Jamaican dancehall music has always mirrored the evolution of American rap. This includes the rash of violent, hate-filled lyrics that got Tipper Gore in such a tizzy back in the early ’90s when rappers like Ice-T released diatribes against police, women and assorted other objects of contempt. Dancehall stars, too,…
Remember that weird childhood game of sitting in the dark on Halloween, passing around “human body parts” — carrots for fingers, peeled grapes for eyeballs and chilled spaghetti for guts? The mere power of suggestion (combined with too much candy corn) could make for a rollicking evening of disgusting fun…
For the record, “The Big Unit” is the nickname of Randy Johnson, pitcher extraordinaire for the Arizona Diamondbacks, whose Bank One Ballpark is just a bunt or two away from the original Alice Coopers’town in Phoenix. For Denverites who scoped the menu during last week’s grand opening of this city’s…
Although a small army of bands — Blink 182, Sum 41 and SR-71 among them — have done their best to stomp out whatever dignity’s left in pop punk, the poppy three-chord rock of the Alkaline Trio is graceful enough to excuse some of the style’s more embarrassing moments. While…
Since forming last summer, Hi-Fidelity, Thursday, June 7, at the 15th Street Tavern, with the Gravity Index and Los Federalis, has become one of Denver’s more appealing arbiters of the garage-rock gospel. Fronted by vocalist/guitarist Joaquin Liebert, the band’s live set is peppered by a batch of irresistibly crunchy pop…
Drummer Levon Helm spent a lot of years smoking a lot of cigarettes, so it wasn’t the biggest shock in the world when, in 1997, doctors told him he had throat cancer. But what the white-jacketed men and women of New York City’s Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center did to rid…
There hasn’t been enough laughing in classical music for centuries,” claims local guitar phenom Janet Feder. “Too much composing and performing gets caught up in itself. I spent years practicing scales and doing all that. Hopefully, I’m sort of returning the fun back to guitar playing. Because sometimes, when I’m…
On this long player, the members of Britain’s newest Next Big Thing show they might have just enough Oasis in them to avoid becoming this year’s Balaam & the Angel. Winner of virtually every UK music award in existence, the band rises and falls on the shoulders of singer/guitarist/songwriter Kelly…
Bardo Pond’s music best soars into the vast expanses of untapped head space when you’re lying flat on your back, say, with a cat on your chest and a bad spring cold. (The band even goes so far as to sell hand-printed Bardo Pond pillowcases.) But be warned: This is…
There are two kinds of records in this world: Those that are simply listened to, and those that are listened to loud enough for your neighbors to enjoy along with you. On Electric Bible, the Gaza Strippers gleefully drop the latter sort. Indeed, the band comes out with both guitars…
It’s been fairly quiet on the all-ages front since April 15, when the City of Denver began enforcing an ordinance that prohibits persons under 21 from sharing the same air with those of legal drinking age in small and midsized music venues. So far, there have been no implosions, lawsuits…
It is halfway through the Wednesday-night show at a club on South Broadway, and the characteristically rowdy, mostly female crowd has worked itself into a froth. From the stage, Doc Holliday peels back the curtain with one muscular arm and steps into the spotlight, grinning like he’s never had it…
It makes perfect sense that Robert Belfour is playing this weekend’s Blues & Bones Festival in Denver. Belfour plays exceptional acoustic blues, meat-on-the-bones stuff that smolders in the spirit of blues greats from the ’30s and ’40s. He’s also no stranger to the joys of a slab of ribs blessed…
Four months after Ken Burns’s massive ten-part documentary Jazz first aired on public television, the air still hasn’t cleared. Jazz fans and jazz factions thrive on argument — always have — and Burns has provoked a real cutting session. Admirers say the nineteen-hour film is the most exciting, exacting and…
A very small child might well have been swept away by the wind that blew through downtown Denver around 4 p.m. Sunday. About an hour before the Westword Music Showcase was scheduled to begin (with an outdoor performance, no less), the city experienced a meteorological shift that bordered on biblical…
To listen to each successive David Byrne (Thursday, May 24, at the Fillmore Auditorium) release is to witness the continuing evolution of an odd, skinny butterfly. It’s as if the Scotsman-turned-Manhattanite hatched from a cocoon that was built in a forgotten jar of habanero peppers, his sleeping, developing mind informed…
The members of The Emmas (pictured), Orbit Service, Double-Barrelled Slingshots and The Barrys must have heard the new-age theory that when you die, your time on earth is judged by how well you treated the furry creatures you shared it with. On Saturday, May 26, at 7 p.m., they’ll all…
Pimping, shooting and looting are not basic elements of hip-hop. What are? The answer lies on The Sneak Attack, the ninth and latest release from Blastmaster KRS-One (Kris Parker, aka The Teacher). The Sneak Attack has all the political activism, spirituality and blistering social commentary you’ve come to expect from…
” Ambient rock” sounds oxymoronic, like “hot-water heater,” “military intelligence” and “Rush Limbaugh.” But in the collective hands of Couch, a Munich-based band that records for the German label Kitty-Yo, the term actually makes sense. The instrumental music that’s heard on Profane is evocative and atmospheric — but it also…
After boring us with last year’s djmixed.com, a largely uninspired remix trance-a-thon calculated to capitalize on the electronica subgenre of the moment, consummate club DJ turned producer Keoki delivers the more digestible Jealousy. The first clue to its quality comes from the album’s cover art: While he appeared in a…
George Jones knows a few things about country music. In a six-decade career that’s been astoundingly productive — especially considering Jones’s staggering bouts with alcohol and drug addictions — he’s placed more songs on the charts (158) than any performer in any genre. He’s been called “the greatest country singer…
There are some days you remember for the rest of your life. For Weakerthans singer/guitarist John K. Samson, a 1996 visit to Denver was one of those days. He can still remember the smell of Mace and tear gas in the air on that seasonably warm night, the howl of…
