Three of Milwaukee’s most reliable bands brought a little
bit of the Cactus Club to Summerfest Monday night at the Cascio Interstate
Music Groove Garage.
Music history is filled with great dropped ideas, and the
1990s, in particular, were rife with them. Milwaukee’s Testa
Rosa picks up some of these loose ends, continuing where bands like
Belly, That Dog, Throwing Muses or pretty much any other band that ever
featured Tanya Donelly or one of the Haden triplets left off. Allusions to the
’90s abound: The guitars adhere to the same strum-and-squall dynamic of ’90s
alterna-pop; Betty Blexrud-Strigens cough-syrup-smooth vocals evoke Kim Deal;
the hazy bass riff on “Ollie Delilah” nods to Weezer’s iconic “Only in Dreams”
riff. This isn’t to say they’re just s’90s revivalists, though. They write
powerful, stripped-down ballads that
don’t drag like ballad. Juliana
Hatfield should have been so lucky as to have these guys ghostwriting her
albums.
There’s little to say about Milwaukee’s excellent Juniper Tar that hasn’t already been said: They sing
relaxed, rustic rock songs with Bryds-esque four-part harmonies that inevitably
give way to blistering, crashing, tag-team guitar send-offs. It’s a formula
that actually pays off better for Juniper Tar than it has for Wilco, whose
recent albums toy with a more extreme but less satisfying soft/loud dynamic.
It’s hard not to think of that climactic scene in High Fidelity where Jack Black finally unveils his band when
watching The Celebrated Workingman, the indie-rock band
fronted by Mark Waldoch, long a familiar face at Milwaukee’s answer to
Championship Vinyl, Atomic Records. With excitable hand gestures and popped
eyes, he conducted his band with Hold Steady-ish cheer, leading them through a
boisterous set of triumphant drums and wild, winding guitars. His enthusiasm
was contagious.
Quantum of Solace is the future of cinema, a movie whose splashiest scenes are tailored to the dimension of big screens. It opens with the camera zooming like a cruise missile, skimming the surface of the sea as it hurtles toward the Italian coast. There,
Besotted by the cinema of silence and early talking pictures, Guy Maddin also finds humor in old movies-or perhaps the humor lies more in the distance between our experience of the world and the gestures of an antique art form. In My Winnipeg, the Canadia
For most of us, bossa nova is the distinctive sound of Brazil. The music was born in the late 1950s, conceived in large part by Antonio Carlos Jobim. From early on, American jazz musicians parked themselves within the idiom, sensing an affinity between th
California's Sound Tribe Sector 9 claims that instrumental music can reflect the tension of the times. In fact, the five-man collective considers its dense Eno-esque swirl of pulsing live and electronic sounds a means of "conversation" between band and li
The local restaurant Barossa, named after the Australian wine region of the same name, quietly closed its doors several months ago. With that closure came the loss of a very distinguished wine list and a menu that borrowed ingredients from all over the wo
The biggest local restaurant news of 2008 would have to be Adam Siegel’s James Beard Award as Best Chef of the Midwest. Siegel is chef de cuisine at Bartolotta’s Lake Park Bistro, as well as at Bacchus. Lake Park Bistro brings a very French fe
