Until recently, there have been two main political schools of thought in country music. The first calls upon its acolytes to challenge and/or vilify America’s enemies in ways that are as simple and straightforward as a steel-toed boot to the groin. A contemporary example is Toby Keith’s “Courtesy of the…
In 2002, the members of rap duo Zion I were preparing to release the followup to their critically acclaimed debut album, Mind Over Matter. When their label, Nu Gruv/Ground Control, lost its groove, they were forced to look for a new deal. During that time, the group reconstructed its album…
Slim Cessna hasn’t forgotten you, Denver. For starters, he misses sliding his lanky cowboy frame into a booth at Taco de México. After all, it’s hard to find authentic Mexican food in Cranston, Rhode Island, where he’s lived since late 1999. It’s also hard to replicate the feel of Colorado’s…
Some people have to have it all. Take singer Corey Taylor and guitarist Jim Root. As members of Slipknot, the two enjoyed worldwide success when their Des Moines, Iowa, bar band was transformed into a tour headliner seemingly overnight. But before they became masked metal mavens, they played together in…
With a third album, Deep Throat, in production, the members of Nixon Grin are proving that they don’t really care if much of Denver snubs them. The four-piece began playing up and down the Front Range in 1999, bringing its pop sensibility and solid, radio-ready tunes to stages of varying…
From learning piano at age four to playing in punk and indie bands in high school, DJ Sage has always had her hands in music. The native of Northern Ireland has become a queen of drum and bass, and hit after hit emanates from her Phylum Recordings label and its…
Why is Pete Yorn’s new album so cheap? On April 15, the day of its release, Day I Forgot could be had most places for less than ten dollars. When Columbia Records stickered Yorn’s 2001 debut, musicforthemorningafter, with a similarly budget-conscious tag, it was labeled “discovery price.” But Yorn sold…
Poor old Europe. The continent just can’t catch a break — not from crowing Fox News hawks, not even from arty musicians. “I hate going there,” says Will Oldham, who recently returned from an overseas jaunt in support of Master and Everyone, his latest release as alter ego Bonnie Prince…
Like that friend who is always cheerful without being annoying — or, God forbid, perky — Dressy Bessy does pop with enough edge and subversiveness to infect even the most cynical among us. And while a cynic might say it’s a little soon for a greatest-hits disc from this Denver-based…
Among the coalition nations engaged in Operation Iraqi Freedom, England is obviously second among equals. When it comes to contemporary music, though, Tony Blair and company have definitely earned bragging rights. Simply put, the UK is producing smarter, more interesting, higher-caliber pop stars than anything the self-declared greatest country on…
Nineteenth-century colonialists spoke patronizingly of the Noble Savage. Today we have the Enlightened Redneck: Mike Damron, singer/ guitarist of the Oregon quintet I Can Lick Any Sonofabitch in the House. Scrapping the sad-sack sensitivity of the Gram Parsons/Townes Van Zandt school of country-rock, Damron and his boys rip out a…
White boys have had the blues for a long time now, too. Elvis, the Rolling Stones and the White Stripes have made far more money by imitating the wails of dirt-poor Mississippi sharecroppers than the hard-scrabble, fistfighting black men who created this uniquely American genre of music ever did. Though…
Evan Nelson answers his phone at nine o’clock on a Tuesday morning. This act may not seem all that unusual — until you consider his occupation. For the past seven years, Nelson has presided as host and innkeeper of Skunk Motel, a weekly fete as notorious for its longevity as…
The members of Deerhoof, who drop by Monkey Mania (2126 Arapahoe Street) on Wednesday, April 30, understand the difference between “childlike” and “childish.” Apple O’, the San Francisco-based combo’s latest disc on the Kill Rock Stars imprint, is an undiluted blast of sheer exuberance, and thanks to the guitar jousting…
Crisp and crunchy, Aggressive Persuasion is easily the most exciting thing to come out of Pueblo since….well, since anything. Raw, hungry, and young enough for half the band to be graduating from high school, the force of AP has moved like a wrecking ball through Denver’s heavy music scene and…
If Amon Tobin’s music were fine art, it would be a Jackson Pollack painting fueled by crack instead of alcohol, with canvas left exposed. Born in Rio de Janeiro, Tobin moved to Britain in his early teens, right when electro-breakbeat rhythms began replacing reggae and punk. As variations on this…
He bleats at you with foghorn-like forlornness, a bedwetter yelping in his sleep while dreaming about tsunamis. In a downpour of snot and spit, Hutch Harris of the Thermals sings, “Eyes so deep/You’d never see through/I can’t fucking stop/Thinking about you!” His voice, extinguished, then sinks like an anchor, drums…
I like the fact that I’m not a frontman but I’m doing it anyway,” says Paul Fonfara of his current musical project, Painted Saints. “I got sick of being in all these bands and being the forgotten guy on the side and not getting any credit. I think that’s one…
There’s a self-conscious import to Uphollow’s Ten Fingers, the unabashedly arty band’s first release since Soundtrack to an Imaginary Life, a rock opera released in 1998. Guided by bandleader and multi-instrumentalist Ian O’Dougherty, the recording is a meta-musical that chronicles three characters in ten songs and clocks in at a…
A Denverite by way of Vermont, singer- songwriter Bourgault, who appears at the Lion’s Lair on Friday, April 18, with Local 33, could easily have placed his best handful of tunes on a full-length disc alongside a dozen or so lesser ones and left listeners to find the good stuff…
Any jazz pianist with the courage to record solo deserves our respect. Sans bassist and drummer, he stands naked, as vulnerable as a stand-up comic or a wire-walker who’s thrown aside his net. If the soloist also happens to be an elegant classicist who combines the dazzle of Chick Corea…
Taking blues, reggae, country and avant-garde down a back alley of alternate guitar tunings might seem a fool’s errand to most folks, on par with Zig-Zag rolling papers sponsoring a NASCAR event. Yet for Neil Haverstick, who’s spent the last fifteen years trying to subvert the Western Hemisphere’s over-reliance on…
