Music

Sellout. Fake. Phony. Career killer. Catastrophe. Those are some of the words used recently to describe Liz Phair, the artist, and Liz Phair, the June-released album from Capitol Records. In the annals of the New York Times, Time magazine and Pitchfork Media, among many others, it’s been decided that the…

Watching movies was a big part of this record,” says Omar Rodriguez, guitarist and co-founder of Los Angeles-based band the Mars Volta. He’s referring to the group’s debut album, De-loused in the Comatorium. “It’s something I’m so jealous of — the medium of film,” Rodriguez continues. “There are so many…

My strength is in writing pop songs — punk-rock pop songs.” Dave Smalley, singer/guitarist of the Southern California-based quartet Down by Law, is spelling out exactly why, unlike his friends and contemporaries in Fugazi, he never tried juggling test tubes in the punk-rock laboratory. “From a spiritual side, I’ve always…

Every new disc I come across is like a blind date. I never know what to expect. Sometimes I’m taken by surprise and become excited by the chase — and sometimes I just want to run like hell. Music is the other woman, a mistress that takes on many forms…

Way back in the decade past, Patrick Park, who was raised in Morrison, played in Idle Mind, an act whose self-titled 1996 release on the sh-mow imprint sounded more commercially viable than it turned out to be. Loneliness may fare better, and not only because Hollywood, a major label, is…

Nashville native and drummer turned frontman Eric Shiveley has probably heard enough Michael Stipe comparisons to choke a horse — or any animal from Chronic Town to Dead Letter Office, for that matter. But Shiveley’s vocal resemblance to Athens’s most notoriously tortured soul is worth noting — as is his…

Chronophonic, a talented collective composed mainly of music majors from a variety of local academies, is living proof that Denver does have vital, contemporary-jazz-influenced music. The band colors outside the box on its debut, incorporating funk, world rhythms, hip-hop beats and soul-soaked vocals. Edging toward the acid-jazz tag on these…

Natalie Beal, the petite, soft-spoken program manager at the Spot, is not a fan of the misogynistic overtones prevalent in modern hip-hop. A few of her boys have spent the entire afternoon recording a tune at the center. They are eager to share it with anyone in earshot — especially…

With Terroir Blues, his second solo full-length, Jay Farrar has inched 23 tracks closer to his final destination: an image of Americana where country, punk, folk, blues and psychedelia accelerate into a single, grim gravity. In the same way that Neil Young sang folk tunes about spaceships, Farrar — who…

The Procussions, a three-man hip-hop crew consisting of Colorado Springs natives Mr. J, Resonant and Stro the 89th Key, are about to break out massive with a debut full-length, Iron Sharpens Iron, slated for release this fall on the indie imprint Basementalism records. According to Adict, label head and former…

Death to the fascist insect that preys upon the life of the people!” So declared the manifesto of the Symbionese Liberation Army. In 1974, this group of revolutionaries — made up of a few escaped black convicts and a dozen or so affluent white kids — kidnapped Patty Hearst, granddaughter…

Mark Oliver Everett, known to discriminating music fans everywhere as “E,” headmaster of the Eels, is the guy everyone wanted to be friends with in high school. Blisteringly smart and deadly funny, he’s cool enough for the boys to want to be near him and cuddly enough to make the…

Al Kraizer thinks he’s misunderstood. The common misconception, he tells me, is that Performance International, the non-profit that puts on the LoDo Music Festival every year, is loaded. And while it’s true that the festival can generate a healthy amount of revenue, Kraizer hasn’t personally reaped the benefits — at…

“So, which one of you guys is Rilo?” Yup, Rilo Kiley, appearing Thursday, July 17, at the Climax Lounge, with M Ward and the Golden Age, is another one of those bands with a name that sounds like a person. Pretty fucking annoying. Just as annoying as most of the…

The towering, ethereal vocals of Porcelain frontman Eric Larson seem to come from a shadowy place outside of normal time and space. Although Larson’s voice is evocative of Jeff Buckley’s or Thom Yorke’s, it’s underpinned by the repetitive, phaser-heavy guitar work and vocal harmonies of Tristram Nelson, his Atlanta art-school…

If Joseph Hill could challenge George W. Bush to a sound clash — a popular reggae competition in which opposing selectors and mike-chatters match wits in boasting, toasting and hyping up a crowd from opposite sound systems — the 55-year-old reggae legend would take the high road. As Culture’s fiery…

It sounds like a Hallmark card or something,” says Longwave frontman Steve Schiltz from his apartment in Brooklyn. “It sounds trite, but it’s true: We like playing together,” he says, when pressed for an explanation of how the band formed. Surely there must have been a higher calling than it…

There’s something terribly wrong about the cover shot of this CD. Not that I’m a moralist. Sure, the image of Ms. Knowles wearing a bejeweled variation on the beads people hang across open doorways is capable of inspiring impure thoughts among impressionable youths and, well, impressionable non-youths, too, and that’s…

It takes sound and meaning to make a word. Remove either one and you’re left with a morphological shell; combine them in just the right way and, well, you’re communicating. This formula applies to pop music, too. Great lyrics can turn a rote melody or an empty riff into an…

Wearing their garage-band title as a kind of attitudinal badge of honor, the Dallas-based Deathray Davies have honed a casual, offhand cool that dovetails nicely with the anti-refinement, retro-rock movement. But Midnight at the Black Nail Polish Factory confirms that the band is most powered by its own momentum. On…