Doesn’t it warm your heart when the son of two prison inmates makes good? Raised by Grandma while the folks were doing hard time, former Bay Area resident Baby Bash broke into the scene after moving to Houston and working with South Park Mexican’s Dope House label. Bash, also called…
Music city got a fat lip early last Saturday, when Riff magazine’s Rock In’ Freak Fest at Fat City ended with emcee Greg Stone (aka Uncle Nasty of KBPI) being charged with third-degree assault and Riff’s marketing manager, Darrell Hughes, leaving with a splitting headache. According to the summons filed…
Closer, the latest CD by Plastikman (aka Richie Hawtin), released October 21 on his own novamute label, is being heralded as the techno album of the last twenty years. Closer is not just the first Plastikman disc in five years; it’s also the first to add vocals to the music…
At first, Westword’s music editor didn’t want you to see this article. He felt the quality of Junior Senior, a Danish duo that recently hit in Europe and beyond with the boogie manifesto “Move Your Feet,” couldn’t justify the cost of the ink required to print a profile. Most of…
I never saw any relation between my upbringing and the art that I do,” says j.frede, the former Denver aesthetic agitator who now resides in Los Angeles, where he has been making a name for himself as a composer and performer of experimental music over the past two years. “I…
Psychedelic space rock and panoramic expressions. Gospel choirs and eighteen-month mixing sessions. Hundred-piece orchestras with their sweeping strings. These are a few of Jason Pierce’s favorite things. Until now, that is. A major departure from 2001’s ambitious, massively orchestral Let It Come Down, Spiritualized’s fifth studio album (which arrives barely…
Perhaps the best way to describe the lyrics of the Weakerthans’ frontman/guitarist John K. Samson is “relentlessly clever.” The former Propaghandi bassist has eschewed the ranting agit-punk of his former band to carve out a more meditative, inward-looking stance that allows him to tell tales that amuse, confuse and elate…
Singer-songwriters willing to figuratively stand naked before the world do so at considerable risk. Allowing the occasional flaw to slip past quality control can infuse songs with just the right touch of humanity, but preserving every flaw may cause the average audience member to seek out CDs whose edges are…
Sometimes in life, if we are fortunate, a moment or an event occurs in which our faith in the world around us, and even in ourselves, is entirely renewed — a defining moment in which lives are changed and philosophies redefined, a moment that transcends cultural and spiritual boundaries, breathing…
“What if the Devil stole your president? Would you wait for Dan Rather with a clown nose and his hair on fire? Would you trust him like George Washington with your credit card and PIN? Or do you cut a hole in the roof of hell and milk a star-spangled…
Mike Villano is one audacious and tenacious cat. Long before Fred Durst introduced Britney to his Limp Bizkit, the flamboyant former frontman of Chaos Theory was at the forefront of the ill-conceived mid-’90s rap-metal explosion in the Mile High City — just waiting to become a household name. When that…
It’s a hazy Saturday afternoon at the end of August. A white Ford F-350 Powerstroke with Colorado plates whizzes down Interstate 15, en route from one legendary strip to another. The vehicle’s occupants are high as hell, almost as if they’ve buried their faces in mountains of coke, Tony Montana-style…
Mark out the points! Build the pyre! Assemble different drummers! Light up the fire! Put on your masks and animal skins!” Dictums for an ancient pagan ritual? Canons handed down by a Druidic high priest during Samhain, the Celtic precursor to Halloween where worshipers draped themselves in costumes and the…
There’s a fairly simple theorem that almost universally applies to confessional singer-songwriters: The degree to which they open their troubled souls on an album is directly proportional to how closed off they are in person. For instance, speak with an artist who’s just dropped the most sincerely revealing collection of…
Yeah, I jumped off a cliff, but let’s talk about something else,” Elliott Smith told me in1997. It was shortly after the release of his breakthrough album on Kill Rock Stars, Either/Or, and Smith had recently attempted suicide by throwing himself off a cliff, suffering only minor injuries. Long before…
Welcome to my nightmare. I’ll admit it: I’m a buzz-kill of Ebenezer proportions. I’ve never been a huge fan of Halloween, not as a kid and especially not as an adult. It’s just another stupid, man-made, commercialized celebration of nothing. Really, what good is a holiday if you don’t get…
Carla Bozulich has always been a country girl at heart. You just had to look — or listen — through the fuzz and distortion to notice. As the leader of the Los Angeles artcore combo the Geraldine Fibbers, Bozulich colored many of her own compositions with country underpinnings, adding pedal…
It’s no surprise that Erica Brown once won a Tina Turner impersonation contest; her larger-than-life personality sets ablaze each stage she steps on. Sizzling, smoldering, Brown is hot, whether she’s doing mainstream covers, classic country or avant-garde rock (Foreskin 500, Cherry Bomb Club and Ron Ivory are just a few…
So she’s not really from space (more like Russia), and her Earth-born parents named her Vlada Kudryashova. But once Space Girl starts spinning, none of that matters. Known for hard trance sets that are out of this world, Vlada originally explored the galaxy of classical piano starting at age three;…
They climb on the stage like acrobats tiptoeing onto high wires. Their moves are poised, exact; their balance and dexterity are honed to surgical precision. Their confidence is almost overbearing, an arrogant mix of savvy and narcissism bolstered by the knowledge that, in the eyes of their fawning audience, they…
Though often lauded for the death-metal stylings of its 1990 debut album, Left Hand Path, Sweden’s Entombed has shape-shifted with each subsequent release. Openly impressionable to outside influences, the band has been on a restless creative trajectory since its beginning, when its name was still Nihilist. By 1993’s Wolverine Blues,…
“I just want to buy a house and make some concrete investments,” says Cam Di-Nunzio, speaking of his artistic aspirations with tongue partly in cheek. And while he may voice the pragmatism and quotidian concerns typical of a guy in his late twenties, DiNunzio is far from typical. As a…
