The reaper had finally arrived for the white Chevy van, thirteen years and 350,000 miles after its birth on a Detroit assembly line. Last year, the van’s keepers — the members of the pajama-clad pop-punk trio Sketch — made the difficult decision to put their old friend down. Dave Allen,…
As alleged “gay supremacists” who once rattled the cage of underground music with 1989’s cult classic It’s Only Right and Natural, Dennis and Jimmy Flemion have gone beyond telling the world, “We are homos, hear us roar.” Racially Yours found them singing about ethnic tension — with one brother in…
With the release of its sixth full-length recording — the second in a row overseen by Steve Albini — Low has put itself on the map. The map of Duluth, Minnesota, that is, where the band started in 1993. Stasis, you see, is part of Low’s shtick. Drummer Mimi Parker…
Being a cult hero has its advantages: Worship by millions isn’t often part of the package, but worship by thousands ain’t bad. Yet the job isn’t as financially lucrative as it might seem at first blush, and maintaining this status over the long haul is damned near impossible. Stephen Malkmus…
At seventeen, she was a wide-eyed high school girl with a silken voice, shyly sitting in at smoky Denver clubs with local mentors like Joe Keel, Dee Minor and Nat Yarbrough. Twenty-five years later, she is a Grammy winner who’s played the White House twice, has eleven albums in the…
Readers unfortunate enough to be born after April 15, 1980, take heed: You have about ten days to soak up as many punk shows, club nights, karaoke contests and rock concerts as you can possibly cram into your soon-to-be depleted social dance cards. Come Easter Sunday, youngish individuals who like…
While it’s fashionable for many indie-rock bands to dabble in electronica, precious few electronica artists successfully integrate rock elements into their styles. San Francisco’s I Am Spoonbender, Thursday, April 5, at the Cat, deftly melds the two genres into a cinematic and hypnotic whole — with sincere (yet demented) noise-pop…
Many members of the local music community regard Dick Weissman, Friday, April 7, in the King Center Recital Hall on the Auraria Campus, as a wise man: A professor at the University of Colorado at Denver and author of the indispensable text, How To Make a Living in Your Local…
For years, it’s seemed, most hip-hop acts receiving good notices in the mainstream and alternative media have subsequently been rewarded with middling album sales and dim futures — which is one of many reasons why the rise of OutKast, appearing Friday, March 30, at the Fillmore Auditorium, with Ludacris, has…
On its debut recording, Memoirs From…, the Sad Star Café suggested that it had the chops to become a good guitar-rock band; the talent was there — it was obvious in singer Mark Sundermeier’s vocals and the dexterous playing of guitarist Kirk Schneider. The songs just hadn’t quite come together…
There’s a perception in this great land of ours that masterful singer-songwriter Nick Cave makes depressing music. But, as Cave points out, this opinion isn’t universally held. “It’s always Americans who say that,” he allows. He chuckles before adding, “The French never do.” Is this an example of what cultural…
In an old snapshot taken sometime in the late ’70s, Dusty Drapes and the Dusters crowd around a ’50s-era car, donning cowboy hats, boots and Western shirts. A sticker on the car’s bumper reads “Cowboy Cadillac.” In the foreground, bandleader Drapes (also known as Steve Swenson) and a young guitarist…
The current explosion in neo-Latin jazz has been set off largely by restless, brilliant pianists — the Cuban virtuoso Chucho Valdés and the Panamanian wizard Danilo Perez, to name just two. Their music is highly evolved and relentlessly multicultural — a spicy gumbo of Latin American, African and hard-bopping U.S…
There are something like two bazillion bats in Austin, Texas. On the underside of a bridge that divides north from south, the night-flying creatures shriek, defecate and hang upside down all day long in one of the largest bat colonies in North America. Once a day, around sundown, they make…
Throughout his four-decade career, John Hammond, Wednesday, March 28, at the Gothic Theatre, has been known as a gifted interpreter of the blues: In the early days, young Hammond channeled the raw power of artists like Robert Johnson and Mississippi John Hurt for a new audience, at once helping to…
No one’s totally sure about the origins of Mullethead, who perform Friday, March 30, with Cabaret Diosa, Burlesque As It Was and Liza Band at the Fox Theatre. Some people say the rocking bi-levelers were discovered while playing Motörhead tunes on the amateur stage at the Colorado State Fair some…
For a media whore like John Vanderslice, fifteen stinkin’ minutes probably aren’t enough. “I think a lot of bands are afraid of publicity,” says the 33-year-old indie rocker from Bethesda, Maryland, who presently resides in San Francisco. ” afraid that they’re prostrating themselves. Like they’re not supposed to be looking…
Eddie Hayes’s nom de plume — Aceyalone — suggests that the man himself doesn’t mind walking the path less traveled, and neither does his music, an intellectually stimulating blend of distinctive, often jazzy hip-hop with lyrics that reject the themes of material lust commonly spewed by too many of his…
Some questions for folks of a certain vintage: Remember growing up in the ’70s? Remember how embarrassing it was? Remember wishing you’d come of age in just about any previous decade, because at least none of them were defined by pet rocks, polyester and Peter Frampton? Remember any of that?…
It’s often thought that those without the skill to write moving, personal songs forgo the singer-songwriter route to concentrate on pop. While a good pop sensibility and poetic songwriting don’t always overlap, with Steady Pull, Jonatha Brooke proves they’re not mutually exclusive. On her first independently released studio album, Brooke…
When artists make a conscious effort to strike out and do something different, they are sometimes led into the fertile fields of creativity. But they often wind up in the same sonic cul-de-sacs already ruled by other, more interesting bands. For every Beatles, Talk Talk or Moby — each a…
The early line on Standards — that the disc would prove to be Tortoise’s most accessible release thus far — caused the heart of this particular fan to sink faster than stocks in the high-tech sector, and for good reason. The joys inherent in the soundscapes created by this thorny…
