“And love, like a versified cliche, came down on me/Hard, in its casual way,” wrote militant black poet LeRoi Jones in 1962. “Versified cliche,” of course, could be considered an apt description of pop music — that is, until Smokey Robinson got his hands on it. The Miracles’ music was…
The last thing that you expect to hear on a Mudhoney song is a lone saxophone staggering through the psychedelic mist of hippie-dippy organs, twittering electronica and slow-burn guitar rumble. Yet thar she blows in meandering amplitude on “Baby, Can You Dig the Light?” the extended opening salvo of the…
Aubrey Collins is feeling a little tired when I call her on a Friday morning, and it’s easy to understand why. Yesterday she woke up with a sore throat and a sniffle — nothing serious, but the kind of thing that can throw your day when your life revolves around…
Blasting out of late-’70s Los Angeles like the most righteous Santa Ana wind ever, X blew the smog-and-pot-addled minds of hippies and metalheads alike. The fierce foursome’s post-Raymond Chandler, pre-James Ellroy snapshots of L.A. despair and absurdity allowed landlocked daydreamers everywhere to figuratively stand at the corner of Hollywood and…
“High concept” is a term that often connotes an overwrought art project — something self-consciously deep or, worse, “important.” But when affixed to Denver’s Uphollow, the description celebrates the band’s ability to cultivate new ideas through sound. In 1993, founders Ian O’Dougherty and Whit Sibley released Soundtrack to an Imaginary…
Much like skinning cats, there’s more than one memorable way to scream in a song. There’s the artfully abrasive method — a full-throated screech with enough primal intensity to make Edvard Munch stop and stare. There’s the discordant and painfully deranged animal cry: Think of a confused Jim Morrison wailing…
Del tha Funkee Homosapien is known to be a video-game junkie, so it’s no surprise to hear booming electronic explosions firing off in the background of his tour bus; it’s just a member of his crew exploring a new game demo. Del’s response when asked what games he’s into these…
Many bands that spend years teetering on the brink of fame get more conservative with age. So it’s refreshing to discover that the latest recording from Space Team Electra, a group that’s been threatening to graduate from Denver since the mid-’90s, is its wildest and least inhibited to date. An…
Can ORB quit its collective day job yet? It depends. In an oversaturated rock market, any interchangeably mediocre band (like this one) occasionally gets the nod. In its current state, however, the quintet not only lacks vision and originality, but needs a name that folks won’t confuse with the ambient,…
On the cover of Cold Wind, Open Road’s second album (and major-label debut), the bandmembers — captured in glorious black and white — wear severe dark suits and matching white Stetson hats. Instruments in hand, they’re gathered around a vintage RCA microphone — ready, perhaps, to launch into Bill Monroe’s…
Though not looking the part, with Marc Bolan-inspired vocal histrionics, Mick Ronson Spiders From Mars-era guitar solos and a gift for Queen-sized drama, one might peg Denver-based Tinker’s Punishment a revisionist act. (None of the four bandmembers, or their rabid fans, are old enough to know who any of those…
While Xiren’s two previous CDs were globetrotting adventures, whisking the listener away for a whirlwind tour de force of cultural influences, Polite Conversation gets right down to his essential pop roots. Most of the songs spin and soar, relying mainly on lush keyboards and breathy, sensuous vocals that land on…
On Orange Porridge, Zebra Junction breaks out the Zappa-esque noodling, the ragtime Deadhead harmonies and even some Butthole Surfers schizophrenia. The players seem to enjoy the notion that their zany eclecticism is somehow throwing the listener a deceptive and sneaky curveball. Despite the fact that any jam-band fan worth his…
Over the past several years, MC Dino and the other members of this eclectic collective have become known for dance-floor innovation and live fireworks. (The act’s next event, Kombat, takes place on Friday, November 8; see “Club Scout,” page 124, for more details.) Body, the Aboriginees’ second disc — the…
Despite utilizing everything from cello to uilleann pipes and trombone to flugelhorn on Faith Healing, Boulder artist Michelle McCown delivers simple and standard folk with an unassuming sweetness. The thin fragility and immediacy of her voice helps to forgive the predictability that surrounds most of the arrangements. Boosted by Nat…
This self-ordained man of the cloth done it alone: He’s got a one-man show, thanks to no one ‘cept the Lord. With a busker’s style and a vintage sound, Reverend DeadEye plays the kind of hyperbolic, electrified Delta blues that recall modern primitive-roots duos like the Chickasaw Mud Puppies or…
Fort Collins’s alt-honky-tonkers Drag the River make music that’s best served in a seedy boondocks barroom, the listener’s beer firmly in hand. This spirit — minus the smell of so many empty Bud bottles — is fittingly captured on Live at the Starlight, the band’s third release. The record is…
There was just too much rain in Seattle for Scott Kerr. “I always thought that gray, cloudy days were my favorite,” says Kerr, the guitarist, vocalist and songwriter for Yellow Second. “After being out there for a while, I realized that there were a lot of things I missed about…
A country artist by both default and fate, Hank III, Thursday, November 7, at the Gothic Theatre with the Shak Shakers and Drag the River, endures a different sort of affliction than that suffered by his grandfather, the legendary Hank Williams, Sr., and father, the almost-as-legendary Hank Williams Jr. While…
David Byrne recently compiled an album called The Only Blip Hop Record You Will Ever Need, which catalogues the vanguard of this new genre: bands that set percussive, PC-generated pings and drones against skeletal acoustic instrumentation. Denver’s George and Caplin, who appear at the Hipster Youth Halfway House (27th and…
As the newest member of Leftover Salmon, banjo player Noam Pickelny has his work cut out for him — and he knows it. “These are really big shoes to fill,” he says, referring to the roots-based group’s late banjoist Mark Vann. Vann, who died of cancer in March, left quite…
Hip-hop purists disagree about who deserves credit for birthing gangsta rap. Some observers cast their votes for artists like Schoolly D, Slick Rick and KRS-One of Boogie Down Productions, while others cite early ’80s tracks such as Grandmaster Flash and the Furious Five’s “The Message,” which slammed a socially conscious…
