Cover Stories
Cub combo
Pewter Cub plays Kelly’s Bar at 9:20 p.m., Saturday, with Polish Muslims, After Dark Amusement Park and Black Jake and the Carnies. Regan Lorie and Scott Sanford started jamming jangly, shoegaze-y tunes atop drum machine beats back in 2008 or so. They soon christened themselves Pewter Cub (Not "Club" — "Cub") and began gigging…
Burning down the house
House Phone plays Thursday at midnight at the Polish National Alliance Hall Lounge with Sisters of Your Sunshine Vapor, Passalacqua and Le Ren. The first time House Phone singer James Linck played us the song "1,000 Years," we thought of Hamtown’s Blowout. It’s a truly moving tune, a kind of a rocker with a…
State of Grace
Katie Grace plays Friday at 10:20 p.m. at Kelly’s Bar with Heartbreak Dallas & the Unfaithfuls, Patrick Davy & the Ghosts and Doop & the Inside Outlaws. Singer Katie Grace is a self-proclaimed Catholic schoolgirl gone bad. Behind those youthful angelic looks and big voice festers the soul of an outlaw, a bluegrass troubadour and…
Distort everything
Bad Party plays the Blowout on Friday at 10:20 p.m. at the Polish National Alliance Hall with the Blackman, Esquire, Duane the Teenage Weirdo and Kenny Tudrick. Bad Party has been compared to everyone from Suicide to Skinny Puppy — but really nobody has ever sounded like Bad Party. Christ, from one show to…
Daughter of the revolution
Both Walking Beat and Belle Ghoul play the Blowout preparty at the Magic Stick. Jesse Smith also performs with various people at the Beehive Recording Co. showcase at the Polish National Alliance Hall on Friday. It’s never easy nailing a time to meet with the lovely, raven-headed Jesse Paris Smith; she’s either here, there or,…
Bite me
Child Bite plays Thursday at 11 p.m. at the Polish National Alliance Hall with Danny Brown, Bars of Gold and Mumble. The first time I met freak-out synth-punk quintet Child Bite, frontman Shawn Knight had leaped off a building’s roof and landed shakily on Dan Deacon’s tour bus. He sprang from car to car…
Double-bill Saturday: Elmore Leonard and ‘Jackie Brown’
If a fraction of the fans of Elmore Leonard on the page and screen come to see him in the flesh, it’s going to be hard to get a spot this Saturday (March 3) at the N’Namdi Center for Contemporary Art. Quentin Tarantino’s 1997 film Jackie Brown — adapted from Leonard’s novel Rum Punch —…
City Slang: Kid Rock to perform with the Detroit Symphony Orchestra
Two blogs for the price of one today, peeps. On May 12, Kid Rock will team up with the Detroit Symphony Orchestra for one night only in an attempt to raise $1 million for the DSO. It’s one of the more unlikely alliances since Deep Purple and the Royal Philharmonic. According to the press release,…
City Slang: Metal Shop at the Ritz
Fancy testing your metal chops on stage in front of a rabid crowd? The Ritz in Warren is starting a monthly metal open mic night called Metal Shop on Thursday, March 8. The party starts at 8 p.m., and there is no cover. The event is the brainchild of married metal-heads Dana Forrester (Crud /…
New Infinities: Housealacqua / Infinity People
There’s two new, notable local releases being unveiled this week – and I want to make sure they don’t get drowned out by the raucous radiance of the delightfully inherently-clamorous Blowout… The day of the Pre-Party marks the debut of Infinity People’s “In Love With The Light.” Listen to some samples… …
City Slang: Nuge to tour with Styx and REO Speedwagon
Yep, you read that right. Hunt-happy gonzo boyTed Nugent is going on the road with weepy radio rockers REO Speedwagon and prog-lite lads Styx. The tour reaches here on June 28, when the three bands will play the DTE Energy Music Theater (or Pine Knob), and the shows are being dubbed the “Midwest Rock ‘n…
City Slang: Don Was and the Stephen Gottlieb Music Festival
Don Was will perform at the Stephen Gottlieb Music Festival on March 24. The festival runs between March 15 and 25 at the Berman Center for the Performing Arts in West Bloomfield. The festival is hosted by the Jewish Community Center of Metropolitan Detroit. More information can be found at their website here. According to…
Predicting the Oscar Winners
This was a strange year for the Best Picture nominees. Seven and a half of the nine nominees are period pieces, with only The Descendants and half of Midnight in Paris taking place in the present. Two of the movies are about silent cinema (Hugo and The Artist), two of the movies take place…
The Darkness At St. Andrews – Setlist, Review, Photos & Videos
The Darkness at St. Andrews In 2004 there were a few CDs that never left my 1992 Chrysler New Yorker. As most of my friends can attest one of those was the Darkness’ Permission To Land. I’ve even caught some random flack over the past few years about how my musical tastes were shit because…
City Slang: Andre Williams releases album at Blind Pig
Andre Williams will celebrate the release of his new Hoods and Shades album with a record release show at the Blind Pig in Ann Arbor on March 24. Doors are at 9 and cover if $8 in advance or $10 on the night. According to the press release, “Andre Williams releases his fourth full-length album…
Oak Park High School added to MT’s Music Map
Check out the Music Map at metrotimes.com/detroitmusicmap Oak Park High School 13701 Oak Park Blvd., Oak Park The school is notable for the class of 1970. The big hit-maker was the late Doug Fieger, who later formed the Knack. But that’s not all. Don Fagenson and David Weiss, renamed the Was Brothers, Don and…
Wanderlust
Wanderlust B+ Wanderlust belongs to a mini-genre of self-exploration comedies, wherein a seemingly grounded, urbane couple takes a road trip into the backwoods of utter lunacy. Its spiritual predecessors are cult classics such as Lost in America, Funny Farm and Flirting with Disaster, and in its best moments, Wanderlust is every bit as hysterical,…
State responds to MMJ column, promises to catch up on card backlog
Lansing has taken notice of Larry Gabriel’s recent Higher Ground column taking the Michigan Department of Licensing & Regulatory Affairs to task for its chronic tardiness in getting cards to qualified medical marijuana patients and caregivers. The folks in charge of the program admit that there is, indeed, a problem, but in a letter to…
City Slang: Black Dahlia Murder video is bloody disgusting
Local metal-heads the Black Dahlia Murder have announced that the video for the new “Moonlight Equilibrium” single is now live on BloodyDisgusting.com. See the video here. BloodyDisgusting.com is a website for fans of horror, so that should tell you where the band have gone with this video. There are werewolves, peeps in Victorian garb, axes…
-After- Blowout: A Matter of MINUTES –
This Kalamazoo band talks a lot about “serving the song…” If nothing else, for Chafe Hensley, Isaac Turner, Mark Larmee and Ryan Nelson, each “solidly into their 30’s,” that… is the last and best and most important remaining goal. There’s a certain stirring ping of nostalgia inherent to Mintues’ brew of pop-rock; those ebullient guitars and…
City Slang: “The Polish Muslims Make Number Two” revisited
Performing at the Blowout at 12.30 at Kelly’s Bar on the Saturday, the Polish Muslims have become a staple of any Hamtramck event. Indeed, only this week they were blowing the roof off the New Dodge for Fat Tuesday. The path is well-trodden, but somehow it’s still funny. The band take old songs, change the…
Meet Detroit’s duck farmer
Suzanne Scoville is at work in the kitchen of a house she owns on the east side of Detroit. She’s making Dutch baby pancakes, and uses a manual eggbeater to whip them up. It is an unseasonably warm winter day, and her cat basks in a shaft of sunlight streaming in through the back window,…
Birmingham’s Frank Street Bakery presses sandwiches that impress
Frank Street Bakery 420 E. Frank St. Birmingham 248-792-5192 frankstreetbakery.com Handicap accessible Soups, sandwiches & salads: $2.99-$6.99 Desserts & smoothies: $2-$3.99 Open 8 a.m.-5 p.m. Monday-Saturday. Closed Sundays. In fact, the tiny soup-and-sandwich joint just off Old Woodward on the outskirts of downtown Birmingham features, somewhat unexpectedly, a pressed Cuban sandwich as its house specialty.…
Destroy This Place: Symphony of mayhem
The members of Destroy This Place — guitarist and vocalist Ryan Allen, bassist Monday Busque, guitarist and vocalist John Nelson, and drummer Sean Sommer — are pissed at me. They’re valiantly attempting to disguise it as humor, but they’re irked. The reason? When we reviewed their debut album Resurrect the Mammoth, released on Bellyache Records…
Detroit ballot fight: Pot as political football
Marijuana is a political football in any Michigan municipality, but in Detroit the ball is getting more slippery of late. Take the Court of Appeals decision on the Coalition for a Safer Detroit (CSD) vs. the Detroit Election Commission case a couple of weeks ago. A three-judge panel ruled two-to-one in favor of CSD. That…
A Separation
A Separation Written and directed by Asghar Farhadi. Starring Leila Hatami, Peyman Moaadi, Shahab Hosseini, Sareh Bayat and Sarina Farhadi. Running time: 125 minutes. Not rated. A Whatever your intentions, the things you say and the things you do have consequences, sometimes calamitous consequences. Try as we might, we cannot separate who we are…
Nneka – Soul Is Heavy (Decon)
It’s not so surprising that the Roots backed Nneka at one of her first U.S. gigs a couple of years ago. The 31-year-old Nigerian-German singer excels at the type of neo-soul that the Roots and pals like Erykah Badu have been championing for years. On her second stateside album, Nneka embraces another influence: late Afro-pop…
Detroit-to-London mix works a change for Guilty Simpson
The further we travel into the 21st century, the smaller the world becomes. On any given day, it’s nothing to communicate regularly with people on the other side of the planet. If there’s one key advantage to technology making the world a little smaller, it’s that musicians seem to be working on international projects at…
Food Stuff
Chop shop This week marks the grand (and we do mean grand) reopening of the London Chop House. Once the restaurant of choice for Detroit’s 1 percenters, the London Chop House in its new iteration will eschew some of the fustier touches of yore. According to early reports, the servers will dress black-tie formal but…
A kinky game of thrones
Q: I am a straight 24-year-old female who has known my fiance since freshman year of college. He has a fetish where he likes to watch women use the bathroom. I knew this, having seen some of his porn early on, and I accepted it. We all have kinks. But while peeing in front of…
Fright from the bins: The Osmonds, The Plan, 1973
With people struggling to understand Mormonism now more than ever, I can think of no cheaper entry into the world of Joseph Smith than plunking down two round nickels at your local Value World for a copy of The Osmonds’ concept album about their faith — a career move which frightened fans off faster than…
Montana gives Citizens United a pass
The more we read about the U.S. Supreme Court’s dreadful Citizens United vs. FEC decision and the bitter fruit it has produced, the more irate we become. Thanks to this 5-4 ruling handed down a little more than two years ago, the floodgates have opened up and money is pouring into so-called Super PACs that…
Michigan primary follies
Suddenly, Michigan’s presidential primary may actually turn out to mean something this year. If Mitt Romney loses, in the state where he was born and won easily in 2008, he could be finished. Those behind-the-scenes strategists and money men who have been backing him in the belief that he has the best (if not only)…
Clean as a Whistle
What: New paintings by seven local tattoo artists. Where: 323 East Gallery, 323 E. Fourth St., Royal Oak; 248-246-9544; 323east.com. When: Displays through March 18. Presented by Big Top Tattoo and Signature Tattoo, Clean as a Whistle features new watercolor paintings by seven Detroit-area tattoo artists. Curated by underground artist and tattooer Mark Heggie, the…
Detroiter’s Tuskegee Airmen doc flies again Friday
Nearly 30 years before George Lucas produced the story of the Tuskegee Airmen as the feature film Red Tails, award-winning Detroit filmmaker Ted Talbert told the story of World War II’s African-American aerial fighters in a homegrown documentary. Talbert, who landed a spot in the Michigan Journalism Hall of Fame for docs like this one,…
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…
Amend this: Michigan labor mulling proposal
In the newest issue of Labor Notes, there’s an interesting item involving a behind-the-scenes plan in the works over at the UAW. Seems like folks there — and a few other unions as well — are cooking up a little surprise for Gov. Rick Snyder. According to LN’s Jane Slaughter (who also contributes restaurant reviews…
