10 Oct 2000

Bookends Boost Symphony Performance

By Zach Carstensen
After a summer of anticipation, the Quad City Symphony Orchestra (QCSO) kicked off its 86th season Saturday, October 7, at the Adler Theater. The mammoth performance of Shostakovich’s Fifth Symphony, the intimate emotion of Mendelssohn’s Violin Concerto in E Minor, and even the rabblerousing overture to Verdi’s opera Nabucco delighted the senses.
10 Oct 2000

Season Offers Solid Entertainment, Few Surprises

By Zach Carstensen
With few surprising pieces, this year's Quad City Symphony Orchestra season is best described as "solid." By relying on repertoire mainstays like Beethoven's Third Symphony, Brahms' Fourth, and the Verdi Requiem, music director and conductor Donald Schleicher has created a season that will surely please the Adler crowd but offer them sparse originality.
10 Oct 2000

Big Rock, and Its Less-than-Bright Kid Brother

By Jeff Ignatius
You remember rock, don’t you? That arena sound that required no hair spray, no leather, no preening, no showy solos, no attitude? The only things you needed were guitar, drums, bass, and a singer. That’s exactly what the local band Blue Ash Ink has on its self-titled, self-released album.
27 Sep 2000

Intensity Rescues Progressive Rock From Itself

By Jeff Ignatius
Progressive rock has never been cool. It has sometimes been respected, but those periods have been fleeting and hastily apologized for. The genre had many practitioners in the early 1970s, bands unafraid of releasing 30-minute pieces (they can’t properly be called songs) rife with self-indulgence and pomposity.
13 Sep 2000

A Beautiful Late Summer Snow

By Jeff Ignatius
There’s nothing fancy-pants about Kelly Pardekooper’s music. It’s as unassuming, familiar, comfortable, and rugged as denim. That’s not to say it’s pedestrian. Far from it. Pardekooper’s new album, Johnson County Snow (on the well-regarded Trailer Records label), is simply spectacular, with 10 beautifully crafted pieces of corn-fed rock from Iowa City.
13 Sep 2000

Symphony Offers Sultry Sounds

By Zach Carstensen
There are times when I’m out and about that I feel the Quad Cities are a great place to catch a symphony, listen to some jazz, or ponder art, and the most recent Quad City Symphony Orchestra (QCSO) pops concert left me in a state of cultural bliss.
13 Sep 2000

Strange Bedfellows Take the Stage at Peabody's

By Jeff Ignatius
We’ve all heard confessional lyrics, but how does one go about writing soul-baring music? Listening to Shannon Wright’s striking Maps of Tactic (her second album on Chicago’s Quarterstick Records) feels like looking at somebody’s innards.
22 Aug 2000

Love Us -- Please

By Jeff Ignatius
The Nixons sound needy. I don't want to make too much of it, but if you go to see them at the Pig Pen in Clinton on August 24, please give the guys a hug and tell 'em you love 'em. Listen to Scott Bush, the brand spanking new guitarist for the Dallas-based band, after fumbling around looking for a description of his band's sound: "They can call it whatever they want, as long as they like it.
17 Aug 2000

Veruca Salt Won't Stand Still

By Jeff Ignatius
Say this for Veruca Salt: Static it ain’t. The Chicago-based band, which makes good on a canceled show at RIBCO this Thursday at 10 p.m. with Ophur, is hardly the same outfit that made a minor splash in 1994 with American Thighs and the single “Seether.
08 Aug 2000

Jamaica in Ya Maka

By Jeff Ignatius
Ya Maka My Weekend has built quite a reputation since its inception in 1992 as the inaugural festival of Rock Island's The District. Not only has it grown from a festival for residents of the Quad Cities to a regional destination, but reggae bands fight for a place on the two stages.

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