Anyone who wants proof of the sorry state of mainstream country music needs only to look at the struggling career of thirty-year-old Allison Moorer, who by all rights should be a major star by now. The Alabama-born singer and songwriter made a big splash in 1998 when her heartfelt ballad…
Throughout the ’90s with Mazzy Star, Hope Sandoval’s voice combined with David Roback’s shimmering, darkly psychedelic slide guitar to create some of the most memorable indie music to come out of Los Angeles’s so-called paisley underground. It wasn’t exactly a rocket ride to the top: The band’s flirtation with recognition…
This week, Backbeat writers clear out their N-Z files and assess a batch of new releases from area artists. See the August 8 “Local Color” for reviews of acts in the A-M group. O’er the Ramparts Waves of Static The Ramparts should have cleaned a bit of lint out of…
Perhaps the truest line ever written about Bruce Springsteen appeared in Village Voice scribe Robert Christgau’s 1975 review of Born to Run: “Springsteen may well turn out to be one of those rare self-conscious primitives who gets away with it.” As Christgau implies, Springsteen isn’t the sort of fellow who…
It used to be that people struggled to place Sonic Youth’s music within some kind of context. Was it avant-garde improv or pop-culture pastiche? Was it fueled by theoretical abstraction or punk-rock impulse? Self-indulgence or self-negation? Now that Sonic Youth (appearing Wednesday, August 21, at the Ogden Theatre) has become…
If Kruder and Dorfmeister are a blunt before breakfast, then Jazzanova is cocktails after dinner. Stylish and sophisticated, Jazzanova’s debut LP (discounting 2000’s remix collection), In Between, is a journey through nu jazz that you’re not likely to forget. The six-man team from Germany has dominated the jazz-dance and downtempo…
In Denver, the concert-promotions war continues to play out like a Shakespearean epic. From dead fish dumped at box offices to royal blow-offs for important jobs, the rivalry between Clear Channel Entertainment and its biggest local competitor, House of Blues Concerts, has included bloody intrigue and betrayals aplenty. For spectators,…
With all of the recent drooling over nouveau/retro straight-up rock outfits like the Strokes and the Stripes, you’d think someone would have noticed the Deathray Davies by now. This Dallas-based garage-pop band, which appears at the Bluebird Theater on Friday, August 16, with Superdrag, is the brainchild of former Bedwetter…
When it came time for 16 Horsepower to release its newest album, Folklore, the band turned first to Europe, where the largely acoustic album has been drawing all kinds of glowing accolades for the past two months. Six weeks later, on August 6, the disc saw stateside release on Jetset…
There may very well be something terribly wrong with the members of Speedealer. “Everybody in this band is pretty pissed off,” says bassist Rich Mullins. “I think our attitude is that in order for something to rock, you have to really mean it. Jeff calls it ‘a tremendous amount of…
Denver-born trumpeter Shane Endsley migrated this summer from balmy, laid-back Los Angeles to dense, teeming Brooklyn so he can be closer to his fiancée — and to New York’s fertile experimental-music scene. For some people, such a move might have been a shock to the system. But at age 27,…
Statewide drought be damned, releases from Colorado musicians continue to flow into local retail bins — and the mailboxes of Backbeat writers. In the first installment of a two-part batch of reviews, we focus on artists whose names fall into the first half of the alphabet; see next week’s issue…
The word “mature” keeps cropping up in positive reviews of this disc –mature songwriting, mature arrangements, mature subject matter, mature performances — and such references are apt. But maturity isn’t the most scintillating quality: It doesn’t quicken the pulse or trigger the endorphins, and it can easily slide into less…
There is a secret history of British new wave. Beneath the cosmetic facade of Boy George and Adam Ant lurked a legion of post-punk misfits — champions of cheap guitars, thrift-store glamour and reckless experimentation. Behind every Duran Duran was the spiky funk of the Pop Group; behind every Bow…
Prior to August 2001, Jesse Morreale’s experience with law-related matters was primarily limited to scanning concert contract riders for gratuitous requests — sussing out, for example, whether or not performers really needed eight pounds of jelly beans delivered to their dressing room before a show. But over the past year,…
Golden is the most modest indie supergroup imaginable. The band, which appears on Tuesday, August 13, at the 15th Street Tavern alongside Rye Coalition, Kind of Like Spitting and the Gravity Index, sports an impressive underground pedigree. Alex Minoff, who splits singing and guitar-playing duties with Ian Eagleson, has logged…
Depending on how you look at it, Transhypnotic is Denver’s Devo — or maybe just a bunch of guys who like wearing funny outfits and crafting clever music. Playground Politics, the band’s debut, is a curious, spacey oddity that blends arena-rock riffage with synth pop and new-wave-style angularity. Transhypnotic’s three…
Must be something about Monterrey. Picture it: Every year, the Mexican soccer league has two seasons, winter and summer, and before each season kicks off, excitement abounds in all of Mexico’s stadiums. Nowhere, though, is the electricity more palpable than in Monterrey, which puts on a jubilant, colorful celebration, complete…
As the opening credits roll, the film’s soundtrack slowly fades in. On the screen, Kevin Kline shuts off his alarm and stumbles around in Fruit of the Looms as the audience hears a pleasant, bongo-led melody. Two male singers vocalize prettily, their harmonies dancing around each other, joining up occasionally…
Coming from a band that’s known for playing hotheaded punk — aggressive, but ever mindful of the importance of melody — Wretch Like Me’s ambitious new album, I Am Become Death, is a little disconcerting. “You kind of get bored playing three chords,” says singer Abe Brennan. “It’s kind of…
Yoshimi Battles the Pink Robots is the Flaming Lips’ second disc since reimagining themselves on 1997’s Zaireeka. It’s casually electronic and curiously acoustic, with sounds from either end of the musical spectrum crashing in the middle and collapsing into smiling, sad piles of overcast optimism and, as leader Wayne Coyne…
Japanese taiko drumming is an art form that is as visual as it is auditory. Kodo’s army of drummers, sinewy and scantily clad in traditional costume, muscle 882-pound drums in perfectly choreographed unison while participating in a complex piece of performance art that is equal parts athletic performance and spiritual…
