It’s no insult to point out that country music radio confectioners Sugarland are about as pop as country comes. That’s pop as it used to be: melodically unfussy, equal parts candy and substance. They’ll na na na pleasantly as a track fades out, and, Christ, the duo wraps up the “fan club edition” of their likable Love on the Inside…
There’s a kind-of-funny, kind-of-sad scene in the movie Baby Boy, John Singleton’s follow-up to Boyz n the Hood. Tyrese Gibson and Omar Gooding, playing two close friends, chase down a group of teenage boys who have robbed Tyrese’s character. Gooding and Tyrese line up each of the young boys on a front lawn. While the other boys tremble, one stares…
For the fourth year in a row, tickets for this huge all-ages rock festival sponsored by KQRC 98.9 have sold out. Fortunately, plenty of scalpers close to the gates at Penn Valley Park’s Liberty Memorial have got ya covered. This year’s lineup includes L.A.’s raunchy hard rockers Buckcherry, Grammy winners Korn, the post-grunge quartet Shinedown, Canada’s Theory of a Deadman,…
Hailing from St. Louis, Joe Stickley’s Blue Print is a folk-rock band — in that order. The gentle strums of Stickley’s acoustic guitar provide the engine for many songs on Smoke Leaves Town, while shuffling drums, quavering fiddle and the reedy wheeze of an accordion add color and depth throughout. There’s a bucolic whimsy that breezes through the record; lyrics…
Hubert Sumlin’s brand of the blues creeps in like fog. It moves with a deliberate groove, slowly enveloping you until suddenly you’re soaking in it. His guitar playing has an unassuming quality that sneaks up on you, cagily circling before exploding in a flurry of unpredictable licks. A Chicago blues adherent from way back, the 70-something Sumlin moved to the…
Each time Hopewell swings through the Replay Lounge, the tiny venue seems to have a harder time containing it. Few bands bring a show as mammoth as Hopewell’s, replete with rock-star lighting and a jet-engine squall that shakes the windows. Following in the footsteps of bands like the Flaming Lips and Mercury Rev (the latter of which periodically enlists Hopewell…
Director Sam Raimi defaults to the horror romps that made his name (the Evil Dead trilogy). Playing a bank loan officer, Alison Lohman bears the brunt of this film’s supernatural humiliations. Lohman’s Christine Brown is putting the finishing touches on her self-reinvention as a young professional: eye on a promotion, renting hillside real estate in Los Angeles, and heading toward…
Snoop Dogg knew what he was doing when he reached out to Charlie Wilson for a sample and four guest vocals to enhance Tha Doggfather, the rapper’s 1996 follow-up to Doggystyle. Charlie Wilson’s original act, the Gap Band (named for Wilson’s North Tulsa neighborhood of Greenwood, Archer and Pine, which was once called the black Wall Street and was burned…
I was hoping she wouldn’t come over. Interaction with the performer was my biggest fear recently as I watched Ruby Falls wind her way through the Jardine’s dining room, ruffling hair and thrusting her chest in the faces of audience members. I knew my gender afforded me a little added security against getting singled out by the singer for Alacartoona….
Writer-director Rian Johnson’s movies are clever and soulful confabulations. The filmmaker’s screenplays read like novels, and he serves up movies that could play like parodies. The Brothers Bloom is a love story — two, actually — that flirts with the con-man movie clichés with which Johnson ultimately can’t be bothered. Which is just as well. The genre’s big game is…
Young people suck. For the old and the jaded, there’s nothing quite like a sub-30-something filled with optimism and ambition to make you miss your once-full head of hair even more. So if the punk kids just won’t stay off your lawn, do whatever you can to avoid Lawrence three-piece American Low Life’s self-titled EP. There’s nothing polished or particularly…
Yeah Yeah Yeahs drummer Brian Chase vividly recalls the winter day earlier this year when a hot-from-the-manufacturing-plant CD of It’s Blitz! — the third full-length from the bicoastal trio of Chase, singer Karen O, and guitarist Nick Zinner — arrived at his doorstep. He held it in his hands and he talked to it. “I was like, ‘All this blood,…
This is an embarrassing admission, but it’s true: I always wake up on the wrong side of the bed. One of the reasons I’m not much of a breakfast eater is that I’m perpetually grumpy in the morning — too ill-tempered to expend more energy than it takes to prepare coffee and one piece of toast. And I prefer to…
First of all, Up is not a movie about a cranky old coot who finds his inner child, with the help of a roly-poly Boy Scout, during a series of magical adventures experienced from the front porch of a dilapidated manse held aloft by hundreds of helium-filled balloons. Such, of course, is the perception advanced by promotional materials, which sell…
At the Kansas City Repertory Theatre’s dizzy, lavish A Flea in Her Ear, there’s only one problem most audience members might face: They might be glutted. So generous is Georges Feydeau’s 1907 farce (and David Ives’ new adaptation) with double-entendres and door slams and escalating complications, and so frequent and hearty are the laughs elicited as director Gary Griffin and…
It’s a packed house on this mid-May evening at the Blue Room. The third Tuesday of every month always draws a specific crowd to the jazz club at 18th Street and Vine. It’s poetry slam night, when wordsmiths from across the metro gather to show their skills to a jury of their peers. Secret judges are scattered throughout the crowd….
More than 200 union carpenters showed up at Lee’s Summit City Hall on a recent Tuesday. Some rode Harleys. Some brought children. Almost all of them wore T-shirts protesting a deal that the City Council was about to make. The carpenters mustered in the parking lot, giving the council members who arrived for that night’s meeting a glimpse of what…
There’s a reason that so many prison movies fetishize death row. All the rituals and panicked legal and fourth-estate machinations leading to the death chamber — or sometimes, at the last second, away from it — make for gut-grinding entertainment. The last meal, the last rites, the reverent silence among the other prisoners. The four-hankie conversation with the grieving mother,…
Dear Mexican: My question is simple: Can you please confirm the fact that there are doctors, lawyers and other professionals living in Mexico? I’m a Mexican-American woman living in Chicago who has had a heated discussion about that topic. My friend, who is a teacher at a local school, was of the opinion that there really aren’t any. Her point…
Once framed and hung in a Prairie Village kitchen, this single column of yellowed 1910 Kansas City Star newsprint heralds last century’s theatrical amusements and serves as a testament to a time before Kansas City theatergoers were primarily treated to out-of-town talent of the faded-sitcom variety. The vaudeville era brought us Eddie Foy, Fannie Brice, Jack Benny, Fred and Adele…
This week’s “Letters” all come in the form of online comments. Regarding Nadia Pflaum’s May 14 feature “Dead Man,” about Missouri’s then-pending execution of Dennis Skillicorn: “The problem with the cost of the death penalty can easily be solved. Have people bid on pulling the lever to jolt these scumbags with electricity. There are hundreds of thousands of victims of…
The Kansas City Tax-Increment Financing Commission delayed a final judgment on J.E. Dunn’s alleged use of front companies to meet minority hiring goals during its construction of H&R Block’s world headquarters. Allegations that Dunn overreported minority participation on the Block project first surfaced in a 2005 lawsuit filed by a group of Hispanic contractors. The suit turned up evidence that…
Fox 4 has an amazingly disturbing story of an old corpse switcheroo. The family of Pvt. Henry E. Marquez was finally going to put the soldier’s body to rest after 64 years. But a funny thing happened on the way to the cemetery. The body that arrived at Kansas City International Airport on Wednesday wasn’t Marquez’s, and no one figured…
Here’s the first of three videos we’ll be posting this week of the Brown Bomber’s performance at the Blue Room. These are the readings we quote in this week’s feature story, “Spit Happens,” and your chance to see how amazing these young writers are. Robert Brown’s up first: Categories: News Tags: the blue room, the Brown Bombers
