Towards the end of the night last Friday, the seas parted. It may have been a fight—not a huge surprise there. Granted, King Khan is no G.G. Allin, but given the boisterous quasi-moshing occurring toward the front for the bulk of the band’s set at Bowery Ballroom, it seems unlikely anyone would have been too taken aback had some momentary scuffle erupted—perhaps a few too many pints were imbibed, some sideways glances traded, maybe someone looked the wrong way at someone else’s significant either.

This post has additional content, click on the permalink to read more.

Read more

“The hard part,” Kevin McDonald answers, “was trusting that it would be funny.” It’s Friday afternoon, and the Kid in the Hall is a ball of hyper energy, answering questions with an unnatural speed, stringing together words without pause, and beginning new sentences two-thirds a of the way through their predecessor. He’s holed up in his Chelsea hotel room for the moment. Later in the evening—half-an-hour after the already late start time of 11—he’ll be taking the stage to perform his one-man, one-hour musical comedy show for Sketchfest 2009, Hammy and the Kids.

This post has additional content, click on the permalink to read more.

Read more

In 1997, director Simon West brought together an all-star cast, including Nicolas Cage, John Cusack, John Malkovich, Ving Rhames and Steve Buscemi to create what some have deemed the greatest action film of all time. That film was Con Air.

The movie has it all—danger, redemption, explosions, Lynyrd Skynyrd. Well, that’s not entirely true—Con Air is, sadly, missing one important feature: sketch-based comedy. Thankfully, a dozen years later New York sketch troupe Elephant Larry have set forth to write this egregious cinematic wrong with Elephant Larry Presents Con Air, a sketch solve based revolving entirely around the Jerry Bruckheimer-produced film.

In honor of the show, which be performed three times this month at the People’s Improv Theater, we sat down with Alexander Zalben, one-fifth of Elephant Larry.

This post has additional content, click on the permalink to read more.

Read more

“There were two things I was doing when I was a nervous, shy 14-year-old,” explains Brendon Small. “One was music, the other was comedy.” In many respects, the artist hasn’t come all that far in the past two decades. Twenty years later he’s still juggling those two passions, albeit in the form of a popular animated series on Cartoon Network’s Adult Swim. Small’s Metalocalypse is weird and violent and wonderful animated crossroads of black humor and death metal—in short its just about everything your average red-blooded adolescent American boy is looking for in late night television programming.

This post has additional content, click on the permalink to read more.

Read more

“Many people have said that it’s an odd choice to star in a show where people don’t know who you are,” laughs Jon Glaser, in a low, gravely near whisper. “But that’s just fine with me.” There’s a wonderful irony, of course, in all of this. The one-time Conan writer’s new show is hands-down both his highest profile gig, and, arguably his most anonymous, a fact no better illustrated than by the handful of giant billboards—three in New York City alone —ordered by the good people at Adult Swim, with Glaser posed Calvin Klein-style, nude save for pair of off-brand tighty whities and a bank robber’s ski mask, the latter of which plays a prominent role in the comedian’s series, Delocated.

This post has additional content, click on the permalink to read more.

Read more

Let there be no doubt that, when the fine folks at the Music Hall of Williamsburg state that an opening act is going on at 9 sharp, that said band is, in fact, going on at 9. There’s plenty of time for the subsequent acts on a three-band lineup to throw the scheduling out of whack, but when it comes to starters, the venue runs a tight ship.

This post has additional content, click on the permalink to read more.

Read more

“I’ve said many times,” J.D. Ryznar tells me, “turning people on to Steely Dan is the hardest thing in the world, but I think we achieved it on our show. It makes people laugh and then they go and listen to Steely Dan and they can’t stop because it’s amazing.“

It’s a strange and wonderful and slightly terrifying power than Ryznar and his friends yield, and the Dan is only the beginning. There’s also the Doobies, Hall & Oates, Christopher Cross and Toto. After 11 episodes, Yacht Rock, their web show, managed to turn an entire generation of jaded hipsters into unironic—if slightly closeted—fans of some of the smoothest music ever penned.

This post has additional content, click on the permalink to read more.

Read more

“It’s one of the few things that people know about Delaware,” says Spinto Band guitarist Joe Hobson. It’s a few days after Barack Obama’s decisive Nov. 4 victory.  The band is busy bouncing from coast to coast in promotion of its recently sixth record, Moonwink, the follow up to 2005’s Nicely and Nicely Done, the band’s most commercially success record to date, thanks in no small part to the insanely catchy indie-pop of “Oh Mandy.” The band is driving to Phoenix today. Two days before it Los Angeles, a night off to watch one of Delaware’s most notable residents take the stage alongside Obama live via satellite from Grant Park in Chicago.

“It’s good,” Hobson says about the senator from his home state’s recent election to the second most powerful post in the free world. “It puts Delaware on the map.” Joe Biden, The Spinto Band—what else puts Delaware on the map? There’s the whole being the first state to ratify the Constitution thing, which the state proudly boasts on its license plate. Oh, and Judge Reinhold was born in Wilmington, too—that’s something, right? I fully expect that Hobson will have some fun facts about the country’s second smallest state at the ready for any reporter seeking some information on The Spinto Band’s home state, but the guitarist is at a loss.

“There’s not too many,” he answers. “A lot of businesses are run out of there, because they have tax breaks. A lot of banks are run out there. Usually people ask us what happens in Delaware, and we say, ‘not very much.’” Honestly, I’d probably play up the whole Judge Reinhold thing, but that’s just me. 

It turns out, surprisingly, that there’s not really much of an indie rock scene in Wilmington, the state’s most populous city, which carries such flattering nicknames as the Chemical Capital of the World, Corporate Capital of the World and Credit Card Capital of the World. It’s also the city the band calls home. “We always have a hard time trying to set up shows in Wilmington. There’s a place called Mojo 13, which is in the Claymont area. We have decent shows there. For the most part we don’t really play anywhere in Wilmington, ever. We tried for a while, there’s a place called The 4W5, but it was always not great, and then the place shut down.“

Thankfully, after six studio albums, The Spinto Band has managed to rack a large enough following to expand its reach far beyond its hometown.  There’s the current nationwide tour, which was itself proceeded by a jaunt through Europe. “We were there for about three weeks,” Hobson answers. “We did the U.K. for the most of it, but we took a few days, went to Paris, Amsterdam. It’s good. I’d say with the last album, it was uneven. The shows over there were bigger. But now it seems to be evening out.”

The band has thus far toured with a number of indie rock heavy weights—The Artic Monkey, Art Brut, We Are Scientists, The Kooks—but this time out, the band’s taken the top billing. “It’s our biggest headlining tour. We’ve done other ones before, but they weren’t nearly as big.” All and all, between Moonwink and the whole vice presidential thing, 2008 has turned out to be a pretty solid year for The Blue Hen State. It’s enough to bring a tear to even Judge Reinhold’s eye.

Photo by Elizabeth Weinberg

This post has additional content, click on the permalink to read more.

Read more

New Zealand’s fourth most popular folk-parody duo? Talk about your one-way ticket to home box office gold. Flight of the Conchords spent their first glorious season on HBO failing at music, love and life in general, with a little bit of help from New York’s current reigning class of underground comedians like Eugene Mirman, Todd Barry and Aziz Ansari.

While, by my estimates, such a distinction would have helped them crack the number three, or possible even the coveted number two slot, they’ve since downgraded themselves to “formerly New Zealand's fourth most popular guitar-based digi-bongo a capella-rap-funk-comedy folk duo," having been knocked out of fourth place by their own cover band, the simile-embracing Like of the Conchords, a distinction that one would assume might make it a touch easier to score tickets to one of the band’s upcoming Town Hall appearance tonight and tomorrow.

This, sadly, is not the case—one can only imagine the manner of hoops fans would have to go through to make it into a show by the top four. I read something about “fire by Baptism” on a message board somewhere. Scoring an interview with the band, it turns out, is even tougher. We’ll spare you the grim and gory details here, and simply say that we spent much of the past week listening to "The Most Beautiful Girl (in the Room)" from the band’s recently released self-titled LP, thinking about what might have been. In the meantime, we’re set to spend the next couple of months wandering the streets of Chinatown with Mel-like tenacity, hoping to score ourselves a cameo in Season Two.

Flight of the Conchords play May 6 & 7 at Town Hall, 123 W. 43rd St. (betw. 6th Ave. & B’way), 212-997-1003; 8, $35.



Read more

The Village Pourhouse sits where 3rd Ave. meets East 11th St. and, while its punny name invokes a passing reminder of the taverns and flophouse that once lined these streets, the innards betray a modern establishment inline with recent decades’ gentrification and mass cultural exodus—with a constant stream of jukebox selections to match.

Recently the bar has happily become a favorite venue for those flag waving defenders of the First Amendment, the Comic Book Legal Defense Fund, and while events over the past year have been arguably met with varying degrees of success, Tuesday night’s benefit has subsequently become nearly universally lauded by all in attendence, a rare channeling of the artistic rabblerousing that inhabited this area unconfined, for the better part of a century.

Past CBLDF events in this space had relegated the featured artists to booths on the perimeters of the room. This time out, however, there was no question as to the focal point of the evening’s festivities. At the front of the room, the wall was already lined with pre-show sketches, largely black-inked drawings of our age’s best known superheroes and villains. But despite—or more likely because of—the early call time, there were none of the billed artists anywhere to be seen, even with the promise of free food for early comers, appetizers that were eventually consumed rapidly by the evening’s paid attendees...

Want to read the full "CBLDF" post? Then click here.



Read more