Gore galore
Full disclosure: I used to work for this band and on a personal level, I think they’re terrific human beings. But I suppose that’s why hearing that the Gore Gore Girls were recently signed to Bloodshot Records in Chicago — the label that launched and/or facilitated the careers of Neko Case, Ryan Adams, The Old…
Smoke Break 9: Lou Reed & Troy Aikman.
In the ninth edition of Smoke Break, I recount my experiences as a 6th grade Richard Dent, and wish the current Chicago Bears good luck in the Super Bowl. Also: what if Lou Reed was an analyst instead of Troy Aikman? JTL Watch all the Smoke Breaks here. As always, Smoke Break is brought to…
Art Bar
Literature, and in this instance, poetry, holds a mirror to life; thus the great themes of life become the great themes of poems. Here the distinguished American poet John Haines addresses — and celebrates through the affirmation of poetry — our preoccupation with aging and mortality. Young Man I seemed always standing before a door…
Garage in ’07? Nah.
Arizona’s Love Me Not’s recorded In Black & White here in Detroit at Jim Diamond’s Ghetto Recorders. The two dudes wear sharp-cut suits, the two girls wear go-go boots, and the record blows by in an agreeable enough but pretty indistinguishable tumble of vintage organ and pep siphoned from 1960s rock ’n’ roll. Things get…
Motor City Cribs
Elliot Bergman of Nomo and his percussion laboratory.
Friend Opportunity
This is what happens when people with music degrees are given record deals. Deerhoof is often championed as the little band that entertains the big bands. The coed Bay Area trio has supported the likes of Radiohead, Wilco, and the Roots on tour, and it’s notable when a group of musicians draws praise and support…
Folk you
In many ways, the advent of the Internet, affordable home recording equipment and independent distribution have helped to save music. By taking the stewardship of the musician’s future out of the hands of CEOs and by putting it back into the public realm, today’s musician will find it a heck of a lot easier to…
II
Sasquatch’s sophomore record treads like good stoner rock, its cracked earth littered with broken booze bottles and ashen fragments of rolling papers. Sounding less metal and more rawk than their 2003 offering, the Los Angeles trio revives the sun-baked, kegger-party energy of early stoner heroes Kyuss more than anything else. (Sasquatch includes Detroiters Rick Ferrante…
Bonior’s back
The issues didn’t matter when he first volunteered on a political campaign in the 1950s. As a 6-year-old, David Bonior passed out literature for a candidate he doesn’t really remember along Joseph Campau Street in Hamtramck for potato chips and pop. This time around, the former Michigan congressman from Macomb County makes it clear that…
The Hitcher
The random, psychotic-masochistic behavior of the film’s title character does not include hitchhiking at all, just a bunch of “how did he get there?” moments where our slasher anti-hero materializes in a monster truck, a small-town jail cell or the back seat of a station wagon. He might as well be from outer space, or…
Head trip
Eight decades before the coming of LSD-inspired music and art, “decadents” walked dark streets, drugged out and delirious on absinthe and a modernist theory called symbolism, which emphasized art askew on emotion and psychic energy. Detroit artist Charles Alexander is inspired by the anarchic rebellion and heady romantic idealism that characterized both those important countercultural…
The Hitcher
Sean Bean is a placeholder actor — convincing only for as long as you can stand his sour facial expression, the look of a villain with an impacted tooth. But casting Bean as the titular thug is right for this DOA remake. The original, 1986 Hitcher wasn’t that great, either; C. Thomas Howell was the…
Free Will Astrology
Here’s this week’s homework: When they say "Be yourself," which self do they mean? Testify at freewillastrology.com.
In their debt
Student loan legislation in motion.
Meditations on Alice
Spiritual texts tell us that life is change, and change is its only constant. And while it’s difficult to mark just when such a metamorphosis occurs in our lives, a change of name generally indicates such a shift, be it confirmation, marriage, divorce or, in the case of musicians, the adoption of a persona like…
Unspecial delivery
No News, no Free Press — and no New York Times?
In The Flesh
It was transcendent, which is fitting, given her life-long spiritual concerns. Roy Haynes in his 80s had the energy of a twentysomething, the muscles of an Elvin Jones in his prime and the lightning precision of a Tony Williams. Bassist Charlie Haden spread out a huge bottom sound, and spun out one masterfully lyrical solo…
Letters to the Editor
Wrong about rites Re: “Hard Bodies and Hard Questions” (Metro Times, Jan. 17), I feel that Thomas Lynch’s remarks about changing funeral rituals were incorrect. African-Americans, in reclaiming their African culture, include in Kwanzaa, funerals, memorials and other programs, the pouring of libations. These libations welcome our ancestors (that is, those that are deceased) and…
Make it or break it
Pittsfield Township sits just on the outskirts of Ann Arbor. It’s a standard sort of middle-American sprawlburb, filled with strip malls and business parks. Valley Ranch is one such park, home to companies called Essen Instruments and Humantech Workplace Ergonomics Consultants. Here, in this soulless part of town, sits a soulless-looking edifice that appears to…
Comics
The Boiling Point – by Mikhaela Reid The Perry Bible Fellowship – by Nicholas Gurewitch
For those about Ta’Raach
Ta’Raach McMathis never meant to leave Detroit. It was 2004, and the emcee-producer was booked for a DJ gig in Los Angeles. And, remembering it now, he still can’t quite believe it. “It was my first time out there,” Ta’Raach says, “and off of that one gig I got, like, this whole mini-DJ tour.” The…
A reporter’s legacy
Foundation forms in wake of newshound’s passing.
X BOX
When the Hamtramck Blowout — America’s largest local music festival — returns on March 7, it’ll be its 10th year. That’s a decade of music and mayhem, but how many Molson headaches does that work out to? Don’t answer that. Blowout has always been about old favorites as much as new talent, and ’07 is…
The name game
Naming a band can be an arduous task. The moniker a band gives itself will ultimately convey an idea to their listener about what the music will sound like even before they’ve heard a note. Interestingly, this does not explain why the guys in "Slobberbone" decided to give their terrific band such an extraordinarily lousy…
Jeffrey Morgan’s Media Blackout
And now folks, here’s MB103 asking that musical question… Kasabian — Empire (RCA) :: What happens when Suzi Quatro meets Bob Dylan? The Mooney Suzuki — The Maximum Black EP (V2) :: This reissue of 1999’s The Black EP by one of rock’s most engagingly raucous primitive agit-pop garage bands is freshly adorned with five…
Cuckold catcalls
Q: I usually agree wholeheartedly with your DTMFA recommendations, but in the case of Unlucky In Cuckoldry I found myself put off by your advice to divorce his wife. My problem with your advice is this: People change. UIC’s wife obviously changed at some point … hence her "adults don’t do this" comment. I don’t…
Every which way
It would be so easy if Clint Eastwood were as black-and-white as the characters he built his legacy on — grizzled, misogynistic loners, the very pictures of primal, untamed manliness. But having reinvented himself over the past two decades as a behind-the-camera philosophical auteur (a title he’d surely deny), that picture of tough-guy taciturnity has…
Food Stuff
Full plates for local foodies.
Head Cheese
Like most Detroit stalwarts, Hell City Records has an oil-and-water relationship with our town. Jason Lockwood, godfather and guru of the local imprint, knows that agitation is usually the quickest way to unity, especially when everyone’s an underdog. And it’s that mentality that defines the label, with the stark blacks and reds of its logo…
Curry in a hurry
In 2006, Rohit Khanna, born in New Delhi, opened what he calls “the first express Indian restaurant in Michigan, where you can get a complete meal for under $6.” Chilli Masala is centrally located in Canton, in the midst of the western suburbs’ growing Indian population. The fast-food theme is followed relentlessly. Customers place their…
Eye sore
The Best of Match Game BCI Rarely has a game show been so fueled by alcohol as the Match Game. With a recurring cast of smarmy celebrities and a madman at the helm in the form of host Gene Rayburn, this program ruled TV between ’73 and ’82 — and lives on thanks to the…
Detroit in two tongues
If there’s a weakness in Chocolate City Latina, Esperanza Malave Cintron’s first collection of poems from a large publisher, it’s that the best poems are so well-hewn that weaker ones appear weaker than they really are. A fault of editing, not of the author: At 103 pages, the book feels a bit long. With that…
Night and Day
Wednesday • 24 Yang Wei MUSIC Don’t feel bad if you don’t know what “an international pipa sensation” is — we were confused too. The “sensation” is musician Yang Wei and the pipa is, well, a stringed lute-like instrument that sounds graceful and airy. Chinese musicians have played the pipa for more than 2,000 years.…
CINEMA REVIEW
The Last King of Scotland contains the most powerful, riveting performance you’ll see on a big screen this year, embodied within the giant frame of Forest Whitaker. He commands with a portrayal that’s deft in the shadings of Amin’s wild mood swings — from playful charmer to vicious intimidator. Whitaker plumbs the layers of Amin’s…
The death of Disco D.
Word has been rolling in from friends and supporters all day that Disco D committed suicide this morning. The ghetto-tech pioneer, DJ, producer, and entrepreneur had seemed to be on a roll lately, helming tracks for Trick Daddy, turning types onto Brazilian emcees, and even coordinating the domestic import of a clear form of rolling…
