Something Ill: A Hip-Hop Odyssey comes to the Bluebird Theater on Thursday, September 27, offering local heads the chance to voyage through some of Denver’s most progressive and intelligent urban-music arbiters. Headliner nGoMa, which features the nearly tantric interplay between rappers Dap and Reese, will be joined by DJ K-Nee,…
We’ve all been duped at one time or another. At some point, everyone has made a serious error in judgment when purchasing music, whether or not he’ll ever admit it. It’s a common story: A really cool-sounding song that grabbed you the first three and a half times you half-heard…
Most people would agree with the assertion that life is pretty mundane. Lord Byron summed it up perfectly when he wrote, “When one subtracts from life infancy (which is vegetation), sleep, eating and swilling, buttoning and unbuttoning — how much remains of downright existence? The summer of a dormouse.” We…
Roger James first made a name for himself in local music circles as a jazz pianist. Last year he released Voyages, a collection of tasteful keyboard-laden originals that wouldn’t seem out of place next to recordings by Yanni and other artists who straddle the line between jazz and new-age music…
The Waterboys’ first release in eight years crawls greasily out of the gates like a shiny-wet pale demon emerging from the sewer. On “Let it Happen,” the album’s opening track, Mike Scott’s skeletal vocals paint a nightmare vision of a Cimmerian cityscape, a Burroughs-esque journey in which he encounters all…
Burning Airlines singer/guitarist J. Robbins has worn a lot of different hats during his career as a keystone in the Washington, D.C., underground music scene: He was a cog in the machinery of rioteers Government Issue, frontman for the lauded Jawbox, the producer/engineer of a staggering number of albums and,…
A former Lakers ball boy whose ever-growing musical credits include collaborations with Carlos Santana, Deltron 3030, Beck and Femi Kuta among others, Money Mark (who performs at Boulder’s Fox Theatre on Friday, September 21) serves up his third solo full-length album. Change Is Coming’s twelve highly accessible instrumentals blur the…
The hard-rock cycle seems to be spinning again. For the past couple of years, the genre has hawked up one minor variation on Limp Bizkit after another — and since the Bizkit’s lowest-common-denominator amalgam of metal, rap and misogyny isn’t exactly fascinating (a friend of mine calls it “asshole rock”),…
Publicists are paid to have a way with words. But an e-mail that rolled in last Wednesday from the owner of a Chicago-based, punk-leaning public relations firm was propelled more by emotion than commerce: “Nothing like profound tragedy to make our myopic punk-rock world and scene squabbles seem truly meaningless…
Last December, Robbie Fulks delivered one the finest shows to hit Denver in the year 2000, a neo-country pop set that won’t soon be forgotten. Unfortunately, only a small group of locals were there to witness that wintertime performance at the Gothic. Too bad: Fulks has rightfully earned the status…
Music may not be the cure for all of our ills, but the healing power of rock and roll has certainly been tested again and again. For some of us, patriotic anthems and religious hymns can’t compete with the cathartic crush of a big, fat guitar riff. If you’re looking…
With an almost cheerful inability to differentiate between the ridiculous and the sublime, Moris Tepper somehow remains as focused as a bird of prey. At times his mind rests assuredly in a few of life’s less popular givens: Don’t trust anyone who burns incense; evil comes from the “big brain”;…
India.Arie believes in music’s power to heal, transform and transcend. And though the grooving, funky and bluesy moments might disguise it, this notion serves as a spiritual underpinning for much of her Motown debut, Acoustic Soul. “We’ve all heard of someone being woken up from a coma by a song…
If truth is stranger than fiction, the Judas Priest saga is one that somebody should make a movie about. In fact, somebody has, sort of. Rock Star, the recently released Mark Wahlberg vehicle, is loosely based on the life of Tim “Ripper” Owens, the bar-band imitator who replaced original Priest…
This week’s gargling fodder includes some welcome returns, sad departures, happy developments and untimely closings. Backwash leaves it to you to determine which is which. Uphollow has returned to Denver stages, and this time the band is working without a script. While some may recognize Uphollow’s name from bills and…
Stories From the City, Stories From the Sea, the most recent album by PJ Harvey, received the usual critical hosannas, and it’s in the running for this year’s high-status Mercury Music Prize. But many of Harvey’s fans (this one included) found it a bit difficult to get worked up over…
Chris Daniels & the Kings will feel right at home when they perform at Swallow Hill on Friday, September 14. Daniels recently stepped down as director of the revered acoustic-music outfit, a position he held for nearly five years. The room he’ll be playing — Daniels Hall — sports his…
Poets and poetry can come from anywhere. Sometimes the poet and his hometown are completely intertwined, inseparable as the thorn and the rose — much as Lou Reed is fully a part of New York, and Tom Waits is the ragged king of down-and-out Los Angeles. The songs that Stockton,…
As artists go, film composers are often chumps. They rarely pursue their own vision; instead, they’re following some director’s agenda, trying to match their music to edited pieces of celluloid they had no hand in creating. Blending in usually counts for more than standing out — hardly a recipe for…
The rampart sprung from the defeated, shattered shopping mall, where not enough people spent enough of their money. Concrete debris and misshapen metal amassed into a hundred-foot peak, much less natural and stately than the ones to the west, but somehow more personal — especially because the viewpoint was a…
Writing reviews of recordings by freshly dead artists is a tricky business that frequently results in overrating, a critical embarrassment that keeps on giving. Think about all those poor shmoes who, rightly thunderstruck by John Lennon’s murder, found themselves raving about Double Fantasy, a modest album that’s not even within…
If there is one complaint to be made about punk, or punk rock, or just plain rock music these days, it would have to be that most bands take themselves way too seriously. When one does find an inkling of humor embedded in a punk song, it is of the…
