It’s after 10 p.m. on a Thursday — a school night for most folks — and Herman’s Hideaway is packed with nearly 500 people being worked into a frenzy by a brand-new act. Near the end of the set, the tattooed freak show behind the mike says, “Let me clear…
These days, singer/songwriter types are a dime a dozen. There’s no shortage of one-dimensional, heartbreak-soaked troubadours saturating the sonic landscape — they’re as interchangeable as the multicolored faceplates made for cell phones. This is precisely why it’s refreshing to discover an anomaly like Las Vegas native Franky Perez. Discovered by…
Denver lost a mighty source of rock power the day the Volts disbanded. From 1991 to 2002, the quartet — led by the circuit-blowing vocalist J.R. Spiegel — was as forceful as its name, fusing rowdy Oi! and sleazy street punk into a single, sizzling shock. When Spiegel left Colorado…
Ask anyone from the ’90s music scene about Diggie Diamond, and you’ll get quite a reaction: shock, fear, awe, reverence, gagging noises. You might even be regaled with tales of a few dozen legendary gigs fraught with seared retinas, scorched lungs, ruptured eardrums and flagrant displays of genitalia. As the…
The typical artist has no head for business — which is why the typical artist is starving. Like it or not, a creative person who can use the marketing machine to his advantage (rather than allowing it to use him) is far likelier to find an audience than someone who…
It’s tempting to dismiss the Deftones’ latest effort as evidence that the band is in a holding pattern. The opening track, “Hexagram,” begins with a trademark Stephen Carpenter riff, and when the rest of the band joins him, the song lumbers around an all-too-familiar groove. With ten more songs to…
When Jane’s Addiction first burst on to the scene, it arrived with a purpose. The act came to bury metal, not to praise it. A late-’80s musical landscape still littered with crotch-stuffing, meatheaded, misogynistic hair farmers was ripe for change. And Perry Farrell — looking like some primal pygmie, pre-op…
The mainstream media’s coverage of youth movements generally demonstrates a staggering degree of ignorance — so it’s no surprise that the press has consistently treated DJ culture like a new phenomenon, when it’s anything but. As proof, consider that Seb Fontaine, among England’s best-known (and just plain best) spinners, is…
Banking on the dreams of would-be lyricists who answered want ads from “hitmakers” in the back pages of tabloid-style magazines, several low-budget song factories (based mostly in Nashville and Hollywood) once offered fame and fortune to any red-blooded Yankee willing to submit unwashed verse for “professional” studio consideration. “No special…
Several weeks ago, I received a panicked message from a frustrated musician looking to tell his story. “This producer we’ve been working with has gone insane and is holding our record hostage,” an incredulous voice reported. Sadly, the caller’s saga is far from unique. He and his bandmates had forged…
What happens when punks get sick of playing punk? Historically, all kinds of great things, from Public Image Limited to Slint to the Mercury Program — which will perform Saturday, August 16, at 32 Bleu in Colorado Springs, with Appleseed Cast, Chin Up Chin Up and Eyes Caught Fire, and…
With a safety record to rival Amtrak’s, Derailed conducts runaway locomotives of the headbanging variety. Fast and heavy, the trio — guitarist/frontman Russ Fahnestock, bassist Matt Flanagan and drummer Scott Lewis — cranks the decibels up past hardcore’s pain threshold for a pleasingly melodic, punk-informed brand of gritty, proletarian metal…
I couldn’t have written this record five years ago,” says Dave Gahan of his long-awaited solo album, Paper Monsters. “I didn’t know who I was. I needed to go through everything in order to wake up.” Enlightenment isn’t arrived at easily. The best lessons in humility often come from being…
I knew the band was something special, that’s why I’ve been in it for four and a half years,” says Matthew Winter, bassist for Los Angeles-based Rooney, of his band’s rapid ascent. The group has grown from local favorite to second-stage upstart at the resuscitated Lollapalooza festival to main-stage opener…
The Lost Sounds, who are slated to play the 15th Street Tavern on Wednesday, August 6, know better than to embrace a simplistic retro ethos. After all, some sounds are lost for a good reason, and even those worthy of revival often seem less interesting the second time around. (Would…
For those who crave blues from the old school — Muddy, Little Walter, Otis Rush, Little Milton, et al. — most modern blues recordings hold little appeal. The majority of them are too slickly produced, too heavy on the rock and roll, and too far removed from the heartache, joy…
As far as credentials go, Madlib’s got it made. Baptized Otis Jackson Jr., he has an immaculate pedigree: His dad, Otis Sr., was a soul semi-star in the 1970s, and his uncle is Jon Faddis, a trumpeter who played with both Dizzy Gillespie and Charles Mingus. On his own merits,…
Lloyd Dobler, the protagonist of the film Say Anything, was a prophet of biblical proportions. “I don’t want to buy anything sold, bought or processed,” he pronounced. “I don’t want to sell anything bought, sold or processed, or process anything sold, bought or processed, as a career.” Dobler was onto…
When you click on the word “Biography” on the Giddy Motors Web site, you’re taken to a page that says simply “There are three of us.” But the pranks don’t stop there. Click on “News,” and you’re whisked away to the BBC News home page; click on “Nothing” and it…
Peopled with local anarchists, artists, radicals and muckrakers, the Breakdown Book Collective (1409 Ogden Street) is a refuge for alternative lifestyles, political viewpoints and artistic expression. So it seems a fitting place to reveal the more roving, experimental side of songwriter/guitarist Roger Green, who recently stretched out into the solo…
Late last summer, a pale, willowy young man walked into the vinyl section of a Denver-area record store. He seemed nervous. His glossy black hair fell like ink across his eyes, and he glanced around the relatively empty shop as if someone were about to run up and hit him…
The abrasive San Diego-based noise quartet the Locust receives fan mail on a fairly regular basis. In fact, the group’s press release uses the following anonymous love letter as its lead paragraph: “Go tweak yourself to death, you rich, big-headed rock stars. You are nothing but a bunch of image-concerned…
