CHIEFTAINS 4/25, Rosemont theatre You know they’re Irish, you know they’re good at it, and as far as I know this show, unlike their recent records, will be blissfully free of celebrity cameos. KRINKLES 4/25, Weeds; 4/26, Martyrs’ This is a release party for their new album, Three Ringos, which is packed with the sort […]
Author Archives: Monica Kendrick
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Sex and Violins
Dirty Three Double Door, March 22 By Monica Kendrick There’s something about the very sight of a member of the violin family that makes a lot of people assume they’re in for something fundamentally different from rock ‘n’ roll. Perhaps it’s a middle-class association of the fluttering bow with the fear of coughing loudly; perhaps […]
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Bad Livers
BAD LIVERS Bad Livers singer-banjoist-guitarist Danny Barnes and tuba player-upright bassist Mark Rubin must have been a pair of those smart, weird kids you sometimes find in small southern towns listening to punk records and wisecracking–the ones voted Most Likely to Move to the Big City in the usual indie-rock parable. But these kids stayed […]
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Rock and Roll Ghost
Marianne Faithfull Park West, February 5 By Monica Kendrick In her hilarious 1994 autobiography, Faithfull, Marianne Faithfull tells the story of the time she OD’d on sleeping pills, shortly after Brian Jones died. She writes that she “spoke” to Jones before lapsing into a six-day coma, then hints wryly that it would have been better […]
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Dynamic Duo
Swans Double Door, January 21 By Monica Kendrick Creativity is a volatile high–less predictable than drugs and harder work than sex–and when you throw in the fact that rock ‘n’ roll usually requires collaboration, you’re skating on thin ice indeed. Rock ‘n’ roll is littered with artists who blew their creative wads in the first […]
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Swans
Swans At first they seemed farcical–their black-hole-dense, painfully slow slabs of crunge sounded like Black Sabbath at the wrong speed and Michael Gira’s guttural, grimly literal proclamations on rape and slavery like goth melodrama taken to a dead-end extreme, doomed to appeal only to the sort of chronic masturbators who can’t read enough about serial […]
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Outside the Lines
God Is My Co-Pilot Empty Bottle, December 13 We’re here / We’re queer / We’re gonna fuck your children!” screams God Is My Co-Pilot front woman Sharon Topper on “Queer Disco Anthem.” You bet it’s a sensationalist hook, and it sure is fun to shout–whether or not you mean a word of it. Though the […]
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Musical Notes: life in the Betsy Years
The Betsy Years take their name directly from bassist Liz Payne’s life. “My father’s been married four times,” she says. “So I denote certain periods in my childhood by who his wife was.” The Betsy years (1971 to ’77) were a significant period in Payne’s development and a time of tension in her family. In […]
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Sexless Appeal
Scissor Girls Lounge Ax, September 6 By Monica Kendrick According to the Gavin Web site: “Sarah McLachlan and her manager, Terry McBride, are planning a North American tour for an all-women music festival next July and August, including Emmylou Harris, Suzanne Vega, Tori Amos, Tracy Chapman, Joni Mitchell, Neneh Cherry, Veruca Salt, Annie Lennox, Natalie […]
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Everywoman’s Wild Ride
Ann Magnuson The Luv Show (Geffen) By Monica Kendrick It’s easy to forget that there was once a time when little girls didn’t dream of becoming stars, when women weren’t allowed onstage at all and female parts were played by men–centuries before Andy Warhol and John Waters. It wasn’t until the turn of this century […]