Cry, the fifth album by country singer Faith Hill, opens with a loud crash of drums, a throbbing electric bass and a screeching electric guitar. The song is called “Free,” and it’s about liberating oneself from the chains of the past. The point is obvious: Hill wants to shed her…
When talking roots, it’s hard to get farther down the musical tree than Africa. So when searching for rootsy compositions evocative of deep blue seas, rural villages where chickens cluck about the streets and a soulful spirituality far removed from the media-saturated din of contemporary life, your first stop should…
Vincent Gallo once described himself as the kind of guy who’d attend a football game in a visiting uniform and cheer until he got killed. Divisive as a portcullis with the stare of Rasputin, the Buffalo-bred director/actor /composer has certainly garnered his fair share of praise and scorn over the…
The Colorado Music Association unveiled its Music Directory at a holiday party this past Sunday, passing out copies of the comprehensive talent guide. The directory, more than two years in the making, lists the vital statistics of as many working bands and artists as COMA was able to gets its…
Annie Quick, who appears Thursday, December 19, at Ziggie’s Saloon, has a way of both blending into and stepping out of her environment. Her band, Stickman Jones, shed its hippie upbringing when it moved from Santa Cruz to New York City in 1997. Surging with the flash and urban energy…
Blister 66 has attained a musical fluidity that allows it to change with the tides — as well as trends in mainstream commercial rock. Today the band’s lineup is almost completely different from the one that unleashed a rap-metal mélange on Denver in the late ’90s. Yet the big prize…
There’s a fine line between punk-rock recklessness and downright criminal behavior. It’s a line the Otter Popps have crossed on more than one occasion. “After our shows, we used to go out and light fires,” says Myke Martinez, the trio’s frontman and guitarist. “We’ve all been in the clink before.”…
ost Americans have a love-hate relationship with yuletide music. They can’t imagine the season without it, but they sometimes wish they could. Such conflicting emotions are easy to understand after plowing through the more than thirty holiday platters that made their way to our door this year. As usual, the…
White people long to be funky. They want elasticity: the rubber knees, the fluid flow, the boiling blood, the innate understanding of the rhythms they pine to create. They want the funk; they are willing to give up everything for the funk. But the funk remains buried by centuries of…
Members of Three Degrees of Freedom recently made a very serious investment in their future, one that suggests a rock-and-roll variation on the Oscar Meyer wiener car and the Orkin man’s bug-eared auto. The jam-happy Denver outfit bought a huge white Suburban and plastered the sidewalls with a blazing, blown-up…
At Bob’s Bad Vapors in Memphis, arguably the birthplace of karaoke, you can see a different Elvis impersonator every twenty minutes — if you’re an absolute masochist, that is. Seemingly rolled off some glitzy assembly line in Dante’s Inferno, sneering exhibitionists from all walks of life converge year round upon…
Following the murder of his uncle in the early ’50s, young Otis Taylor accompanied his shattered parents as they uprooted themselves from Chicago and moved to Denver — the once and future bluesman’s adopted home for the last five decades. But that single childhood atrocity wasn’t the first act of…
Music journalists are largely responsible for turning Paul Oakenfold into the planet’s foremost DJ — a title he wears as if by right. But after the arrival of Bunkka, a CD that presents Oakenfold as a full-fledged pop artist, these tastemakers turned on their man in a big way. A…
On the cover of his most recent album, Here I Am in Dallas, Dallas Wayne sits at the counter of a dimly lit bar with a cigarette in hand and a deeply troubled look on his face. He’s obviously in no hurry to leave the joint. At his elbow are…
Someone once dubbed Chuck Pyle “the Zen cowboy,” and that’s a pretty accurate description of the Colorado singer-songwriter, whose songs are filled with metaphysical musings straight out of a Buddhist text. “The waves they ebb and they flow/The perfect moment’s gone before you know,” he observes in the dreamlike “If…
An indie-rock-scarred hipster’s first reaction to this disc might be one of disgust. Clean, processed guitars? A singer in tune? Swelling anthems that would sound at home on an SUV commercial? Yes, all of this — and not an ironically dissonant note in sight. Battery Park’s music falls somewhere between…
When a group’s CD includes enough promotional packaging to kill a small forest, a lengthy musical manifesto that could put the Unabomber to shame and a grand total of three songs, you’ve got to wonder how much effort went into the crafting of the actual music. The answer is plenty,…
Singer-songwriter Kim Jones, a native New Yorker, has put down roots in Denver, but if Road Dreams is any indication, she’s got traveling on her mind. Several of the CD’s tunes deal with voyages of one sort or another, including “Journeymen,” which tells the immigration tale of her great-grandparents, and…
There’s no end in sight to the acoustic revival, which is a lucky break for local-but-touring band Newcomers Home. Traditional, gently trickling guitar melodies and well-worn influences permeate the band’s second CD, In the Hour, which places the trio within the general sanctuary of Americana-style folk. More safely bland than…
Here are two more in a long line of compilations meant to promote Denver-area punk rock. The only real surprise here is that more of these groups aren’t better known. On Undead in Denver, almost every band sounds like some combination of X, Social Distortion or the Dwarves, which is…
Once a fixture on the Denver jazz club scene, singer Lynn Skinner has been keeping her own counsel of late. But Gems in the Rough, a new, self-produced collaboration with guitarist Vonn Regensberger, reaffirms her gift as a versatile stylist with a voice as appealing as old brandy. The material…
Active since 1982 in the underground home tapers scene, Little Fyodor has helped create and circulate countless cassettes of varying oddness over the years — mostly at a time when publications like Factsheet 5 gave a rat’s ass about willfully unmarketable forms of musical expression. Packed to the gills with…
