As the charismatic frontwoman of Blondie, Debbie Harry was more than just a dumb, photogenic singer crooning unforgettable new-wave pop songs. From her beginnings in the ’60s folk-rock act Wind in the Willows to her experimental, poppy post-Blondie albums, Harry has consistently proved herself to be a versatile artist with…
Pull up to Le Rouge at 9 p.m. for the first round of the Miss LoDo Contest. These things never start on time, but I don’t want to miss anything. So I grab a seat at the bar. It’s near the end of the fourth quarter of the Pistons-Cavs game…
In Alfred Hitchcock’s North by Northwest, Cary Grant plays Roger Thornhill, an advertising executive who gets kidnapped by a bunch of spies convinced that he’s an elusive figure named George Kaplan. Longtime friends and Hitchcock fans Jeffrey Wentworth Stevens and Jason Fredrick Iselin borrowed their moniker from the film —…
Slide Show Chris Adolph of Bad Weather California sat alone in a folding chair on the stage of the Larimer, in front of an all but empty room, bathed in green light. “I’m going to pretend this room is full,” he said and then started playing…
Slide Show The Born in the Flood barbecue June 3 at the Larimer Lounge was everything good about being in Denver right now. The weather was pleasant, if a bit weird. Overcast but warm, with a moderate breeze blowing through, it might not have been a storybook “nice day”, but…
Slide Show There is a reason we eat dessert last. See, if you have the best part of the meal up front, it sort of ruins everything else. How exciting are boiled potatoes when you’re still savoring the taste of that chocolate mousse? This applies to music as well, as…
We Are! We Are!, All Capitals, The Narrator and Me Llamo Rosa Larimer Lounge Friday, June 1st Slide show Live review…
Your eyeballs have found a new blog category that will appear every so often in Backbeat Online: Beyond Playlist. The concept is simple. Even in the waning days of the CD era, reviewers such as yours truly are sent far more discs than we can possibly critique in the physical…
It was an evening of local inspiration or maybe experimentation, or how about extraterrestrial communication last night at the Hi Dive, where Denver’s Mothership hosted a CD release show celebrating their first full length, the Eleven Dimensional Symphony. A dirty mix of camera difficulties, PBRs and lost keys led me…
Gregory Alan Isakov CD-release show With Chris Pureka and Tiny Television Slide Show Check out the slide show or read this week’s feature…
A key line from the title cut of Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band reads, “It was twenty years ago today/Sergeant Pepper taught the band to play” — but you’d never know it from the Denver dailies. Both the Rocky Mountain News and the Denver Post have published articles commemorating…
GFK, Hiretsukan and Propagandhi Slide show…
Norah Jones thinks her musical evolution is moving forward more rapidly than do many reviewers. Still, her latest disc, Not Too Late, is a modest step toward greater self-expression — she wrote or co-wrote all of the material on it — and other projects suggest that she’s interested in doing…
Gregory Alan Isakov isn’t a big talker. Live, he rolls through his sets with graceful efficiency and a minimum of banter. When he does speak, it’s at such low levels that you’re forced to lean in close to catch the gist of what he’s saying. As soft-spoken as Isakov is,…
Not Too Late is Norah Jones’s third CD, but the first for which she wrote or co-wrote all the songs. Musically, however, only a handful of folks see it as a significant departure from the 2002 Grammy magnet Come Away With Me and its big-selling successor, 2004’s Feels Like Home…
Summer’s right around the corner, which got us to thinking: If there was an undeniable, universal soundtrack for summer, one that appealed to everyone regardless of their individual inclinations, what would the final track list look like? Probably a lot like this. “School’s Out,” Alice Cooper: We never get over…
In less than four years, the husband-and-wife indie-pop duo in the Rosebuds have repeatedly reinvented themselves. On their 2003 Merge Records debut, The Rosebuds Make Out, guitarist/vocalist Ivan Howard and keyboardist/vocalist Kelly Crisp made a sunny AM-pop splash with sparkling, naive love songs. The group’s 2005 follow-up full-length, Birds Make…
What is Ozzy now, a hundred or something? You’d think the old coot would call it a career rather than further tarnish his legacy. Like most icons past their prime, though, maybe he just doesn’t know when to say when. He’s clearly saddled by idiots; why else would he choose…
The men of Linkin Park seem awfully insecure. Minutes to Midnight is stuffed with take-us-seriously gestures, including the presence of producer Rick Rubin and liner notes that couldn’t be needier if they’d been written by Sally Field. For instance, the Parkers reveal in a footnote to “What I’ve Done” that…
Believe it or don’t, a decade has passed since Fortuitous Oddity, Cephalic Carnage’s self-released debut, first assaulted eardrums in these parts. Since then, the fearsome five have established themselves internationally as extreme-metal madmen par excellence, and Xenosapien will only enhance that reputation. The eleven songs here constitute a jolt of…
The thing about album reviews is that they tend to be fairly untrue. Too many generalities, too much name-dropping; it’s a contentious game of words and, often, a clash of musical egos. Take Scenery, the debut solo effort by Timothy Thomas Cleary (formerly of Boulder-based Signal to Noise and soon…
The Clientele, God Save the Clientele (Merge). One of the most appealing things about previous releases by this U.K. band was the sound quality. The ’60s-esque pop songs were sublimely hazy and antiquated, almost as if they’d been recorded on a Fisher-Price recorder at the bottom of a lake. Sad,…
