Category: Theater Critic’s Choice

Born in Jerusalem, multi–instrumentalist Raz Mesinai grew up there and in New York, absorbing the sounds of both cities. Dub has been an element in his work from the beginning (as in the wiggy 90s project Sub Dub), but the music of the Middle East has played an increasingly important role. Under his own name […]

On “Before the Money Came (The Battle of Bettye LaVette),” a track off the Detroit soul singer’s new Scene of the Crime (Anti-), LaVette looks back with a triumphant sneer on a career that took four decades to get off the ground. She bitterly recalls cutting a shoulda-been classic album in 1972 at Fame Studios […]

The haters–after all the hype about the singles, they were bound to come out of the woodwork for the first album–say Bonde do Role are irresponsible assholes who happen to be Brazilian, yelling dumb stuff over ripped-off party beats and disrespecting their own musical culture. But the band’s tossed-off hybrid of ghoulish swamp punk, dirty-butt […]

In a Critic’s Choice in late 2005, I called Office’s self-released Q & A the best local album of the year, so naturally I’m pretty excited that word’s gotten out about this excellent pop band since then. Office signed to Scratchie/New Line for A Night at the Ritz (due September 25), which they’re treating as […]

The choice between being a sell-out or a saint is the crux of Daniel Brook’s The Trap: Selling Out to Stay Afloat in Winner-Take-All America (Times Books). Brook, a progressive journalist, tells the stories of young idealists struggling to get by as rising health care, housing, and college tuition costs make a middle-class lifestyle elusive. […]

I’m not sure why BILL CALLAHAN decided to retire the Smog moniker and put out Woke on a Whaleheart (Drag City) under his own name. There’s no sudden shift on the new album: Callahan just takes another step down the path he’s been on since his obscurantist lo-fi days, moving steadily toward clarity. His melodies […]

As he’s gotten older, former Jefferson Airplane guitarist Jorma Kaukonen has returned to the traditional blues and gospel that first inspired him, but he still takes risks. His latest, Stars in My Crown (Red House), includes plenty of the stuff you’d expect from him these days–original takes on time-honored blues and gospel themes, plus rootsy […]

Choreographer Winifred Haun says she told dancer Erika Gilfether years ago that she was dying to give her a certain role: Cathy from John Steinbeck’s novel East of Eden. “She’s evil!” Haun explained. Petite, fragile-looking Gilfether was a little surprised but embraces the part in the aerial duet Haun created. She nails Cathy’s attack on […]

Back when they were touring as the rhythm section of Simian, a decent but now largely forgotten British electro-pop band, dance-music wunderkinder James Ford and James Shaw used to book postshow DJ gigs as Simian Mobile Disco. These days that name is the one they release all their music under, which so far adds up […]

While Matt Pike rampages across the earth with the swift-moving predatory dinosaur that is High on Fire, his former Sleep bandmates, bassist Al Cisneros and drummer Chris Hakius, slowly nurture their own formidable beast, the graceful, majestically heavy OM. On their last full-length, Conference of the Birds, and the two splits that followed–an EP with […]

Buzzed and beloved, OKKERVIL RIVER has just put out The Stage Names (Jagjaguwar), its first new release since 2005’s Black Sheep Boy–the others were a 2006 outtakes EP and a subsequent deluxe omnibus edition compiling both. On the new disc it sounds like these Austinites have turned to concision: their usual rambling sensibility is confined […]

Turbonegro are the scariest-looking bunch of faux homos this side of the Baltic Sea. Plenty of people consider these Norwegian glam-punk deviants nothing but a novelty act, and I’m sure the Clockwork Orange makeup doesn’t help–neither do singer Hank Von Helvete’s “assrockets,” the Roman candles he stuffs in his can and lights onstage. (In a […]

The last time Riccardo Muti conducted the CSO, the Bears had just drafted Walter Payton. His return–a two-week stay at Symphony Center, followed by a seven-city European tour with the orchestra–could be an audition for music director. Muti opens with Tchaikovsky’s Sixth Symphony (Pathetique). The composer declared that he’d put his whole soul into this […]

David Cronenberg’s follow-up to A History of Violence–starring the same lead, Viggo Mortensen, in a very different part–lacks the theoretical dimension of its predecessor, but it’s no less masterful in its fluid storytelling and shocking choreography of violence. A Russian mafia tale with a London setting, scripted by Steven Knight (Dirty Pretty Things), it confirms […]

At one point on his new album, Finding Forever (Geffen), Common tries to smooth-talk a potential paramour who doesn’t date rappers: “I’ve got my SAG card, baby,” he tells her. “I’m an actor.” It’s true he’s been turning up on the silver screen, but he also switches roles like a chameleon on disc, covering the […]