It’s hard, in our hypersexualized, innuendo-stiff era, to imagine the prelapsarian innocence that obtained among gentle folk in Victorian times, when men and women were ignorant of their own and one another’s anatomies, not to mention the mechanisms of coitus. Little wonder the malady of the age presented as a constellation of nervous irritabilities that doctors labeled hysteria, particularly prevalent…
Molly Erin Sarle is watching a man fly a model airplane. The singer-songwriter reclines on her deck in California, perched over the wide expanse of a nature preserve. Birds chirp in the background, and Sarle gasps and giggles as the man loops his airborne contraption a bit too close to her for comfort. “Take your time,” she says to me…
Jason Statham bares his six-pack before speaking his first line in this humorless, efficient remake of the 1972 Charles Bronson hit-man movie. Directed by Simon West (Con Air), The Mechanic (which opened here Friday) is all business: the solitary assassin and his mentor (Donald Sutherland); the latter’s ne’er-do-well son (Ben Foster); double-cross, payback and guns, guns, guns. Where Bronson, without…
Sylvain Chomet’s The Illusionist breathes life into a celluloid fossil, lovingly animating an unproduced script by the great filmmaker Jacques Tati. At least in part, The Illusionist is a chaste father-daughter romance — additionally so, in that animator Chomet, perpetrator of the splendid retro-toon The Triplets of Belleville, was given the source material by Tati’s own daughter. Chomet sets The…
Amos Lee is the East Coast’s answer to Jack Johnson: a fine-throated singer with a penchant for downbeat pop. There are marked differences between the two singer-songwriters, though. Lee’s influences tend toward folk and soul rather than soft rock, and his R&B-tinged baritone isn’t as buttery as Johnson’s. Lee’s biggest difficulty has been balancing competing impulses: shadowy soul crooner versus…
Lesser rappers are justified in their envy of the Ying Yang Twins’ “Halftime,” which has become the unofficial anthem for the New Orleans Saints. Unlike some one-hit, sports-arena wonders, though, the dirty rap duo from Atlanta has been a genuine hit maker for the past 10 years. (Among those successes are “What’s Happnin,” “Say I Yi Yi” and collabs with…
Ana Popovic looks like the blues-busting kin of the Alien franchise’s leather-clad Ripley. The throaty swagger of her singing complements her searing six-string licks. Popovic grew up in Belgrade, Serbia, and discovered the blues from her guitarist father’s extensive record collection. Her mastery of English began there, and her singing betrays hardly a trace of accent. Her first band, Hush,…
If you’ve heard of the Melodians, it’s most likely because — like most members of Generation Y who enjoy smoking weed — you’ve heard “Rivers of Babylon.” (It’s the closing track on Sublime’s 40 Oz. to Freedom.) The Melodians, though, were jamming a long time before the members of Sublime toked their first joints. The Jamaican reggae act has been…
Lazy has honed its chaotic, cacophonous sound in West Coast dive bars, art-gallery shows, and the grungy hallways of the Leedy-Voulkos building. The local art-rock band’s self-titled EP is sopped with Modern Lovers beats, Velvet Underground dissonance and lo-fi discord, all smoothed out by producer Nathan Reusch. The tight guitar work doesn’t reflect the onstage antics — think whiteface and…
A black-and-white photograph in the lobby of the new 77 South restaurant in Leawood shows a handsome couple. She’s a vivacious-looking blonde with big, bouncy hair; he has serious sideburns and wears one of the natty polyester jacket-and-pants combinations known in the 1970s as a leisure suit. You need to study this photograph to truly appreciate the concept of 77…
Love Garden Sounds, the legendary Lawrence record store, is doing what many people do when they turn 21: gathering a bunch of friends for a couple of nights at a bar, with plenty of loud music to mark the occasion. Love Garden is throwing a 21st birthday bash Friday, February 4, through Saturday, February 5. Kelly Corcoran, Love Garden’s owner,…
Dear Mexican: My gabacho friends look at me askance for being a gabacho who enjoys mariachi music. They, and even some of my Mexican friends, run and hide when I go a step further and start listening to the mournful ballads of Vicente Fernandez, backed up by — you guessed it — a mariachi band. Not that the music of…
