Ready to Rock
It was a night like no other at the Next Door Art Gallery (2020 Waugh Drive, 713-520-1712). A band called Felix Madison was playing Zeppelin to the very note — damn if even the vocals didn’t sound like Plant. They’re not purely a Zeppelin cover band — the second set…
Steak House Shuffle
Houston is a market where you can’t toss a rib eye without hitting a restaurant claiming to serve the best beef. So jumping in with your own claim isn’t for the timid restaurateur. How will Fleming’s Prime Steakhouse & Wine Bar fare as the new kid on the chopping block?…
X Marks the Spot
John Doe shudders at the scenario. He’s imagining that it’s the first night on X’s unofficial reunion tour, the seminal L.A. punk band’s boldest attempt at a bona fide comeback in seven years, and somehow the anarchistic fans his band used to play for have been replaced by what looks…
Cocktail Party
After trying Mambo Seafood’s (6697 Hillcroft, 713-541-3666) cóctel de camarones ($5.95 and $9.95), you’ll never be satisfied with the stuffy old shrimp cocktails where a few lone crustaceans teeter over an ice-filled glass, waiting to be eaten one at a time. In Mambo’s cocktail, the sizable shrimp are tossed around…
Down-Home Brew
Eleven Hundred Springs doesn’t look like your average country band. They’ve all spent plenty of time in tattoo parlors, and not just for the pleasant conversation. A couple of them have long hair. In a rock club, they’d blend in, but they’re five sore thumbs at the honky-tonks they play…
Motor City Mellow Men
Welcome to Detroit. Mitch Ryder and the Detroit Wheels. Stevie Wonder. The MC5. The Stooges. Ted Nugent. Eminem. Kid Rock. The White Stripes. It’s all there — the rich history, the promising future, the bands that push the limits of whatever type of music they play. And now, with all…
RIP, KIKK
The sorry state of Houston radio in the year of our lord 2002 got even more desolate last Monday at noon. In the inestimable wisdom of parent company Infinity Broadcasting, 43-year-old country institution KIKK was put to the sword by the company’s newest brainstorm: KHJZ, Smooth Jazz 95.7 The Wave…
Sondre Lerche
Call him precocious or wise beyond his years, but Sondre Lerche is hardly your typical 19-year-old songwriter. While most barely legal bards are likely to bang out three-chord tunes about girls, drugs and the burden of being perennially misunderstood, Lerche has come up with a collection of luxurious, grown-up pop…
Metro Area
Metro Area transports listeners to an alternate universe, where the lush sounds of Salsoul and Prelude were never overpowered by the thump of hip-hop and breakbeat. Instead, it picks up where Prince and Paul Simpson left off in the mid-’80s, crafting modern disco, with just enough modern flair to not…
Chasmatic
Between them, the members of Chasmatic — bassist Josh Denkmore, drummer Jeff Senske and singer-guitarist Marshall Preddy — have played in such local luminary bands as Lucky Motors, the Cinders, Phineas Gauge and the Wholesome Rollers. Preddy wrote all ten of these songs about women, love and longing, broken relationships…
The Red Elvises
Billing themselves as providers of “the only rock from Siberia,” the Russian rockabilly vaudevillians in the Red Elvises have spent the past six years conquering the club circuit with an over-the-top stage show that features an Old Country interpretation of American trash culture. Surfing (“Surfing in Siberia”) and disco (“Closet…
The Pretender
Rodrigo Fernando Montano is a liar. You wouldn’t think it to look at him. He has an honest face, a big open smile and a nice warm handshake. He’s handsome, too, just over six feet tall, with an athlete’s build and eyes the color of dark chocolate. Today his collar-length…
Stone Sour
Was it the ignominy of a life behind masks, or the fact that their fans were known as “maggots” that drove Corey Taylor and James Root to give Slipknot the slip for a while? Whatever it was, Taylor and Root have suckled up to the side-project sow and taken to…
Fueling the Ire
Grand Dragon Sue Green holds a cigarette between her hot-pink fingernails and watches the men in her klavern slice through burlap bags with buck knives. Inside the garage crammed with timber, old blankets, tools and other assorted junk, the sacks’ odor chokes like mustard gas. “Burlap smell pretty good, don’…
Wonder Boy
Do, you wish to know if Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets is as good as the first Harry Potter movie. Is it as charming, visually gratifying, faithful to filthy rich author J.K. Rowling’s inescapable books? Well, that’d be yep times four. The sequel is an enchanting spectacular for…
Bush Envy
The fallout from last week’s Democratic meltdown continues to ripple across the local landscape. Three-term Harris County Democratic chair Sue Schechter plans to throw in the towel and resign early next year. “I’m just not sure I’m the right person that can recruit the next set of candidates,” says the…
Moral Minority
David Arquette in a movie about the holocaust? Is this somebody’s idea of a joke? As it turns out, this unconventional bit of casting proves to be the least of The Grey Zone’s problems. Written and directed by Tim Blake Nelson, better known for his acting (The Good Girl, O…
Paying for It
In case you missed it, the respected (if drearily earnest) Project for Excellence in Journalism has rated Houston’s local TV news operations. The results aren’t too surprising. For five years the group, associated with the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism, has been rating local news around the country. This…
Dead Weight
Consider life’s unbreakable rules: Send Mom flowers on her birthday. Keep your fastball down. Never order lasagna in Des Moines. Don’t go sailing with people you can’t stand. Violation of this last rule has yielded some pretty fair books and movies over the years — Moby Dick and The Caine…
Cut the Apple
Cut the Apple Reject Rory: Thanks for your timely article on Judge Rory Olsen [“Judging Rory,” by Margaret Downing, October 31]. As a normally straight-Republican voter, I made an exception in Olsen’s case when I voted Tuesday. The GOP is much better off without that bad apple. Bill Eubank Houston…
Something Else by the Kinks
In 1969 Rolling Stone announced, “The Kinks have arrived.” And so they had, selling out four nights at L.A.’s Whiskey A Go Go and breaking nearly every attendance record in that infamous club’s history. But the truth is that the Kinks and front man Ray Davies had been at the…
The Mystery of Monsters
Before the eyesores known as Minute Maid Park and Reliant Stadium sprang up, before developers started naming buildings after juice brands and energy companies, we had the Astrodome. Pat Buchanan called for a cultural jihad from the Dome, and Robert Altman set his cult film Brewster McCloud there. The Houston…
It’s Alive!
Liliana Porter is describing a gold plastic bust-of-Jesus lamp in her soft Argentinean accent. She’s using the over-the-top light fixture as a means to explain her fascination with the kitsch objects she selects to star in her photographs and videos. “How did this thing come to be?” she begins, and…
Writes Love, Not War
Tim O’Brien has a problem: His fiction about the Vietnam War has made him famous. Worse things could befall an author, but it’s an injustice to praise O’Brien for only his war writing when he’s really one of the best contemporary American authors, period. True, O’Brien, who now teaches creative…
Sub Text
Ponzo’s Original, the cold Italian sub offered at the new Midtown Italian takeout restaurant, comes with hard salami, cotto salami, mortadella and provolone, and is served on a toasted Italian bread roll with lettuce, tomatoes, diced Italian peppers and Ponzo’s vinaigrette. It’s one of the best Italian subs in town,…