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…
Minty fresh. That’s how the side of the bottle describes the blood’s taste. Pacing on the deck of a suburban home in gigantic platform boots that obliterate the leaves crackling underfoot, Maris the Great begs to differ. “I think it’s more like cherries,” he says, and he should know. Although…
Awakened by atomic testing and an insatiable appetite for horticulture, Bongzilla has but two things on its slow, single-chambered, reptilian mind: kind bud and loud amplifiers. But having a lot to say about very little is part of this Madison-based outfit’s undeniable charm. Able to scrape that good, sticky resin…
In his long career, the ageless tenor saxophonist, bandstand wit and sometimes blues singer Billy Tolles has occasionally hit the road with stars like Dizzy Gillespie, Quincy Jones and Ray Charles. But for the most part, “B.T.” has been a solid local performer and educator who’s firmed up Denver’s jazz…
This is not a supergroup,” Curt Kirkwood insists about Eyes Adrift, a new rock-based trio featuring himself, Nirvana’s Krist Novoselic and Sublime’s Bud Gaugh. “This is not any of your American fuckin’ hogwash. This is real. We want to have a good go of our lives, because the past is…
When you’re part of a dub band from Colorado, live high in the mountains and spend your days in a basement playing with analog recording devices and enough instruments for an orchestra, you find time to get in touch with the spirit world. You might cement your ideas about the…
Jon Fishman is feeling a little frantic, which is no wonder given his current schedule. For one thing, he recently became a father. And Phish, his mainstay act, is set to rock back into action this New Year’s Eve at Madison Square Garden. Pork Tornado, Fishman’s new moonlighting project, is…
Over the course of the past year, the Denver Post and the Rocky Mountain News have discovered that there is indeed a music scene in Denver. What accounts for this revelation, we couldn’t rightly say. Of the two, The Post has been most proactive in upping its music-savvy profile, possibly…
Though criminally underappreciated, Meshell Ndegeocello, who appears Wednesday, October 30, at the Bluebird Theater, with DJ Sundance Kid, helped lay the foundation for current neo-soul sisters and brothers such as Jill Scott, D’Angelo, Erykah Badu and Floetry. Her latest CD, Cookie: The Anthropological Mixtape, shuns the lush orchestration that defined…
Blind Harvest’s recent CD, Drop the Bomb on Me, blasted the band to the tips of tongues in the local scene, and its live shows have kept people talking. Led by former New Yorker Ken Karnisky and full of foot-stomping funk and gentle jazz jive, the Harvest is a “sensitive…
Goldfish never belonged in the heels of platform shoes. Period. They’d slosh around like poor, lost souls, seasick in tiny drunk tanks of flashing strobe lights, pummeling low-end frequencies and too much loco-motion. At least it was a miserable condition the little fishes shared with their evil captors, the oblivious…
At one point in its history, it was entirely possible that Imperial Teen would forever be associated with the 1999 film Jawbreaker, given the fact that the band is best known for contributing the creepy, stalkerish “Yoo-Hoo” to the movie’s soundtrack. The fact that the group dropped off pop culture’s…
A profile of your average Maybellines fan: thick glasses, cardigan sweater, scuffed-up thrift-store shoes, a back pocket full of half-melted candy, and a record shelf stacked with 45s by Stereolab, Tiger Trap, Heavenly and the Modern Lovers. The Maybellines stick Casio organ tones into buzzy guitar riffs like cards into…
Still Small is an awfully modest title for this disc, which serves as a de facto introduction to one of the most promising acts on the Denver scene. Main Yellow man Scott Kerr is a former member of Five Iron Frenzy, but the music made by him and his fellows…
Red-haired and musically ambidextrous, Marcy Baruch has pole-vaulted into the inner sanctum of Denver-area singer-songwriters. Her debut recording, Clearly, suggests she’s paid the dues to be there. It’s easy to imagine much of the material on Clearly co-opted by aspiring Faiths and Shanias, artists who toil in the gray stylistic…
Funky, jazzy, tribal, swampy. While it’s difficult to hang a tag on the Motet, one thing is clear: The band is enthusiastic. Recorded during a 2002 spring tour, Live begins the same way many of the Motet’s shows kick off, with wow drums and a percussion jam that would feel…
Singer-songwriter Steve Watson crafts clean, concise electric folk-rock ballads that should appeal to fans of Jackson Browne, though it’s the high and dry lonesome prairies of Wyoming that provide inspiration, rather than any crowded stretch of Southern California. Somewhere above the wires, outside the radar and beneath the sonar, the…
Music lovers with an allergy to jam bands can be excused for assuming that they’ll have an adverse reaction to this CD, a live recording cut in Colorado and Oregon. After all, the closing medley of two songs — one of which is played twice — clocks in at a…
Before the ideas of “pop” and “punk” were grafted in unholy union, there were bands that didn’t know there was ever a difference. Add the Hacks to that list. Influenced by the gruff, Oi!-tinged punk of Channel 3 or Sham 69 and the almost conceptual sloppiness of Crimpshrine (whose “Fucked…
Biggie Smalls and Tupac Shakur have been in the news more often recently than they were during their heydays as East and West Coast rap stars, respectively. A Los Angeles Times series and a new movie — each presenting different theories as to who killed Shakur in September 1996 and…
“True love is a blessing/True love is a curse,” begins one song on Johnny Dowd’s latest disc, The Pawnbroker’s Wife, and even though Dowd addresses the highs (largely in past tense), he’s more comfortable scraping emotion’s depths. A discomforting collection of tar-toned tunes, The Pawnbroker’s Wife explores a decaying relationship…
Since the demise of the late, great Foreskin 500, most of Dave Kerr’s appearances before local audiences have found him standing behind a turntable deck and donning a pair of headphones. He’s had informal “residencies” at the Lion’s Lair and the 15th Street Tavern, gigs that were more likely to…
