Music

Playing house band for the oppressed worldwide is one way that Ozomatli, an eleven-piece, L.A.-based, genre-splicing outfit, wants to party in 1999. By proudly wearing a “politics for the people” philosophy on its sleeve, the multi-cultural group is a pre-millennial answer to the infamous question posed by Los Angeles denizen…

Like a lot of guys who spend their lives toiling away in the oft-thankless world of unsigned local bands, Chuck Tinsley is looking forward to the day when music will make him rich — or at least provide him with a comfortable income. But as a guitarist in the Denver…

Trish Murphy Rubies on the Lawn (doolittle/Mercury Records) With her new release, Austin-based singer/ songwriter Trish Murphy has leapt a considerable distance. On Rubies on the Lawn, Murphy stretches her coffeehouse folkster beginnings across a decidedly more accessible landscape to create an impressive, from-the-heartland pop gem. Rubies is a scrumptious…

Just us folks: Chances are good that those who’ve frequented downtown and Capitol Hill coffeehouses during the past eight years have, at some point, been privy to the quiet stylings of singer/ songwriter Micah Ciampa. After a prolonged stint as a member of the local folkie roster, however, Ciampa has…

L7, Thursday, August 26, at the Bluebird Theater, recently shrunk to a trio when bassist Gail Greenwood left the band for geographical reasons (the band lives in L.A., Greenwood doesn’t). No matter. It doesn’t take a specialist to create the kind of raw and raunchy music these gals are famous…

Thinking Plague, 8 p.m. Wednesday, September 1, at the Mercury Cafe, released In Extremis last fall — and collected the kind of global critical praise that forces the skeptics among us to reread it as a reality check. Much like its three predecessors, the release led admirers to speak of…

You cannot pick your parents. This is one of life’s few truths, and it propels us all into a biological crapshoot wherein some are truly born lucky — and others just seem like they are. Julian Lennon didn’t ask to be born the son of Cynthia Powell and John Lennon…

There’s a good reason that so many members of the public see music critics as twerps: Plenty of us are. Scribes with pretentious stripes routinely disregard the stuff that real people enjoy hearing (regardless of its quality or lack thereof) in favor of the outré (regardless of its quality or…

Reggae music has historically been sung by the disadvantaged, and although the members of John Brown’s Body don’t reflect the standard image of the oppressed or downtrodden, they have overcome a sizable obstacle: They’re white and they’re from Boston. “It’s definitely a handicap and a challenge,” explains Kevin Kinsella, with…

Local rock-scene staples the Pin Downs are on a roll. The kind that rocks, blessedly hard. Combining big-muff pedals with a humor-tinged attitude, the all-female party-crashing punk band of guitarists Heather Dalton and Ginger Richards, bassist Sara Fischer and drummer Jen Frale has worked its way into revelers’ happy hearts…

To all you Johnny Rebs and Rottens who genuflect to the anarchist’s symbol, to every weekend “reactionary” who ever spray-painted the Hester Prynne-sized letter A in an alley, then circled the scraggly looking thing with a hearty, shitfaced laugh — listen up, little heroes: Recess is over. Your new two-headed…

As if you hadn’t noticed, the low cost of manufacturing CDs still hasn’t been passed along to the average consumer — but at least it’s inspired reissue companies to bring long-forgotten obscurities like these back to the marketplace. Here to Create Music, from 1980, is the only solo album made…

If you hope to greet the Void by hosting a rave on the rim of a crater (to paraphrase Henry Miller), the understated, rather sad-eyed Play might sound faint and indecisive compared to the multi-tracks and the single minds of the Prodigy or the Chemical Brothers. Yet Moby, the vegan/Christian/moralistic…

Michael Roberts didn’t do me any favors as my predecessor in this position. For one, he promised, though not in print, that he would review every single local release to pass through the Westword office, no matter how fleeting the mention. And so he did. Whether or not they liked…

GZA, at the Fox Theatre on Tuesday, August 24, drops lyrical moves that will keep you in check. Touring in support of his third release, Beneath the Surface, this elder statesman of the Wu Tang Clan executes lines that are both visual and abstract. For instance, the title track asks,…

Oyoyo, Friday, August 20, at St. Paul’s United Methodist Church, is a Denver-based five-member percussion ensemble specializing in traditional African folk music. Leader Emei Ezidinma is Nigerian; “oyoyo” is the Yoruban word for “beauty.” The group, however, uses a pan-African assortment of instruments: the talking drum, the kalimba (thumb piano),…

To white-bread America in 1970, the blues was an alien form of music. Ignored by the folks on Main Street, the genre was embraced mainly by record-store-hunting folkies, retro-minded rockers and weed-smoking academics. That is, until B.B. King’s “The Thrill Is Gone” came bleeding through the nation’s quadraphonic speakers and…

Like most guys in high school band, the members of Skavoovie and the Epitones didn’t have dates for their junior prom. But it wasn’t because they played tuba or marched around in ill-fitting uniforms with caps and ornamental braiding. Instead, they were too busy with a gig as the evening’s…

After almost fifty years in the spotlight, Mose Allison remains a pianist, singer and songwriter with a dilemma. It seems that the blues roots of the Tippo, Mississippi, native clash with his current jazz edification to create something of a crisis of categorization. Though Gimcracks and Gewgaws, Allison’s most recent…

King Rat has found inspiration in the most un-punk of places–namely, the 1979 hit movie Breaking Away. The movie chronicles a young man’s struggle with his identity as a “townie” in a Midwestern college town. In the film, the lead character faces obstacles as he attempts to realize a dream…

When Doug Bohm migrated from Chicago to Denver in 1994, he quickly found a niche as a gothic industrial concert promoter, a gig that afforded him time to pursue an interest in electronic music with the bands Post-Mortem Stress Disorder and Fish Music. Today, as a director of Bands for…

When Vyshonn Miller was a little boy, he learned to stick close to his big brother, Percy, as much out of a survivalist instinct as out of brotherly love. Well-respected in the community for his hustling prowess and basketball skills, Percy was someone people tended not to mess with, even…