mates from Stone Temple Pilots. Like Weiland’s Velvet Revolver, Army…
A greatest-hits album from Mary J. Blige presents more problems than you’d expect. For one thing, very few memorable singles exist between 1992’s huge, sublime “Real Love,” which anointed Blige the queen of hip-hop soul, and her latest, last year’s Grammy-nominated “Be Without You.” Like many great singers, Blige depends on the melodic invention of others, and the R&B she’s…
Pity pub rock, punk rock’s fatally unpretentious big brother. Punk stole his guitar and plastered it over with slogans and snot. In 1994, the Figgs stole it back with their debut, Low-Fi at Society High. The album was billed as pop-punk, but more than any band since Squeeze, the Figgs highlighted the neglected constellation of rock and pop classicists that…
