Official Guide: 2008 Pitch Music Showcase and Awards

Do you feel it, that subtle shift in the weather — like a wound finally starting to heal? When the dog ceases baying at the moon, the cat comes home to its milk and the hawk stops circling to land on an Einstein Bros. billboard? Yes, citizens, the Pitch Music Showcase is here.

Thursday night, August 7, in Westport, for a mere $5, all children ages 21 and older can buy admission to our biggest-ever local music party — possibly the biggest Kansas City has seen. From 8 p.m. until closing time, 34 bands, DJs and MCs take over Blayney's, the Beaumont and Beach Club, the Dark Horse Tavern, the newly minted Foundry and good ol' McCoy's.

Obtain fortification at a decent eatery and rush down at the crack of 8 because the opening salvo is not to be missed: the Roseline at Blayney's, the immortal Namelessnumberheadman at the Beach Club (Rockesh canceled, having broken up), D/Will at the Dark Horse, Beatbroker at the Foundry and the Last Call Girls hooting up first call at McCoy's.

That's barely the beginning. As the showcase boils to an end, you'll find the Beautiful Bodies shaking a tailfeather at the Beaumont, the Pink Socks leading the 1960s frat-brash-a-go-go at the Dark Horse, American Catastrophe hanging 'em high at McCoy's, DJ Sku executing derring-do at the Foundry. And that's not nearly all.

The acts playing the Showcase represent fewer than a third of the whopping 95 local names that are up for one of this year's Pitch Music Awards. You can read about all 95 of these righteous slayers of popular music in the following pages. They were chosen not, as in past years, by the wider Kansas City and Lawrence music community (the usual promoters, club owners, media peeps, etc.) but by Pitch staffers and contributors, with input from a few of our friends, including Robert Moore of Sonic Spectrum, Chuck Haddix of KCUR 89.3's The Fish Fry, blogger Happy in Bag and Chronic the Hedgehog of PopFreeRadio.com.

We took the nomination process into our own dictatorial grip to ensure a diverse ballot slathered in fresh blood — and that's exactly what we ended up with. We also created an All-Star category for the acts that keep winning their respective categories year after year.

The ballot has been running in the paper and online over the past few weeks, and fans have been voting for their favorites at Pitch.com. On the night of the Showcase, if you haven't already voted, please pick up a paper ballot at any of the venues, fill it out and leave it in the box provided.

The Showcase marks the end of the voting. Ten days later, on August 17, we'll present the winners with their trophies at the Uptown Theater at what's sure to be a madcap ceremony hosted by David Wayne Reed.

As always, we encourage you to be a patron of the arts. Help us discover new bands and keep us hip to older acts that might be getting overlooked. Our ballot isn't a comprehensive list of all that's going on. Since formulating the ballot earlier this year, we've spent tons of time and spilled gallons of ink on groups that aren't up for awards.

And so what? The main thing is to recognize the great music scene we have in Kansas City by rocking out to local sounds and ending this hot-cold summer with a bang.

— Jason Harper

Contributing writers: Ray Cummings, Richard Gintowt, Greg Franklin, Caleb Goellner, Jason Harper, John Kreicbergs, Aaron Ladage, Andrew Miller, Lorna Perry, Sarah Smarsh, Ben Westhoff

AVANT/EXPERIMENTAL

The Sperm

Like its seminal namesake, the Sperm’s musical progeny is a bit willy-nilly. In fact, it’s all over the goddamned place. This trio — whose members go by ethnic-sounding handles such as Malacheck Bamboozo — doesn’t write songs so much as it squeezes out tuneless improv doodle noodles like a young, smacked-out-of-its-gourd Ween. It isn’t really experimental, per se; it’s joyous exploration.

myspace.com/thesperm

This Is My Condition

One-man bands far too often get overlooked or dismissed as mere gimmicks, but Craig Comstock’s This Is My Condition blasts apart the limits of sludgy, noisy rock. Working triple-time on drums, singing fuzzed-out vocals and sliding his drumsticks up and down his guitar for a strange, skronky-art-rock-meets-avant-blues mashup, Comstock gives a live show that’s frantic in all the right places and serves as an excellent palate cleanser for those tired of formulaic and predictable music.

thisismycondition.com

Mythical Beast

Mythical Beast hails from the storied school of shamanic, ritual drone. You know the one — it worships at the feet of Jefferson Airplane’s “White Rabbit” but extends the length, ups the distortion and jettisons the sweet melodic core for something less immediate. “In Memory of Yellow Skin,” for example — from a split with fellow travelers Pocahaunted — finds the group picking its way through a landscape of blackened, dour psych guitar and chilling incantations, looking for an end-of-the-tunnel light that isn’t likely to materialize.

myspace.com/mythicalbeast

Mr. Marco’s V7

Mr. Marco’s V7 might be the only band in town that could score a ’70s porn flick as comfortably as it could pen a Turkish opera. The band’s outlandish boogerfunk alternately recalls Zappa, P-Funk, Miles Davis, Primus and Ennio Morricone — touchstones that still don’t explain half of what the malleable instrumental quartet cooks up. The group’s Wednesday-night residence at Davey’s Uptown has spawned more berserk jams than Les Claypool could shake his bass at.