The Great American Cattle Barons is actually yet another ‘band’ instigated by Iowa City’s profligate purveyor of bummer rock, Samuel Locke Ward, this time…
Kent Williams
Posted inArts & Entertainment
Gary Numan, of ‘Cars’ fame, performs at the Blue Moose
Since the 1990s, when musicians like Trent Reznor and Marilyn Manson began citing his music as a major influence, Numan has earned considerable esteem for the various directions he has taken electronic music in and his continuing contributions to the genre.
Posted inAlbum Reviews
Album Review: Bull Black Nova – Don’t Fall Away
Don’t Fall Away is an album of ambitious art-pop songs with a pretty broad palette of sounds and styles. It’s at least partially home-recorded by A. J. Worden, the man behind Bull Black Nova, though Brook Hoover, of the Surf Zombies, gets an engineering credit as well. No matter the means of production, this is a well-recorded, dynamically dramatic album. It really is true that these days all you need is a computer, a decent microphone or two and good ideas.
Posted inCommunity/News
‘A Transplanted Chicago’ details Iowa City’s collective distortion of race and crime
A Transplanted Chicago: Race, Place and the Press in Iowa City opens at the bus interchange by the Old Capitol Mall. It is the first place — geographic…
Posted inAlbum Reviews
Album Review: Alex Body – Aquarian Nightmare
Alex Body — of Twelve Canons, Miracles of God, Giant Question Mark, Shitty Wizard — has released three solo albums, of which Aquarian Nightmare is the most recent. Since 2011′s Cutting Down Camelot, Body has waded further into the electronic end of the psych-pop swamp. This album’s sound is a thick mixture of drum machines and analog synths, and he is more confident of his voice, cutting back a bit on the slapback echo and reverb
Posted inAlbum Reviews
Album Review: The Main Sequence – Self-Titled LP
Ambient music generally has no narrative, no frontman and sometimes no recognizable foreground. This is a genre where practitioners may outnumber the total audience, at least in the U.S. where Americans like celebrity, attitude and a human focal point in their music. Ambient music doesn’t just lack those things, it’s an active rejection of them…
Posted inAlbum Reviews
Album Reviews: Velcro Moxie – Restless
Velcro Moxie is a rock and roll band fronted by a remarkable voices of Jasmine Terrell and Nick Carney. They’ve become a live mainstay at the Yacht Club since getting together in 2011. If you live in Iowa City when a band plays the Yacht Club frequently, they get pigeonholed as one of “those” bands—a bit jammy, a bit hippy dippy—but that’s usually an unfair judgement, both of the bands and of Yacht Club.
Posted inAlbum Reviews, Arts & Entertainment
Album Reviews: Giant Question Mark – The Qualbum
Giant Question Mark is a project by Alex Body and Joe Heuerman that grew out of a mutual affection for synths and drum machines. Since last December, they’ve existed as a live performance duo, though they occasionally uploaded raw, improvised tracks to Bandcamp as examples of their work. I found these pieces really entertaining and wanted to review them, but for the
Posted inAlbum Reviews
Album Review: Bonne Finken – Love Affairs
I have an ambivalent relationship with commercial pop. I got my first transistor radio in 1966, when we lived in San Jose, Calif., so my seminal experience of pop music was at the moment when Motown, The Beatles and psychedelic rock collided. The mainstream was a lot l
Posted inArts & Entertainment
Album Reviews: Thomas Comerford’s II
Thomas Comerford, formerly of Iowa City and also the band Kaspar Hauser, lives in Chicago now. Comerford stands out from the crowd of rootsy singer-songwriters by virtue of his outrageously tuneful songwriting and instinct for the perfect arrangement. He sings in a full-throated baritone, his voice touched by a subtle vibrato.
Posted inArts & Entertainment
Dolls in a Dollhouse: Wes Anderson puts up his most cartoonish characters in Grand Budapest Hotel
Wes Anderson’s The Grand Budapest Hotel was released the first week of March, showed up in Iowa City in late April and is remarkably still showing twice daily at …
Posted inAlbum Reviews
Album Reviews: Paul Cary and The Small Scarys – Coyote
Paul Cary’s last album Ghost Of A Man was a go-for-broke alley brawl of a record: It was sparsely arranged, emphasizing Cary’s voice and guitar. His newest album, Coyote, adds a full band that includes Russ Calderwood’s bass and Adam Penly’s greasy, distorted Farfisa filling much of the aural space left open on Ghost.
