We've posted several posters from this spring in the image galleries, including Kate El-Koury's beautiful poster for the Chris Koza show with Grass Withers this Tuesday, June 6.

Kirksville metal mavens Condor are hitting the road. Here's where you can see them:

• 5/18: Columbia, MO
• 5/20: Little Rock, AR
• 5/21: St. Louis, MO
• 5/24: Bloomington, IN
• 5/27: Madison, WI
• 5/28: Minneapolis, MN
• 5/30: Omaha, NE
  
• 6/2: Lawrence, KS

Leave it to Stop, Thief!, one of the least mobile bands I have ever seen onstage, to communicate like Francine Patterson with my refrigerator.

It makes sense, because Stop, Thief! make machine music the likes of which I’ve rarely heard. Machine music, that is, in the sense that they don’t pretend to be working with anything other than electricity.

But they are anything but industrial. In fact, shifting rhythms and focal points are their specialty. Where Stop, Thief! shine is in their joining of multiple (often seemingly divergent) parts into an entrancing whole. They stack melodies on top of one another like little kids seeing who can make the tallest block tower. And their melodies are just about as simple as that, but when you get a dozen of ‘em interacting within a single song, to lift a line from Lou Reed, the possibility’s endless. Without any of those smoggy lyrics hanging around to clutter up the music, what we’re left with is a swath of openness upon which the five members of Stop, Thief! are free to roam. And roam they do!

But they don’t race all over; they take their time. I think this ties into their virtual motionlessness in live performances. While these guys are impressive musicians, they don’t try to wow us with virtuosity. Instead, each player marks a territory and grazes there for awhile before moving on. The effect is calming, and the moods shift so subtly that when things start to really get wild, the music is still very much under control, so much that it takes a moment to register the change.

All of the compositions on Stop, Thief!’s eponymous debut EP are undeniable triumphs, floating like lilies on an undulating rhythmic palette. The opener, “Matlock was a Lawyer,” fades in with chiming harmonics, cymbaline washes, and orchestral synths before presenting the first of the many brief, repeating guitar figures that serve as hinges on this record. Eventually the main riff is sped up and “Matlock” becomes a driving rocker, before returning to a more placid state of sustained notes from various guitars and keyboards. The primary theme is reintroduced and the song coasts along to its finale on an early-Roxy-Music wave of hypnosis.

The lovely arpeggiated guitars that welcome us into “Blanket Security” give way to the discs’s most lyrical basswork, which in turn leads into a new guitar line and what sounds like a xylophone soloing its kindergarten melody over martial drums and power chords.

"What’s Michael Winslow up to These Days?” gets us into entirely different territory. It starts with some Morse code and a guitar bit that sounds eerily like “Eulogy to Lenny Bruce” from Nico’s Chelsea Girl. More blips and bleeps and some indecipherable vocal noises, building drums, and then everyone else kicks in. The feeling is not unlike the opening of Dark Side of the Moon after the woman screams. “Michael Winslow” features another of those magnificent five-or-six-note guitar patterns, the last note of which wobbles off as though it’s had a shot too many. The mood gets frantic, as the guitars shift into heavier distortion, but things calm down and the main guitar motif returns. The last minute of the song is a combination of bells and a boiling kettle going bonkers.

The only song here that sports anything resembling a traditional pop structure is the brief “August,” tucked away after the oscillating “Michael Winslow.” The occasional guitar strum, sans distortion, anchors an aching melody, and the middle section features an organ. Stop, Thief! maintain a somber, almost wistful mood throughout the song.

“An Afternoon Matinee in the Theatre of War” finishes things off, beginning with one of those patented hypnotic Stop, Thief! guitar figures. More unsettling, unclear voices lead into rhythmic strumming straight out of Neil Young’s guitar epics on Everybody Knows This Is Nowhere. The intensity slowly builds, the pace picks up, the twin guitars attack with brutal fuzz, and the deafening climax comes to a halt with a final chugga-chugga and a door-shutting drumbeat.

In listening to “Afternoon Matinee” for the third or fourth time, I heard something new. It seemed familiar, this noise like a jet taking off, but I couldn’t figure out why. When “Afternoon Matinee” ground to a halt, and my CD player read “5 24:41,” my apartment still sounded like a tornado had picked it up and plopped it down on the runway at a major airport.

Turns out it was my refrigerator. That brown Seventies refugee, holed up in a poorly-insulated building in sleepy Kirksville with its only contemporary, the shag carpet. While the carpet just sits there, occasionally muffling the last gasps of some creaky floorboards, the refrigerator has some sass. It’s certainly the most outgoing of my appliances. But I can’t imagine any of the others are too fond of the fridge. I know I’m not. It interrupts movies, reading, music, sleep, life. And then it tried to interrupt Stop, Thief!

What happened instead was altogether surprising. Stop, Thief!, rather than reject the advances of the naughty, naughty fridge, embraced its screeching whirr, and danced around it.

A limited number of Souled American CDs are available at Kirksvillain CDs (in The 'Ville on the south side of the square).

There are just a few copies of these specially priced double CDs left in print. Pick them up before it's too late!

If you haven't checked out Kirksville Rocks MySpace page take a gander and please make us your MySpace friend!

The page makes it easy to listen to bands that are playing The DuKum Upp and inlcudes listings for all Kirksvillain Productions shows.

Goran Ivanović was featured on the cover of latest issue of The Indie Review.

The cover blurb said that Ivanović was, "perhaps, America's finest guitarist today." The story is titled "Guitar God."

You can hear him here.

Truman's Division of Fine Arts is presenting Violet: A Musical featuring local blues band Deadwood.

Special guests Michelle Jones, Leslie Sikes, and Daryl Fazio will perform with Deadwood.

The show runs from April 18-April 22 at 8:00 p.m. in the Ophelia Parrish Courtyard Theater.