Music

Discovering the music of Booka Shade is a little like that phenomenon of meeting someone new that feels so right it seems you’ve known them for years. Before they came into your life, you never knew anything was missing, but now that they’ve arrived, you can barely imagine life without…

The Black Crowes, Warpaint (Silver Arrow). On their first studio release since re-­forming in 2005, the Robinson brothers show how a little time off from each other can work wonders. Warpaint continues to improve their winning brand of ­Southern-fried power-blues rock and may finally silence critics who insist on throwing…

The wait has definitely been worthwhile for this debut. Widowers spent months painstakingly and passionately recording the eleven-track opus in its own Opponent Processor Studios, and the efforts have paid off. While most of the songs on this inaugural effort will be familiar to anyone who has caught the act’s…

Boulder Acoustic Society members tend to be characterized as makers of hippie music. By those standards, then, Caged Bird qualifies as first-rate hippie music — a batch of songs that are often deeper, darker and more intriguing than haters of the style typically expect. The playing of multi-instrumentalists Kailin Young,…

Lots of folk lean on religion when they’re trapped and desperate — an inmate facing thirty hard ones, for instance. Nick Cave is a prisoner of sorts, only his cell comes without concrete walls. And he, too, has leaned on Christianity, only recontextualizing its core doctrine to jibe with his…

With its latest release, R.E.M. has perfected a two-part strategy for earning glowing reviews. Step A: Issue tepid to dreadful albums for at least a decade. Step B: Put out a decent CD and watch it be hailed as a Work of Genius! That’s pretty much the story with Accelerate…

Hillstomp’s bucket thumper and washboard scraper John Johnson once said, “The blues isn’t really about being sad,” but about using the music as a celebration, to bring yourself up and out of something. Johnson and guitarist/singer Henry Kammerer know a few things about lifting up spirits with their punk-infused, backwoods…

The second Raconteurs album, Consolers of the Lonely, is getting more pub for the way it was released — quickly, mere weeks after its completion, with little prep time for marketers or retail outlets — than for the music it contains. That’s appropriate, though, since the best of the new…

No one can accuse Dale Watson of not being country enough. The Austin-based singer-songwriter, supported on this bill by Jim Dalton and Tony Nascar, has a bottomless bar-room voice, a wonderfully baroque delivery, and a pronounced ornery streak he proudly displays on “Country My Ass,” in which he attacks watered-down…

Just having been in the Wu-Tang Clan automatically affords you a certain level of credibility, even when it isn’t warranted (yes, we’re talking about you, U-God). Even that, however, isn’t necessarily enough to earn you shine. Good thing for GZA, then, that he has more going on than just that…

Rjyan Kidwell started up Cex in 1998, when he was just sixteen years old. At seventeen, he launched the influential Tigerbeat6 label with Kid 606. By the time he was out of high school, the guy was already something of a well-known figure in underground electronic music. His early material,…

Pharrell Williams is so in-demand as a producer that every time he tours with N.E.R.D., his most consistently weird project, he probably costs himself money. But in the days before the release of his latest gun-for-hire superstar collaboration, Madonna’s Hard Candy, he’s on the road again, for reasons that make…

Most musicians aspire to perform before ever-growing crowds — and singer-songwriter Colin Meloy certainly doesn’t bellyache about the burdens imposed by the large throngs that regularly gather to check out his longtime band, the Decemberists, these days. Still, he harbors a certain nostalgia for the old days, which he revisits…

In the metal world, it seems that everything old is new again. Hundreds of bands are mining the rich ore of melodic British icons like Judas Priest and Iron Maiden and combining it with the sludgy doom of Black Sabbath and Pentagram — with varying degrees of success. Austin’s the…

Reunion season looks to be in full-swing in the Mile High City. Hard on the heels of last week’s news that Yellow Second is reconvening for a show at the hi-dive, comes word that the original members of another beloved, bygone band from the not too distant past, Sick, are…

The Pharrell Williams Q&A published in conjunction with an April 24 article contains a mention of Westword’s previous N.E.R.D. interview – one conducted back in 2003 with Chad Hugo, Williams’ partner in the band and the Neptunes production duo. The earlier piece, which appears in its entirety below, provides greater…

Slide show with photos by Brian Folkins Savage Henry’s Wish We Were Floyd Friday, April 18, 2008 Gothic Theatre Better Than: Sparking a fatty and synching up Dark Side of the Moon with The Wizard of Oz. Dead on and flawless. That’s about the most fitting description I can come…

The Communikey Festival this weekend brought together one of the largest gatherings of electronic arts purveyors this side of the internet. Slide show review by Cory Casciato…