Music

If you hate trance, you can place a fair amount of the blame on BT (Brian Transeau to his parents, wife and friends). The superstar producer helped push the form to its lushest, most symphonic and bombastic heights, and his tracks are among the most recognizable and iconic in the…

Nick Cave may be one of the more disciplined songwriters in the business (he usually spends six days a week working in his office), but he’s been especially prolific over the past four years, finding time to pen the remarkable two-disc Abattoir Blues/Lyre of Orpheus set, score two films with…

Unleashed bassist/vocalist Johnny Hedlund is a cheerful, friendly guy who happens to play in one of the most ferocious and consistently powerful death-metal bands ever to emerge from Sweden. Since 1991, the act has released nine studio albums full of pummeling drums, grinding guitar riffs and lyrics that excoriate Christianity…

Ponytail didn’t come together like most bands. The original five members were randomly chosen by poet Jeremy Sigler to collaborate on music. Since that time, the act has become one of the stars of the burgeoning new American indie underground, spiritual kin to sublimely noisy, neo-tribal acts like High Places,…

Since the dawn of time — or at least the 1960s — a particular breed of music has been consistently popular in these parts: relaxed, groove-oriented, quasi-rock jams that cause true believers to twist like overcooked vermicelli. Hippie music, many call it, and Frogs Gone Fishin’ has the subgenre down…

Runway Estates refuses to wallow in any particular musical genre, which may throw some folks. As the group moves effortlessly from sun-dappled, impressionistic, hushed minimalist psych folk to deeply layered dream pop, it leaves behind a rich array of textures that shimmer and drift. On No Good Horse Thieves, singer-songwriter…

Brass Knuckles is Nelly’s Thriller. No kidding. It’s not perfect, but neither was MJ’s magnum opus; it jumped styles and was not particularly cohesive. Likewise, Knuckles skips haphazardly from Dirty South jams to G-funk throwbacks to would-be empowerment anthems. It’s more of a collection of singles than an actual album…

Although the Radio crew’s talent is well established, the band’s music has always raised user-friendliness questions: Sure, 2006’s Return to Cookie Mountain was excellent, but did anyone other than rock critics listen to it? Dear Science tackles this conundrum head on, upping the accessibility quotient without smacking of sell-out desperation…

Read anything about Darker My Love and the word “psychedelic” is likely to pop up by the second paragraph — much to the irritation of Rob Barbato, the band’s bassist and vocalist. “I can understand why people do that,” he concedes. “We’re from Los Angeles and San Francisco, and so…

Dave Bartz and I are best friends. We grew up in the same ‘hood, went to the same high school (Bartz a few years behind me), share the same values. In the mid-’90s, we even played together in a band. We spent six months in a drafty Eastlake garage —…

Santi White, who goes by Santogold, is red, white and blue through and through, having come of age in Philadelphia before relocating to Brooklyn — but much of her work bristles with foreign-sounding intrigue. “Shove It,” from her self-titled 2008 debut, is built upon reggae and dub influences, while “Creator”…

James and its luminous folk pop certainly fits in sonically with the rich tradition of great rock music from Manchester. Although the outfit was initially lumped in with the whole Brit-pop movement of the 1990s, this act’s roots go back to the early ’80s, when guitar rock of surprising immediacy…

After opening Slim 7 nearly two years ago, Bill Ward is hoping to move his now-closed club from Larimer Square to Cherry Creek. At the end of August, Ward packed up Slim 7, which was tucked into a small space off an alley, to make way for what will become…

Dr. Dog has been compared to hipster faves like Pavement and Guided by Voices (which does no justice to the Dog’s genuinely adorable ’70s AM soul), but the late Rick Danko himself would’ve loved Philadelphia’s current indie darlings: lo-fi keyboards, bass and thick drums make a bed for sentimental, earnest…

It’s difficult to think of a Red Rocks headliner that’s simultaneously as unlikely and as appropriate as Sigur Rós. The quartet uses even less of the standard rock lexicon than does fellow Icelander Björk, who headlined at the venue last year — and while the band’s been around since 1994,…

Many punk-rock purveyors of musical mayhem spout lyrics that make them sound like a bunch of idiots who are only in it to get drunk and maybe score with some equally soused groupies. There’s nothing dangerous about a buffoon that advertises his or her own stupidity in song. Primasonic (due…

Common, N.E.R.D. and Chester French Tuesday, September 23, 2008 Fillmore Auditorium Better Than: Most hip-hop/soul shows you’ll see this year. The Roots included. At about 7:30pm, with the Fillmore not even half full, retro pop/rock/soul act Chester French took the stage. The band, who recently inked to Pharrell Williams Star…

Obi Best Capades Social Science 02:00-02:45 of “Nothing Can Come Between Us”: When I first saw this cover and name, I was really, really hoping that it was going to be a sort of Star Wars meets Feist sort of thing. Unfortunately, it’s just a Feist meets Feist kind of…

When Fight Like Hell called it a day this past spring, Denver lost one of its finest and most vital hardcore bands. After the band broke up, the members moved forward, with Memphis going on to play drums in Death Before Dishonor, Jake joining Know the Score, and Matt playing…