thursday september 10 Paul Rudnick’s critically acclaimed play Jeffrey had an incredibly successful run earlier this year in Fort Worth, playing to packed houses and capturing several awards from the Fort Worth Theatre Guild, including Best Studio Production and Best Actor. The original cast has assembled once again for a…
Fog lights We Were Sent For The Danes Red Crown Records My Bloody Valentine’s 1991 album Loveless set a new standard for pop, breaking songs into a million pieces and then reassembling them in a different order, creating a warped replica that both embraced and rejected pop’s conventions. Unfortunately, Loveless…
Bobgoblin’s appearance at this year’s EdgeFest should have been the finest moment of the band’s five-year career, proof that the band’s uphill struggle against apathetic audiences and an indifferent record label was worth it. Worth the indignity of playing shows to four walls and a couple of bouncers on a…
thursday september 3 One reason why the Liquid Lounge is one of the best new clubs–no, make that best clubs, period–is the DJs that take over the club every Thursday night: Mark Crowder, Shawn Francis, and Christopher Ryan. The trio–collectively known as Fine Time–plays an eclectic mix of records, everything…
Frank Black doesn’t like to talk about the Pixies very much, maybe because he knows that almost everyone would rather listen to any Pixies record than one of his own solo albums. Black probably realizes that his former band’s legacy is as inescapable to him as walking, but he doesn’t…
Past perfect Cocktail Country The Lucky Pierres Self-released On the back cover of Cocktail Country–the debut full-length by The Lucky Pierres–there is a photograph of the band sitting around a table at Sons of Hermann Hall, decked out in their retro finest. Taken out of context, the band in the…
thursday august 27 Echo Theatre’s inaugural production, Dream of a Common Language, may be set in 1874, but its theme is entirely modern. The play, written by Heather McDonald, explores the delicate balance between a woman’s career, her family, and society’s expectations. Women have been allowed–and encouraged–to work for quite…
Rap it up Down By Sound: KNON Hip-Hop Compilation Various Artists KNON A few years ago, Mad Flava had a deal with Priority Records, but record contracts are only good as long as the band is, and honestly, Mad Flava was never that great. So here they are, no longer…
Brandon Boyer looks distracted, and a little bit embarrassed, when he opens the door to his Denton apartment. “Sorry,” he says sheepishly as we walk into his living room. “Iwas in the middle of a game.” Boyer waves an arm toward the source of his embarrassment, a Sony PlayStation, and…
thursday august 20 Before it was even completed, Grapevine Mills was being touted as the mall to end all malls, the shopping center that would make all others in the metroplex obsolete. Why would anyone want or need to go elsewhere? The Mills has been up and running for almost…
As a maker of musical parodies, “Weird” Al Yankovic has an unimpeachable track record, from 1979’s Knack spoof “My Bologna” to 1996’s foray into the world of gangsta rappers, “Amish Paradise.” As a movie star, well, that’s another story. Yankovic never made a film before 1989’s UHF, and there probably…
thursday august 13 Riverdance is a celebration of Irish music, song, and dance that almost every person of Irish descent would probably like to see quietly disappear. Unfortunately, that’s not likely to happen anytime soon. The Irish dance troupe attracts inexplicably large crowds wherever it travels, including Dallas, where it…
The Corvette is more than just a car–it’s a symbol of American culture. Well, it’s a symbol of American culture in other countries, at least; it’s the American dream wrapped in steel and fiberglass and powered by a Big Block V8. In reality, most Americans’ only contact with a Corvette…
It’s never been easy to keep a Deep Ellum crowd occupied. There’s always a better band or cheaper drinks somewhere else. Sure, you can get people to come in, but it’s getting harder to keep them there. And because each club has a separate cover charge, clubgoers are less willing…
thursday august 6 About the only thing that Red Jacket brags about more than its inclusion on InStyle magazine’s list of coolest nightclubs in the country is the rumor that Jack Ruby spent his last free night at the club. Ruby, as anyone within earshot of Oliver Stone knows, is…
Whatfunlifeis Duffel Bag Transona Five Sandwich Records It’s never been very hard to pinpoint where Denton’s Transona Five is coming from. Every answer you need is in the four bands mentioned in the classified ad singer-guitarist Chris Anderson and guitarist Chris Foley placed when forming Transona Five: the Velvet Underground,…
Delays are to be expected in the music business. Even at the lowest level, entire albums can be buried in avalanches of red tape and broken promises, perpetually shelved until everyone involved starts to wonder whether they will ever see the fluorescent light of a record store. Until a band…
thursday july 30 William Manchee could be Dallas’ answer to John Grisham. Manchee, an author who has maintained a private law firm in Dallas since 1975, recently published Brash Endeavour, a page-turning tale of a small-time lawyer in over his head with some big-time clients. Just like in Grisham’s books,…
Events like the Dallas Music Expo aren’t for the casual fan. Things like this are for the kind of people who can stand to spend two hours sifting through musty cardboard boxes full of 45s, looking for a piece of black (vinyl) gold. They’re for the fans who have to…
Haven’t we metal before? Sweettit Stink!#Bug Last Beat Sweettit, Stink!#Bug’s second long-player, is an album made at the crossroads where metal meets everything else (funk, rap, industrial) and leaves with a gig bag full of hyphens. It’s a mishmash of styles that bounces from white thrash to scratch-and-riff metal to…
It seems as if the Dallas music scene has lost more than it has gained recently. Within the last year alone, UFOFU, rubberbullet, and Course of Empire called it quits, and the Dark Room and the Orbit Room had to shut their doors. Deep Ellum has become the province of…
thursday july 23 In case you didn’t read last week’s Observer (or any Observer for the last, oh, four months), Peter Schmidt–former Three on a Hill and Funland frontman–released his first solo album, love or the decimal equivalent, on July 21. The album, recorded under the name Legendary Crystal Chandelier…
