Music

SCREECHING WEASEL L.A.M.F’s • King Rat 08.18.10 | Gothic Theatre You can’t accuse Screeching Weasel of breaking any new ground, musically speaking. But talk about the soundtrack to my young life growing up. Considering how I wore out cassette tapes of the band’s songs solidly throughout the early to mid-’90s…

Roughly one year ago, Dan Craig started working on his fourth full-length, Alchemy. He had just married fellow songwriter Jessica Sonner and was a year and a half into a two-and-a-half-year hiatus from medical school. “I kept pushing myself to these big crossroads,” he says, “these sort of shaping moments.”…

Getting a liquor license in Montana can run into six figures. That’s one of the reasons that Mike Hayter and his business partner, Mike Refling, left Bozeman and moved to Denver to open their new sports bar, Hayter’s, in the former Lizard’s Bar & Grill space, at 1920 Blake Street…

It seems inevitable that these guys are going to be compared to Animal Collective more often than is warranted. But really, the sound and overall aesthetic of Gauntlet Hair is far closer to that of Deerhunter. We’ve heard plenty of bands recently whose ghostly vocals sit indistinguishably in the mix…

San Francisco’s Ty Segall is garage rock in the same sense that Thee Oh Sees and the Coachwhips are — meaning that its show is as disorienting for its weirdness and intensity as the music is. Woven into the stripped-down, ebulliently delivered rock and roll are warped sounds, straightahead noise,…

The Chicago-bred outfit Fruit Bats has been making records for ten years now, most of them for Sub Pop. And yet Eric D. Johnson, who forms the core of Fruit Bats, has evaded the radar of much of the indie-rock world, mostly for being a consummate, unflashy songwriter adrift in…

Atlanta, Georgia, is a locus of some of the most interesting music coming out of the United States at the moment. It’s known for its flourishing hip-hop as well as its experimental rock, so it’s no surprise that an act like Listener would emerge from the place. Dan Smith and…

Rakim Allah (born William Michael Griffin Jr.) is the father of lyrical finesse and the king of emceeing. His emergence onto the hip-hop scene in 1987 arguably changed the theatrics in rhyme scheme, impacting the future flow of cats like Jay-Z, 50 Cent, Wu-Tang’s Raek-won and a host of others…

Chris Fogal has a message for fellow musicians. On the song “Delusional,” Fogal tells his starry-eyed peers: “You will never know fame/You will never get signed.” Considering Fogal’s previous close calls with success, it would behoove up-and-comers to pay attention. The Gamits’ last record, 2004’s Antidote, was a highly touted…

The Broomfield-based post-hardcore quintet Honor the Fallen trekked to Phoenix to record its new, self-titled EP with producer Cory Spotts, who’s worked with Fearless Records acts like the Maine and Blessthefall. It’s clear that Honor would be more than happy to follow the same career path as those two bands…

This latest offering from Lucio Duran, formerly of long-running experimental electronic outfit Blackcell, immediately recalls late-era Future Sound of London with its electro-organic sound. “The Machinist” is, roughly, a 140 bpm equivalent of jogging through darkened and deserted city streets with only sparking electrical wires lighting your way. “Infused With…

For a band that met in an evangelical church, Candy Claws sure is Eastern in its approach. For one thing, all the lyrics on this album were constructed by sending phrases from Richard M. Ketchum’s The Secret Life of the Forest through a website that translates things into Japanese and…

From a creatively active Denverite to a now fully immersed Baltimorean, Nick Houde has always been a vocal participator in the DIY community at large. Houde’s musical projects — from Transistor Radio Sound and BDRMPPL to Snake Feathers and Future Heavy — have pulled from diverse movements like no wave…

When a local band opens for a national act, the former generally does its best to impress its touring counterparts. When Denver hardcore band Bankrobber recently played with Bane, the group was impressive enough that Bane asked the outfit to go on tour. For a band like Bankrobber, with deep…

The music of DJ/producer Steve Smooth is a bit like his name — kind of cheesy, but in a way that can’t help but make you smile. His pumping, high-energy tracks are short on subtlety and long on slick production and relentless thump. It’s a bit predictable and sounds enough…

So this is kind of rad: I’m listening to Sirius XMU right now and in between cuts from No Age and LCD Soundsystem, I just heard that song “Marathon” from Tennis, the breezy, uplifting one that kind of reminds me of “Bruises” by Chairlift — another lauded act with Colorado…