Running an independent record label is always a tricky business proposition. You needn’t be a business-school graduate to recognize that music is a big, big industry and that the little guy is often squashed beneath the heavy boot of seemingly omniscient major label giants. The prospect of starting an indie…
Pop tart Gwen Stefani — pretty as she can be, with a midriff for the ages — celebrated a special birthday recently: the dreaded three-oh. And by industry standards — those sad, governing, youth-obsessed, number-crunching principles — such a cosmic reckoning usually means one thing: Keep the salt lick and…
Ween has a perception problem: Non-fans know it best as a somewhat offensive, zany, wacko goofball outfit mainly out to parody and desecrate. But if no one’s taking Ween seriously, we can safely blame the victims here, what with such career moves as openly discussing plans to spray diarrhea onto…
Trumpeter Dave Douglas, jazz magazine cover boy and darling of the European jazz set, is multifaceted, to be sure. The introspective classicist can suddenly turn into a fiery post-bop improviser, and the eclectic composer can re-emerge as the all-out swinger. Soul on Soul marks the third time Douglas has paid…
Cabaret Diosa — the nine-piece extravaganza of guitars, horns, mambo, swing, jazz and, of course, dancing — is a band that exudes more drama than a late-night Springer marathon. It seems fitting, then, that director Erich Toll of Boulder’s Big World Productions enlisted the musical diaspora as soundtrack providers for…
Vic Chesnutt and Kristin Hersh, with the Willard Grant Conspiracy, Tuesday, May 23, at the Fox Theatre, appear on a double bill they’ve dubbed “In Their Own Worlds.” It’s an apt title considering Chesnutt and Hersh are songwriters who seem tapped into a creative dimension invisible to the normal, naked…
Denver Turnverein Choir, Saturday, May 20, at the Denver Turnverein, 1570 Clarkson Street, sports a cultural heritage as rich as Denver itself. The outfit’s namesake building dates back to the early part of the twentieth century and serves as the cultural center for Denver’s German citizens and its Turners, a…
If diamonds are a girl’s best friend, imagine how you could score with Super Diamond, Saturday, May 20, at the Ogden Theatre. The band is lighting up marquees and dazzling audiences these days with its very own Neil Diamond experience. Save your sneers and scorns, ye of the too-cool masses:…
True story: During the mid-’80s, when Lionel Richie, the once and future king of marsh- mellow soul, straddled the pop-music sphere like a colossus, I owned a life-sized cardboard standup of the former Commodore that my malevolent loved ones and I would, um, do stuff to. At first, this Richie…
Ben Stevens has just driven from his home in Lyons, Colorado, to Denver for a taste of his favorite pizza. It’s a considerable effort, considering all the pizza joints he’s passed on the way to Famous Pizza on South Broadway. “You can’t get good pizza in Boulder,” says Stevens, an…
It’s become increasingly easy — and respectable — to create electronic music. Platinum-selling artists like Fatboy Slim and the Chemical Brothers have steadily worn down America’s innate resistance to sampled dance music, and in many ways, the challenge to create engaging new sonic forms of music now falls to the…
Last week, some people had the notion that the world might end. On Friday, May 5, eight major bodies in our solar system aligned, and some apocalypse-watchers were downright positive that none of us would live to tell about it (or learn about it later while pulling bongs and watching…
The triple threat of REO Speedwagon, Styx and Eddie Money, Wednesday, May 17, at Fiddler’s Green, is proof that arena rock never died — it just spent a decade or so touring the state-fair circuit. In terms of both nostalgia and comedic potential, Wednesday’s show is not to be missed,…
To some, musical theater is best left to performers who like tights and tap shoes and audiences who hit the seniors’ buffet on their way to yet another production of The Sound of Music. Rent did its best to destigmatize musicals, though the experience was like watching Friends on Ice…
Alex Trebek isn’t the one posing the questions (or answers) when the Hornet bar and restaurant hosts its interactive Trivia Face Off every Monday night at 7:30. Which is probably a good thing. You don’t have to be a super genius to participate in the fact fest at the trendy…
Matt Johnson, the man behind the entity dubbed The The, is a good quote — and he knows it. “I’m one of the kinds of people who journalists like,” he says, “because I’m always putting my foot in it and speaking my mind.” How so? Most performers who’ve just issued…
One listen to the Ranch Girls & Their Ragtime Wranglers might lead a listener to assume that the bandmembers are native students of Americana — heartland dwellers raised on cowboy movies and the Carter family. Western swing, ’40s-girl-group singing and rockabillied country are just a few of the styles that…
The Reverend Howard Finster is a patron saint of the so-called outsider art movement. A simple preacher from Georgia, one day Finster looked at his thumbnail and discovered the face of God telling him that, from that day forward, he was to devote his life to painting. Finster took God…
Forty years after his suburban upbringing in Freeport, Long Island — an adolescent nightmare that included electric-shock treatments at the age of seventeen — Lou Reed (born Louis Butch Firbank) still has plenty to be hacked off about. But with Ecstasy, his first studio album in almost five years, the…
There’s not a lot to some pop-oriented experimental music: a couple of catchy riffs and repetition, repetition, repetition. As a result, there’s always the temptation to tart up songs with extra sounds, complicated time signatures and so on. But unless that kind of tinkering is done very carefully, it can…
Despite hip-hop’s widespread popularity, DJ culture, one of the foundations of the genre, continues to receive commercial short shrift. Although most fans dig it when turntablists spin on stage, only a relative few seek out the discs such jocks make on their own. And that’s a drag, given that many…
On “Leave You Behind,” the tenth track on Sleater-Kinney’s All Hands on the Bad One, the guitar intro is such a friendly riff, it could double as a soundtrack for a Kermit-and-Fozzi road trip. When guitarist/vocalist Carrie Brownstein’s girly voice enters the song, it comes soothingly, like she’s humming a…
