People love to hate Poison, but the band’s members are having too much fun to care. They tour faithfully, coming around Denver almost every year — and just as faithfully, fans keep showing up to hear them play. Because playing is what Poison’s always been about: pleasure in its many…
It’s a story as old as dirt and every bit as gritty: Rock band forms, shows promise, toils for years and years, fails to grab the brass ring and finally is written off as irrelevant. When faced with the fact that it will never make the bigtime, each act reacts…
Dave Ralph began his career in the late ’70s, before many of his fans were even born. His ingenuity and inclusion of multiple influences from outside the dance-club norm changed him from wandering unknown DJ to one of the most sought-after names on the scene. Ralph is a born performer…
If a bar owner wants to present live music, I think the requisite cabaret license should automatically be approved. Unfortunately, the real process is much more tedious, as Sudy Kudva has learned. Kudva, the new owner of the Squire Lounge,at 1800 East Colfax Avenue, is trying to get the city’s…
Yeah, we just mope around all the time,” says Mike Hudson, bassist for Aveo. It takes a half a second to realize that Hudson is fucking around. Upon first hearing Battery, the Seattle-based outfit’s new disc, you might not expect the trio to be anything but pensive, excruciatingly sincere, maybe…
Good Charlotte is one of the biggest bands in the nation right now, a pop-punk quintet that’s played the MTV Video Music Awards, graced the cover of Rolling Stone and sold over three million copies of its latest disc, The Young and the Hopeless. To Good Charlotte vocalist Joel Madden,…
Some bands are like street gangs. Others are like closeted gay relationships. The best, though, fall somewhere in between, and Detachment Kit (appearing Friday, June 4, at the Larimer Lounge) is just such a combo. Ian Menard and Charlie Davis formed the duo some dozens of months ago in Chicago,…
The average record-label sampler is an inconsistent mélange of already overexposed songs that weren’t that great to begin with. Jade Tree’s latest 21-track compilation, however, is a rare find that showcases the most interesting and talented artists on the label’s impressive roster. Since launching the Jade Tree imprint in 1990,…
Since 1995’s Only Built 4 Cuban Linx and 1996’s Ironman, Ghostface Killah has been the most consistent rapper of the Wu-Tang collective. While the rest of the clan continues to churn out average projects every couple of years, Ghostface has proudly carried the Wu-Tang torch on each release. However, The…
Any writer who dares suggest that Mike Skinner, the Brit behind The Streets, is something less than a primitive genius would undoubtedly get the frigid-shoulder treatment at a critics’ roundtable. Reviewers on both sides of the pond worked themselves into a lather over Original Pirate Material, Skinner’s 2002 full-length debut,…
Naming your band after a line from Wes Anderson’s 1998 cult masterpiece Rushmore is a dicey proposition. What happens if your music totally sucks shit? You’re gonna have a pack of rabid, vengeful Max Fischer apostles out to pop a cap in your ass. Luckily for the three members of…
As a songwriter, Rebecca Folsom shows many faces on Shine, a collection of twelve original songs she recorded last year in Austin. At times her approach is pensive and spare, with minimally instrumented songs that recall other cerebral female writers, such as Edie Brickell and Nanci Griffith. This approach lends…
For hipper-than-thou subversive types who extol Tenacious D’s lampooning of the time-tested power ballad, metal’s appeal lies in its irony. But for the hardcore, metal is a religion — and they take the music on faith. Lately I’ve been a backslider; on most Saturday nights, you can find me in…
The late Screamin’ Jay Hawkins once declared, “I’d rather sing opera than be a black Vincent Price.” And though he’s better remembered as a novelty performer who rose from a coffin, foisting a skull on the end of a stick, Hawkins possessed an astounding vocal range that would have made…
The Briefs return to late-’70s-era dirt punk, creating a ruckus made of hit-and-run guitars and songs about pubic lice and the cost of getting laid. Skinny ties and bleached hair aside, the Seattle band is brazen enough to have put out an EP of cover songs about spree killing, including…
Talk about being snakebit. Since 1993, when Jurassic 5 first began making noise on the fringes of the Los Angeles hip-hop scene, deck men Cut Chemist and DJ Nu-Mark, abetted by emcees Akil, Marc 7, Zaakir and Charli 2na, have put on consistently great live shows — a rap rarity…
Named by an Indian mystic whom his parents followed in Texas, folk troubadour Devendra Banhart sings quirky, skeletal vignettes with a voice that can change from brittle tenor to quivering falsetto in the blink of an eye. Accompanying himself on a battered acoustic guitar, the 23-year-old lo-fi eccentric was a…
With his occasional faux-Anglo accent, declarations regarding proper courtship and a love affair with all things retro, Jack White of the White Stripes looks at times to be patterning his image after an old romantic British dandy. Little did we know, he has a wicked left hook. This undercover Detroit…
The Nitty Gritty Dirt Band, a longtime Colorado favorite, has returned to solid ground. When the act started in the late ’60s, it first tried the jug-band circuit but didn’t gain a real audience until it added drums and occasional electric guitars, creating the country-meets-folk-rock sound that’s still popular today…
Whether being banned for life from playing at the Cricket on the Hill is a blessing or a curse, the Otter Pops still found a way to make ends meet on Denver’s punk-rock circuit after being 86’d from the hallowed watering hole. But if they actually did drive a car…
A friend of mine refers to all electronic music as “techno.” Doesn’t matter what style of electronic music — drum-and-bass, jungle, house, down-tempo — to him, “it’s all fucking techno, man.” And with a little encouragement, he’ll launch into a rant that includes dead-on onomatopoeia of what techno sounds like:…
Quixote’s True Blue is on the move again. And Jay Bianchi, one of the three brothers behind Quixote’s, as well as Sancho’s Broken Arrow, Dulcinea’s 100th Monkey and Cervantes’ Masterpiece Ballroom (notice a theme?), promises that this third incarnation of the live-music club will be “what we always wanted to…
