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Kittie with Candiria and 36 Crazyfists
Thursday · Bogart's
With their debut album, Spit, Morgan Lander, her sister Mercedes, Fallon Bowman and Talena Atfield threw themselves into the music world as an incomprehensible anomaly called Kittie. A quartet of teenage girls thrashing around among — relatively speaking — much more intimidating and maniacal heavyweights like Pantera, Slipknot and other Ozzfest psychopaths. Even more enigmatic is that they emerged unscathed from the media factory that seemed hell-bent on churning out an army of bubblegum Pop divas. While many impressionable teen minds embraced these new artists and their music by cloning their fashion, hairstyles and love of all other things trivial, Kittie resigned themselves to the sidelines by playing what they loved — Metal. They did make an impact (Spit went gold soon after its release) but not as girls who just want to have fun. They quickly made sure everyone understood that they just wanted to break your face. Two years later came the aftershock album, Oracle. Though reduced to a trio for this session, Kittie's venom remained just as potent as they expanded their sound by including haunting, piano-driven ballads. Their third album, Until The End, has moved the girls even farther into the land of professionalism. Morgan barks and spits fire when necessary, but now uses her well-honed singing voice more than ever to embrace the music like a ghostly fog on a jagged mountain range.
The exceptional use of double bass drumming has only improved with time, and this latest offering has more memorable guitar riffs surging through it than any of their previous albums. (Jacob Richardson)
Modest Mouse with The Walkmen
Thursday · Paramount's Kings Island
Chronic alcoholism! Rape allegations! Total mental breakdowns! These are the flashy, tabloid-y talking points for recent magazine profiles about the suddenly hot, Pacific Northwest-spawned Modest Mouse. But the story of the band's improbable rise from Indie cult heroes to major label Alt sensations is almost as intriguing, giving hope to Indie Rock guitar heroes-to-be the world over. The group — which takes its name from a Virginia Woolf line about "modest mouse-coloured people" — formed in the early-'90s and released singles and albums for respected indie labels like K and Up Records before landing a deal with Sony/Epic and releasing The Moon & Antarctica. The band developed a fervent cult following and have influenced scores of up-and-coming bands with a blendered sound that slices and dices Pavement, early Talking Heads and Tom Waits to create a scrumptious smoothie of artsy, gripping and fractured Pop/Rock. The mainstream success of the band's latest release, Good News For People Who Love Bad News, and the overplayed single, "Float On" (the "Hey Ya" of the moment), constitute an A&R man's wet dream. After years of major labels buying up all the best (willing) underground acts, throwing them at the wall, seeing what sticks and then discarding the non-stickers (i.e., the majority) to the trash heap, Modest Mouse's success story of parlaying Indie cred into big-deal sales should keep the suits fishing around for cult acts with radio potential. Whether those acts bite or not is a whole other story. Those pissed about the cancellation of The Walkmen's local show at the Southgate House Aug. 8 will have to shell out a few extra bucks to catch them with MM this week at Kings Island's Timberwolf Amphitheater. But you get to ride The Beast! (Mike Breen)
Jesse Malin with The Damnwells
Sunday · Southgate House
For nearly all of the '90s, Jesse Malin was the leather-and-denim face and voice for D Generation, New York's premiere Hard Rock trash brats. But after all of D Gen's drunken revelry and hedonistic Rock glory, Malin found himself pulled in a completely different direction from his fast and loose band persona. With change firmly in mind, Malin pulled a page from Paul Westerberg's songbook and pursued a sound that matched the passion of his cranked-to-10 band assault with a newly polished sense of melodicism and an understated sonic resonance on his 2003 debut solo album, The Fine Art of Self-Destruction. Malin started with demos financed from money received from a gentrification buyout of his New York apartment lease, and a bare-bones, acoustic troubadour atmosphere approach appealed to him as a direction which led to a self-released EP. Friend and eventual producer Ryan Adams heard a big Pop Rock record among Malin's sparse songs of darkness and isolation, so Self-Destruction steered closer to Roots Rock volume than acoustic hush. In the year since Self-Destruction was released, Malin has toured relentlessly, released an album with his Punk band, The Finger (featuring Adams), played a set with Bruce Springsteen in his backing band and released The Heat, his almost improbably brilliant sophomore album. With The Heat, Malin shifted the emphasis away from the Roots and more to the Rock end of spectrum. The one constant through all his incarnations has been Malin's desperate and driven songs, detailing the scuffed lives of the NYC denizens with which he very clearly empathizes and identifies, and the hopefulness he carries for his downtrodden but never defeated subjects. (Brian Baker)
Sick Of It All with Terror, Time In Malta and Champion
Sunday · Radio Down
Sick Of It All has seen it all and been through it twice. The Koller brothers (guitarist Pete, shredding vocalist Lou) spent almost the last two decades helping to define the NYC Hardcore scene while building their audience through relentless touring and grass roots boosterism. For their efforts they've had to deflect charges of major label compromise (because of their signings to EastWest and Elektra Records) and inciting violence (due to fights that broke out at early shows and an unfortunate incident in the mid-'90s when a Massachusetts college student shot and killed a number of fellow students while wearing a SOIA T-shirt, to which the band vigorously defended themselves in The New York Times), neither of which makes a whole lot of sense in the context of their socially responsible albeit vehement messages and the fact that only within the last few years have the band's members been able to make a living solely on their music. But SOIA knows the value of suggesting solutions in favor of shoving them down listeners' throats. The band's intent is clear on "Take Control," a track from their latest album, Life on the Ropes: "I've got to take control of the problem/Before it takes control over me," howls Lou Koller above a soundtrack of Hardcore-via-Dumbass Rock. "I've got to change the way I see things/And that'll change the way I'm seen." Smart boys. Sick Of It All might not convert their detractors with anything they do from here on out, but for anyone who likes their social and political commentary scored with Punk fury and Guitar Rock balls, this is a band that pegs the needle on all counts. (BB)
