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…
Greg Osby, a 39-year-old alto saxophonist with frantic tendencies, could not have chosen better company than his collaborators on The Invisible Hand. They include two disparate titans of jazz: the 69-year-old master guitarist Jim Hall and the endlessly innovative pianist Andrew Hill, who is now 62 but still pressing forward…
It’s somewhat awkward for Backwash — a shy and humble scribe — to point out that this week’s most notable happening is one orchestrated by this very paper. The Westword Music Showcase will take place in six LoDo locations on Thursday night, providing a chance for you to soak up…
Vue, with Wow and Flutter, Monday, May 8, at the Lion’s Lair, isn’t afraid to take a swim in rock’s deep end, even if it means cutting itself off from the hordes of fans taking the fast road to more easily pigeonholed sounds. With the number of musical subgenres growing…
With the release of Faith, a new CD on the Cadence Jazz label, the Boulder Creative Music Ensemble, which plays Saturday, May 6, at the Mercury Cafe, reveals another compelling reason to not doubt Colorado’s jazz scene. Tenor saxophone player Fred Hess leads the sextet, which features Ron Miles on…
When Napoleon III advanced on Mexican soil in 1862, he could scarcely have imagined how his defeat would eventually be celebrated. In honor of this year’s Cinco de Mayo, Denver will offer a wide variety of traditional festivities and, of course, some good, old-fashioned drag-king cabaret. On Friday, May 5,…
When she first stepped onto the national stage almost a decade ago, Trisha Yearwood was seen as a representative of country’s new breed. An interpretive artist whose personality shone through the songs she decided to perform, she was blessed with a rich, robust voice combining technical mastery with an emotional…
The white man or woman who plays the blues is often forced to confront a long-standing stereotype: the idea among blues-brained purists that only black artists can truly sing about pain, loss and heartbreak. Of course, music history begs to differ with this notion. Some of the most wrist-slitting blues…
There’s no getting around it: People’s reactions to certain kinds of pop music tend to change once they become parents and their offspring start consuming it. What was once innocuous, disposable, easy to ignore and often a guilty pleasure can suddenly seem strangely sinister if you’re not careful. Such worries…
Our dad thinks he knows all about ‘N Sync, but he’s wrong. ‘N Sync is the best. If you like ‘N Sync, you should listen to us. And if you don’t know ‘N Sync, you should listen to us, too. These are the songs on their new album: “Bye Bye…
For all the racket record geeks kick up about the lack of palatable garage rock these days, it’d be easy to think that the Makers haven’t been doing their thing for as long as they have. With a career spanning nearly ten years and several albums, however, the quartet makes…
After nearly a decade of losing at the big-time Nashville game, Shelby Lynne has a stunning new album, one promoted as her Declaration of Independence from the soulless, clone-crazy monster that is the contemporary country music industry. But I Am Shelby Lynne is also a manifesto, of sorts, for the…
Still is an unlikely choice to keep the woofers cranking and the party raging. It’s not particularly therapeutic for those who self-medicate with a few drinks and a gut-wrenching record. Nor will it help spread a political ideology. The work of Sue Garner and Rick Brown, Still is hard to…
Plenty of masculine R&B and hip-hop is little more than narcissistic posturing — a sweaty platform for self-styled superheroes who feel the need to tell you over and over again why they’re the toughest, the hardest, the sexiest, the most street. J-Shin, a 22-year-old smooch music specialist from Miami whose…
Mike Jourgensen — who operates both Noise Tent Studios and DU Records and serves as songwriter/guitarist for Abdomen — likes farm animals. Perhaps more so than the average person over five. And though he likes pigs, cats and turtles, fuzzy little lambs seem to be his favorite of all of…
It’s been a while since anyone outside of Minneapolis has heard anything much from The Jayhawks, who appear Saturday, April 29, at the Boulder Theater with Robert Bradley’s Blackwater Surprise. After the release of 1997’s Sound of Lies — and during a time when Wilco, Son Volt and some of…
Someone once said that jazz and cinema are the only art forms that Americans do better than anyone else in the world. It’s a sweeping — and presumably tongue-in-cheek — statement that ignores many American-perfected musical styles, bluegrass music among them. And while, generally speaking, Americans may not revere cultural…
