Velvet Acid Christ started as an offshoot of Toxic Coma, a project whose strange and unsettling recordings finally saw a wider release last year. Velvet Acid Christ was a decidedly more serious and musical effort rather than an attempt between friends to shock each other and make each other laugh…
A bit of an odds-and-sods collection, this set of songs covers the entirety of the Bedsit Infamy’s existence, including its first formal demo. Recalling XTC’s 1992 compilation Rag and Bone Buffet in terms of purpose and content, this “leftover” work is anything but inferior. Billy Armijo may be a writer…
In 1964, drummer Keith Moon approached Roger Daltrey, Pete Townshend and John Entwistle about being in their band, the Who, which had been named the Detours until the outfit found out another band with that name already existed. The foursome went on to become one of the most beloved and…
Brooklyn’s Buke and Gase (formerly Buke and Gass), an outfit comprising Arone Dyer and Aron Sanchez, who played together in the post-punk band Hominid, took its name from two of the instruments the pair created and use to make their music: A buke is a baritone ukulele and a gase…
In 1990, Bryan Erickson started what would become Velvet Acid Christ with a few like-minded friends whose side and main projects had merged. Recalling early Death In June and Clan of Xymox, the act’s debut effort, Fate, came across as the work of people capable of rapid reinvention. 1995’s Neuralblastoma…
They fired everybody over Christmas break,” recalls Photo Atlas guitarist Bill Threlkeld III, talking about when he first found out that his band’s label, Stolen Transmission, had gone belly up a few years back. “We were on tour, and our manager called and said, ‘Uh, bad news. It looks like…
Pallbearer has been making waves with its psychedelic doom metal. Rather than relying on excessively repetitive riffs, however, the quartet employs actual melodies into its music, as well as simple yet intricate dynamics and rhythms that give the songs more actual sonic heft than grinding away at a single chord…
HOT WATER MUSIC @ SUMMIT MUSIC HALL |2/3/13 Last night’s Hot Water Music show at the Summit was the kind where the crowd pretty much knew all of the songs. But the song that got the strongest reaction, bar none, was “Rooftops,” which came in toward the end of the…
MACKLEMORE @ RED ROCKS |2/1/13 Toward the last part of his set at Red Rocks, Macklemore got a little confessional. He shared with us how since he was in his early teens he’s had no control over his consumption of drugs and alcohol, and he admitted to having spent many…
You Me And Apollo from Fort Collins started out as the solo project of Brent Cowles when he was seventeen. Over the course of the last handful of years, Cowles has turned what was essentially a bedroom recording project into a full-fledged band. In 2011, Cowles released Cards With Cheats…
Hot Water Music came together in Gainesville, Florida when four friends moved there in 1993. Fueled by youthful exuberance and inspired in part by the music that surrounding the skateboarding culture of the time, Chuck Ragan, Chris Wollard, Jason Black and George Rebelo created a band that had that punk…
The title track on Queen of Nothing, the Vicious Women’s latest effort, is a driving, gritty little number that has more in common with Locust Abortion Technician-era Butthole Surfers than with any of the garage rock with which this band is often lumped. But there are no guitars here —…
Pallbearer came out of the underground metal scene of central Arkansas. The band was formed in 2008 by bassist Joseph D. Rowland and guitarist and vocalist Brett Campbell, who had been playing together in SPORTS, an outfit that perhaps unintentionally upped the ante on Jucifer’s own extensive use of amps…
Hot Water Music formed in 1993, when a group of friends got together after their other bands split up. The chemistry was immediate, and the foursome relocated to Gainesville, Florida, where Hot Water Music became one of the most well-regarded melodic hardcore bands of the ’90s. Eminently tuneful, the quartet…
Brent Cowles started writing the music for You Me and Apollo (due Saturday, February 2, at the hi-dive) in 2007, while still living in Arizona. Three years later, he moved to Fort Collins and spent time refining his songwriting and sound, eventually deciding that he needed a band to turn…
Formed in 2008, Anchorage initially cultivated the metalcore sound heard on its first album, 2010’s I Have Seen Further, and a follow-up EP, 2011’s Truth in Adversity. But the limitations of the style didn’t fully suit singer and founding member Kevin Gentry as he developed musically. So last year, Gentry…
On songs like “Honey Wine,” from If by Fire, Eye & the Arrow’s latest effort, Paul Dehaven’s vocal cadence and the synthesis of sounds created by the band evoke the country-blues rock of the Grateful Dead on albums like Workingman’s Dead. But as Fire progresses, the music more closely resembles…
Down got together in 1991, when Pantera’s Phil Anselmo teamed up with Corrosion of Conformity’s Pepper Keenan, Crowbar’s Kirk Windstein and Todd Strange and Jimmy Bower of Eyehategod. United by a mutual love of doom and sludge metal, Down has to be considered one of the early pioneers of the…
Putatively named after Dan O’Bannon’s character in John Carpenter’s shlocky 1974 science-fiction film Dark Star, this band was started in San Diego in 1998 by Three Mile Pilot’s Armistead Burwell Smith IV and Rob Crow, who had been involved in various experimental bands of the time, including Heavy Vegetable. While…
Anyone who saw Dances With Wolves probably recognizes that tatanka is the Lakota word for “bison.” The like-named Denver-based band adopted that imagery for the cover of its latest release, Cloudless Thunder. You might expect a band that named itself after the largest animal to roam the plains since the…
The Walkmen were one of the most successful bands that came out of the so-called post-punk revival of the turn of the century. With catchy melodies more bright than the dark and brooding variety favored by many of its contemporaries, this New York-based act also endured changes in tastes a…
DEAD PREZ @ THE ORIENTAL THEATER |1/18/13 There was a salient theme throughout the night, across the sets of most of the acts, and that was a message of being healthy, both physically and mentally. “Healthy is the new gangsta,” said stic.man of dead prez near the middle part of…
