For years, bluegrass was easily one of the most male-dominated musical genres around. All the biggest stars were men, and their bands were all made up of “boys.” Bill Monroe and his Blue Grass Boys, Lester Flatt & Earl Scruggs and the Foggy Mountain Boys, the Stanley Brothers and the…
Steve Smith, chief operations officer for Clear Channel’s entertainment division, does not have talons, or horns. Backwash discovered this last week, when Smith came to town and met with reporters in an attempt to stem the tide of negative press that his company has received in the past year, including…
Soulhat, which performs Thursday, October 11, at the Fox Theater in Boulder and Friday, October 12, at the Soiled Dove, is the type of band that requires listeners to have their neck-bobbing muscles in good shape. Having dance-floor stamina is a plus, too, as Johnny Volgelsang’s low-down, funky Texas bass…
Dusty Drapes & the Dusters, Thursday, October 11, at the Bluebird Theater and Friday, October 12, at the Boulder Theater, have pulled off a comeback that would make Elway envious. The group — the state’s first alt-country outfit, formed in 1976 — initially reunited for a sold-out concert at the…
The first nuance you notice when speaking with Dave Vanian is how soft-spoken he is. He’s articulate, too, and stokes the conversation with droll anecdotes and disarming jabs of self-deprecation. Certainly not what one might expect from an ex-gravedigger known to yodel Alice Cooper’s classics “Dead Babies” and “I Love…
Les Fradkin’s band, Get Wet, plays a brand of instrumental music that mixes old-school surf and classical touches, with the guitar parts played on new-tech gear. So far, the group isn’t familiar to Front Range listeners. But that’s not the case when it comes to Fradkin’s back catalogue. He was…
Death metal armada: The words conjure images of a legion of disgruntled longhairs unintelligibly growling about the horrors of the world, wallowing in the tar behind an impenetrable wall of distortion. The Denver-based trio that is the Bobby Collins Death Metal Armada (DMA for short), however, has more in common…
“No one ever believes me when I say I am Mr. Pacman,” said Avery Rains, the lithe and soft-spoken leader of the three-man technotronic outfit that headlined a baroque bill at Monkey Mania on Saturday, September 27. If those who’d gathered in the newish venue’s dark and beer-splattered parking lot…
When Mystic rolled through town as part of Slum Village’s Family Tree Tour in July, she won the audience over with her conscious rhymes and soulful singing. By the time the then-unknown vocalist hit the first few bars of her first single, “The Life,” she had heads nodding and people…
For several decades now, cultural pundits have been declaring that rock is dead. But Jet Black Joy, who appear Friday, October 5, at Sports Field Roxxx with Black Lamb, apparently didn’t get the latest memo. The Denver-based four-piece rejects the notion that turntables and loops are the future, opting for…
Jacques Cousteau, master of the deep, was intimately acquainted with the oceans that make our planet such a lush home. His realm was the sea and all its complexities; through his photographic expeditions, he handed us sixty years’ worth of mystery and beauty. For him, water was the ultimate symbol…
Three years after they joined forces in Nederland, life is mighty good for the members of Yonder Mountain String Band. But bassist Ben Kaufmann swears that he and his mates can’t take all the credit for their rapid rise in the jam-band universe. “There’s always been this sense of timing…
On September 19, the Rocky Mountain News published a letter from Francois Bellouin of Boulder that began as follows: “Yesterday I was singing John Lennon’s ‘Imagine’ all day long. Following the horror of Sept. 11, I wonder if any of us, almost 20 years after his death, understand and will…
As anyone in marketing can tell you, there’s no better time to repackage and sell a bunch of old stuff than when you’ve got a hot new product with a tie-in to the dated items flying off the shelves. No one knows this better than our friends in the recording…
When an album opens with a cover of Richard Thompson’s dark and brooding “Keep Your Distance,” you know you’d better fasten your seatbelt: It’s going to be a bumpy ride. On their first official album as a couple, Buddy and Julie Miller take us down love’s lost highway, where trouble’s…
If aliens were to arrive in Colorado and request a sample of the kind of music that our mountain dwellers do best, we might do well to hand over a copy of It’s About Time, the just-released fruit of a collaboration between Liza Oxnard (formerly of Zuba) and the String…
You think you’re hot snot because you’ve been listening to the O Brother, Where Art Thou? soundtrack, right? You figure you can boast your infinite knowledge of authentic vintage music now, huh? Well, brother, you ain’t heard ol’-timey music until you’ve heard the Asylum Street Spankers, who perform Friday, September…
Something Ill: A Hip-Hop Odyssey comes to the Bluebird Theater on Thursday, September 27, offering local heads the chance to voyage through some of Denver’s most progressive and intelligent urban-music arbiters. Headliner nGoMa, which features the nearly tantric interplay between rappers Dap and Reese, will be joined by DJ K-Nee,…
We’ve all been duped at one time or another. At some point, everyone has made a serious error in judgment when purchasing music, whether or not he’ll ever admit it. It’s a common story: A really cool-sounding song that grabbed you the first three and a half times you half-heard…
Most people would agree with the assertion that life is pretty mundane. Lord Byron summed it up perfectly when he wrote, “When one subtracts from life infancy (which is vegetation), sleep, eating and swilling, buttoning and unbuttoning — how much remains of downright existence? The summer of a dormouse.” We…
Roger James first made a name for himself in local music circles as a jazz pianist. Last year he released Voyages, a collection of tasteful keyboard-laden originals that wouldn’t seem out of place next to recordings by Yanni and other artists who straddle the line between jazz and new-age music…
The Waterboys’ first release in eight years crawls greasily out of the gates like a shiny-wet pale demon emerging from the sewer. On “Let it Happen,” the album’s opening track, Mike Scott’s skeletal vocals paint a nightmare vision of a Cimmerian cityscape, a Burroughs-esque journey in which he encounters all…
