Photo: God knows, we love NPR, especially All Songs Considered. So it’s pretty great to see the Flobots getting a nod from that show as one of this year’s Overlooked Gems. Wait… what? Overlooked? Really? Not sure how Bob Boylan and company managed to miss the Flobots. “Overlooked” isn’t exactly…
Update: Video from Montreal show posted after the jump. Melissa Auf der Maur, Hole’s onetime bassist, has tapped Adam Tymn, Chris Sorensen and Joe McChan, three-sixths of the almighty, dearly departed VAUX, to back her on a series of upcoming dates. The guys are currently holed up in Hudson, New…
Just received word that Paper Bird has inked a new joint management agreement with Mark Bliesener’s Band Guru and Sarah Levin’s Letter R Management firms. Coming off a series of dates on New Belgium’s Tour de Fat, the darling, irresistible, retro-tinged, roots-based combo has already had quite a noteworthy year,…
Fort Collins ska masterminds, 12 Cents for Marvin, will be calling it a day with a pair of shows commemorating a dozen years together (although the band reports that it formed nearly a decade ago during college — evidently, someone within the organization’s doing new math or something) and nearly…
Photo: Jon Solomon The Giraffes Larimer Lounge Saturday, November 8, 2008 Better than: the last two times I’ve seen the Giraffes. It starts off fairly tame for a Giraffes show. A few people throwing ice cubes at singer at singer Aaron Lazar. A few songs later, it’s plastic cups filled…
Photo: Jon Solomon Gang Gang Dance, Marnie Stern, Pictureplane and Slight Harp (with members of Modern Witch) Friday, November 7, 2008 Larimer Lounge Better Than: Shows at which all the bands are staffed entirely by men. I arrived at the Larimer Lounge Friday night and walked past the merch booth,…
LOCALS ONLY Since releasing their debut album, Til Then… last year, ManeLine, which consists of Mane Rok, InkLine and DeeJay Tense, have been on a tear locally doing show after show and even helping get monthly local hip-hop nights going at Herb’s Hideout (Everybody Eats) and the Marquis Theater (Boombox)…
Stephen Malkmus & The Jicks, Blintzen Trapper Thursday, November 6, 2008 The Gothic Theater, Englewood Better Than: A musical legend falling back on past glory. Opening the show was Blintzen Trapper. I have to admit I wasn’t too much into the band before the show or even afterward but it…
The Fray has announced a release date for the follow-up to its triple-platinum debut, How to Save a Life. A year to the day of when the act first previewed songs from the as-yet-titled album live at the Bluebird at a trio of intimate shows, the disc is slated to…
There are so many albums I buy where people try to put in electronic sounds,” says Jeffrey Stevens, “and it sounds like a cheap sticker on a wooden desk.” It might not sound like it, but Stevens is celebrating. The electronic alchemist, who is one half of Denver experimental pop…
I was making the rounds and hit The Loft (821 22nd Street) on the last Saturday in October, the last night of the club’s Rocktober series, which had featured two local bands each Saturday. On October 25, one of them was the ska/reggae act P-Nuckle, and as the musicians finished…
Many bands mining classic rock for inspiration these days sound like sonic fetishists or kitschy tongue-in-cheekers. There’s plenty of blues in Gata Negra’s rock, but to paraphrase George Carlin, singer/guitarist Whitney Rehr doesn’t just know what notes to play — she knows why they need to be played. The group…
Emerging from the remnants of experimental punk outfit Shit Spangled Banner, Sunburned Hand of the Man shambled into existence in 1997. A lot of bands refuse to be lumped into a specific genre, but this loosely affiliated group of musicians practice what they preach. Many have tried to put them…
The lowercased lang — the subject of an extended Q&A accessible at blogs.westword.com/backbeat — arrived on the ’80s music scene as a glorious freak: a short-maned Canuck with a boisterous manner, a jet engine of a voice and a taste for vintage cowgirl duds and Patsy Cline. It was an…
Jeffrey Steininger, aka Jeffree Star, who’s touring with Brokencyde, Teen Hearts and Ultraviolet Sound, wouldn’t have done well during the early ’90s, when performers were looked down upon if they seemed too hungry for spotlight time. The self-described “Queen of the Internet” has spent the past several years promoting himself…
It would be impossible for a band to telegraph its intentions more clearly than the Gaslight Anthem did by naming its new album The ’59 Sound. On paper, anthemic Springsteen-influenced pop strained through a twin filter of modern punk and ’50s rock sounds horribly contrived — and the Gaslight Anthem,…
With incandescent whorls of melodic sound and synapse-tingling dynamics, Overcasters are reinventing a classic sound pioneered by bands in the Paisley Underground and the British post-punk bands that favored shimmery, exhilarating atmospheres over utter starkness. Fronted by Kurt Ottaway, formerly of Tarmints and Twice Wilted, this band aims for uplifting…
Although Stephen Malkmus has been in the public eye for nearly two decades, he still doesn’t quite have the whole self-promotion thing down. Ask his opinion of the albums he’s made either under his own name or in combination with his current collaborators, the Jicks, since the breakup of Pavement,…
Remember the term “hyperprog”? Whatever it meant in times past, it describes guitarist Marnie Stern’s music perfectly. On her new album, This Is It and I Am It and You Are It and So Is That and He Is It and She Is It and It Is It and That…
One of the first things mentioned in James Zabiela’s official bio is his love of all things sci-fi, and boy, does it ever show in his music. Robotic gurgles, deliciously damaged synthesizer tones and freak-out soundscapes decorate and drive his meticulously compiled progressive/tech mixes and his own productions. He’s remixed…
Horse has spent the better part of the past few months holed up in Dave Otero’s Flatline Studio putting the finishing touches on its new album, U.S. Metal, which is due to drop after the first of the year. In anticipation of its release, the outfit, fronted by KPBI’s Uncle…
Metallica Tuesday, November 4, 2008 Pepsi Center To appreciate Metallica 3.0, you have to make peace with a few things: For starters, you have to reconcile the fact that the Cliff Burton-era lasted only three albums and ended over two decades ago. The surviving members moved on, and that’s okay…
