Cover Story
Dark sider
This tall, bespectacled, Ypsilanti-based singer-songwriter has been warming up hearts around here for a half-dozen years. His songs, often stunning, folkish narratives and image-rich ballads, feature a voice that can croon with heartbreaking sincerity or pull you in like some pucker-lipped carnival barker, stroked by acoustic finger-picking, below-the-belt cellos and purring violins. After releasing what…
Slaughterhouse’s Bob Madigan dead at 47
Former Detroiter and noise-punk trailblazer Bob Madigan has died in San Francisco from liver failure. He was 47. Madigan founded the demented, drug-addled and noisy band Slaughterhouse in 1983 in Detroit, pulling together a bunch of friends to meld guitar feedback, banging drums and Madigan’s shouted lyrics into a viable noise combo. The band never…
City Slang: Live the music
The Detroit School of Rock & Pop has announced the formation of a sister organization called Live the Music Foundation. According to a press release, “Its goals are to raise money for scholarships for students that can’t attend our school and to raise money to help provide equipment for our students so they can continue…
This Means War
This Means War C This film represents the latest feverish attempt to save the charming Reese Witherspoon from Katerine Heigl-like career immolation. With her cuter-than-a-basket-of-puppies appeal growing dimmer each year, the Witherspoon camp has clearly decided to double down on actually being sexy, and it almost works. There are flashes of humor, excitement and physical…
Rest in Peace Michael Davis
Michael Davis, bassist with the MC5 and Destroy All Monsters among other bands, has died of liver failure after a month in hospital. Davis’ musical endeavors need no recap here in Detroit. Personally, I’m going to choose to remember the man who welcomed me into his home when I was working on a book. Michael…
“In Love With The Light” – “Times/Tides” – “Visions”
If we have anything close to our own version of ancient Mayan-esque astrologists… (albeit in the form of a noise-preoccupied faction of rock-n-roll re-arrangers), it’d be the malevolently-artistic and artistically-malevolent minds musing and enthusing the ethereal alleys of what’s known as New Detroit… From this futuristic MysTopian city (based in/around the occasionally-transient HQ known as…
City Slang: Rio will revive rockabilly
Rio & the Rockabilly Revival, featuring Rio Scafone, niece of legendary Detroit rockabilly dude Jack Scott, will celebrate the release of her debut EP at Orchid (141 W. Nine Mile in Ferndale) on Sunday, February 26. It is an interesting story, and one we intend to focus on in a forthcoming City Slang. According to…
City Slang: Infatuated at the Magic Bag
Disco-rockers the Infatuations play a CD release show at the Magic Bag in Ferndale on Saturday night. The band is celebrating the release of the EP Recorded Live in Front of a Studio Audience, and the eight-piece will be supported by Class Three Overbite, Jiva and Joe Jaber & the Last Divide. The action starts…
Megadeth & Motorhead @ The Palace – Setlist, Recap, Videos & Photos
Hitting Detroit on the most recent mega-metal tour, Gigantour came to The Palace of Auburn Hills late last week on February 9th. Headlining was Megadeth, who fronted by Dave Mustaine closed out the evening with a roughly hour long set complete with a somewhat incoherent mini political rant from Mustaine. Megadeth played through a 14-song…
City Slang: The Audition to tour with Every Avenue
The Audition, the pop-punk band featuring Detroit native vocalist Danny Stevens, has self-released a new EP and started a tour with Detroit band Every Avenue. The EP, the band’s first since leaving Victory Records, is called Chapter II, and the first single is “You Make Me Sick”. According to a press release, “This marks the…
‘I Need That Record!’ (You need to watch this)
Somehow I missed this film the first time around. But If you give a shit about music at all, you need to watch it. I Need That Record! is an incredibly well-done feature doc about the death of the record store, but also how the music industry and radio ruined music for so long for…
City Slang: Sponge to open for Guns N’ Roses
Yeah, yeah, we know. The current line up of Guns N’ Roses isn’t really Guns N’ Roses. But try telling that to Vinnie Dombroski and Sponge, who have been hand picked by Axl Rose to open for the current incarnation of the legendary rockers at the (relatively) intimate Fillmore show in Detroit on February 12.…
Flogging Molly
Flogging Molly frontman Dave King was plucked from a Dublin tenement building at 18 to sing for metal act Fastway back in the ’80s. They slowed to a halt after several albums and King fell out with his label when they suggested he change the lyrics of a song about his dead father. Since then…
City Slang: “Stereo Action Rent Party” revisited
Continuing the theme of revisiting albums by bands playing the Blowout in a couple of weeks, we couldn’t ignore Matt Smith’s Outrageous Cherry, a band that has been playing live since ‘93 and releasing great records since ‘94. Smith and co play the Blowout on the Friday, headlining at the Atlas Bar. Smith is an…
How to Listen to “How To Shoot Quail”
The Onion recently quipped a “report” that: “Watching Episode of (PBS/BBC)’s ‘Downton Abbey’ Counts As Reading Book” and…I often feel similarly towards a Doc Waffles track… since the Emcee’s raps are cultivated from his devoted hobby of page diving the sophisticated seas of Victorian novels and eloquently rendered sonnets from the post-Renaissance era, a symptom…
Our daily bread
I first met author and foreign correspondent Annia Ciezadlo in New York City. Like me, she was a Midwestern mutt torn between the city’s seductive bustle and the airs it put on. It was the early 2000s, a decade before Ciezadlo published her stunning memoir, now out in paperback, Day of Honey: A Memoir of…
Staying jazzed
Inner-circle jazz fans got hip to Gretchen Parlato back in 2004, when the prestigious Thelonious Monk competition was among singers and the L.A.-based newcomer took the prize. More than 50 recording sessions and three discs as a leader later, the circle keeps expanding, including enough jazz critics to make The Lost and Found No. 1…
Only the lonely
Their names are read one by one. Each of them is dead, and nearly all of them died alone. It’s a winter evening inside Perry Funeral Home on Trumbull near Warren in Detroit. A handful of mourners and a few well-wishers are gathered in a small room, surrounded by flowers and candles and shaded lamps,…
The sea’s bounty at El Rincon Taraxco
El Rincon Taraxco 1414 Junction St., Detroit 313-843-6595 Bathrooms handicap inaccessible Entrées: $11.45-$19.95 A Mexican restaurant with no beans? Rincon Taraxco, which bills itself as "the First Mexican Seafood Restaurant in Detroit," opened in 2000. It features oysters and octopus rather than chimichangas or chicharrones; there’s just one taco on the menu, and that’s fish.…
Riding Michigan’s roads to ruin
Last weekend, best-selling author Jeff Zaslow was driving home to West Bloomfield from a book-signing event in Petoskey. He never got very far. He apparently hit a patch of ice, and went into the path of a tractor-trailer. I knew him only very slightly, but he was, by all accounts, a very decent man. A…
The Secret World of Arrietty
The Secret World of Arrietty A- It’s a sad commentary that the moronic and slapdash Alvin and the Chipmunks films rake in tens of millions of dollars at American multiplexes while the gorgeously lush and generously humane work of Hayao Miyazaki’s Ghibli Studios is often relegated to art-house cinemas, attracting only animation aficionados and…
Short and sweet
I headed north last week to do Savage Love Live — a rapid-fire, slightly tipsy Q&A session — at the University of Alaska Anchorage. It was my third visit to UAA and it was a blast. All of the questions in this week’s column were submitted to me by UAA students and staffers. Q: Should…
Drawing in light and ink
Joshua White and Gary Panter’s Light Show What: A special exhibit that marks the largest collaboration between multimedia pioneers Joshua White and Gary Panter Where: Museum of Contemporary Art Detroit, 4454 Woodward Ave., Detroit; 313-832-6622; mocadetroit.org. When: Displays through April 29. Joshua White first rose to prominence in the ’60s, when he founded the Joshua…
Sex Police: Arrested development
When Sex Police’s Alexis Ford says, "Any good artist has a little crazy in them," you could be forgiven for thinking that she’s waxing lyrical, invoking a cliché to appear more interesting than she is. In fact, no such efforts are required. Ford, a fascinating 30-year-old Niagara-esque art-rock-vixen, says she spent a week in a…
W.E
W.E C- Directed by Madonna. Written by Madonna, and Alek Keshishian. Starring: Abbie Cornish, Andrea Riseborough and James D’Arcy. Running time: 118 minutes. Rated R. Madonna’s entire career has been about shiny surfaces, so we shouldn’t be surprised that the forever "material girl" would choose shallow subjects from her directorial vanity project; but one would…
Brothel-y love
It’s another "cold" Saturday rehearsal at the Russell Industrial Center. The small band of six actresses and actors hasn’t shed its coats. It’s not advisable, given the chill both inside and out. You bring your own heat at the Russell: coffee, tea, layers of clothing … your passion for the work. A week before the…
Food Stuff
Barbecue blowback Normally, when we do a Short Order roundup, we ask readers to pipe up if they felt we omitted any important information. But with our barbecue listings — holy smoke — did we ever get raked over the coals! (Gee whiz, folks, there’s a reason we never call our listings "definitive" or "comprehensive"…
City Slang: Weekly music review roundup
Remember – if you send it, it will get reviewed. That’s the City Slang promise. It doesn’t matter what genre the music is – as long as it has a Metro Detroit connection, it’ll get in. Preferably, we’d like to concentrate on new releases but, while we’re getting warmed up here, feel free to send…
MOCAD opening night festivities include light show, giant funhouse, Adult.
Friday night saw the opening of Joshua White and Gary Panter’s Light Show at the Museum of Contemporary Art Detroit (MOCAD). The impressive, new exhibit presented an unusual audiovisual treat. For instance, when psyche-folk collective Monster Island started the evening off with a performance, as they played, abstract shapes, spirals of light and odd cartoon…
Something slimy slithers into court
News Hits can’t say with certainty exactly who is guilty of what, but we can say with a high degree of certainty that a distinctly odious smell was unleashed when we opened up a motion the Detroit International Bridge Company filed with the Wayne County Circuit Court last week. Every media outlet in town has…
Alice Cooper, Radiohead, RHCP & Phish Top Bonnaroo Lineup
See the full lineup in the video below or at Bonnaroo.com. In addition to Alice Cooper, other notable Detroit area acts on the initial release include MT cover boys Danny Brown and Dale Earnhardt Jr. Jr. along with Yelawolf. See the full lineup below in video form as well as the rundown. Bonnaroo 2012 Lineup…
Backward, ho: Another ruling against Ambassador Bridge company
The Detroit International Bridge Company is losing ground in its attempt to build a new span next to the Ambassador Bridge. And when we say “losing ground,” we mean that literally. Readers of this rag know that we’ve been saying for years that the DIBC was illegally occupying a 150-foot-wide swath of public land at …
Fela’s last laugh
Fela Kuti would often perform with a painted face and thick chains draping his slim body’s bare chest; he’d stalk the stage playing sax, keys and drums while chain-smoking enough cigar-size spliffs to make a Rasta village jealous. Scantily clad female dancers gyrated around him, while 15 or 20 drummers, guitarists, horn players and more…
