Andy Warhol once wrote, “A person is entitled to the lighting they need.” It’s a philosophy the Pet Shop Boys seem to have taken to heart throughout the two-decade span of their careers as dance-music innovators. The Boys peaked during the synth-pop happy Eighties, thus ensuring that their songs would…
In the spirit of a surge of satirical acts performing around the area in recent and coming weeks (The Monsters of Mock at the Bluebird; the Aerosmith cover band Walk the Line at the Soiled Dove on Halloween; Neil Diamond impersonator Super Diamond at the Ogden on November 13) it…
Dead Moon, Wednesday, November 10, at the 15th Street Tavern, is Fred, Toody and Andrew, three Portland-based fifty-somethings who started gigging together around the time most of their current fans purchased their first Bugaloos LP. But don’t let their ages fool you: These raunchy garage rats know how to rock…
Trump Mother Jones, Friday, November 5, and Saturday, November 6, at the Soiled Dove, is a seven-man band whose players dedicate their skills as studied musicians to pure, unapologetic funk. Five of the seven are graduates of various Colorado music programs, while lead vocalist/percussionist Jeff Cook draws lyrical inspiration from…
As a fledgling country musician, Shelton Hank Williams, aka Hank Williams III, is in an unenviable crossfire of high expectations that make Jesus’s son-of-God standing seem almost cushy. After all, Williams’s grandfather, the legendary Hank Williams Sr., virtually created the country-and-Western genre and cemented its place in the archives of…
The words just won’t stop. Jeff Tweedy has little control over it, he says, so his days and nights are spent at the typewriter, at the computer, scribbling endlessly into notebooks. Pages and pages of stuff, words that are dark and comforting, hilarious and tragic. The writing is automatic, scattered…
Slick Rick’s fourth release, The Art of Storytelling, has recently gone as gold as the caps on his front teeth. This is particularly good news for the legendary MC, né Rick Walters. Since releasing a solo full-length five years ago, he’d all but disappeared from the rap realm that he…
The Aluminum Group Pedals (Minty Fresh) Pedals, the latest release from Chicago’s lounge-loving Aluminum Group, is populated by the kind of delicate little melodies that seem to peek at you from around a corner before coyly ducking away once you’ve noticed them. But the timidity is merely an act: These…
The mountain of local releases that needs reviewing is slightly diminished after last week’s column. But continuing the quest to cover all things local, here’s another smattering. Brethren Fast visits and revisits themes of gear revvin’, truck lovin’ and beer swillin’ on 500 Laps of Beer Drinkin’ Fun, the band’s…
Royal Trux, with Speedholes and the Foggy Mountain Fuckers, Saturday, October 30, at the 15th Street Tavern, has been through a lot since the now hubby-wife team of Jennifer Herrema and Neil Hagerty first came together more than ten years ago at the shared age of sixteen. The band has…
Linda Maich, Saturday, October 30, at the Curtis Arts and Humanities Center, is a world traveler. In fact, her residences in London and Paris might help explain the global reach of this Denver-born singer, songwriter and painter. It’s a quality captured on the brand-new Magic of the Heart, her second…
Bassist John Paul Jones isn’t the unluckiest founding member of Led Zeppelin; at least he’s not slowly decomposing like drummer John Bonham, who died in September 1980 after guzzling an estimated forty slugs of vodka in a twelve-hour period and then asphyxiating on his own vomit. But while his surviving…
Bruce Hartnell, formerly of Los Angeles punkers the Detonators, has executed a drastic change in style. Instead of the three-chord crunch of his past, these days guitarist Hartnell and his many mates in Los Mex Pistols del Norte are playing a form that hails less from Southern California as from…
Sister vocal act Les Nubians learned firsthand the meaning of the word “multi-culturalism” at an early age. Helene and Celia Faussert, born to a French father and a Cameroonian mother, grew up in an interracial household influenced by both African and European traditions. They were raised in Bordeaux, France, and…
A funny thing happened to Rainbow Sugar the first time the band performed: It became the opening act for Sleater-Kinney, one of the most critically acclaimed bands on the riot-grrrly record label, Kill Rock Stars. “We just kept calling and calling until they said we could open for them,” drummer…
Various Artists Poor Little Knitter on the Road (Bloodshot) In the early Eighties, X ruled the Los Angeles punk scene and won the hearts of fans all along the West Coast who understood that there was something poetic inspiring all that fuzz and fire. No one, however, expected that it…
Ah, autumn. The days grow shorter, the trees grow more bare, and local releases continue to pour in like so much sludge down a storm drain. As Denver begins to resemble Kraków more each day, it’s the perfect time to hibernate indoors with a couple of records. As usual, local…
Linton Kwesi Johnson, with the Dennis Bovell Dub Band and the Heavyweight Dub Band, Tuesday, October 26, at the Fox Theatre, is known as a dub poet — a seemingly contradictory term, given that dub is a fascinating form of studio-manipulated reggae that’s frequently instrumental. But the label fits Johnson,…
Rainville, Thursday, October 28, at the Bluebird Theater, plays a brand of all-American music that’s rare in D-town. While most Denver cowpokes revel in up-tempo forms of roots country, this fresh-out-of-the-shadows local quartet sends up the semi-twanged rock that endears bands such as Wilco and Whiskeytown to alt-country types. Like…
“You know what amazes me?” asks Ed Mundell, guitarist and frontman for the Atomic Bitchwax but perhaps best known for his efforts in Monster Magnet. “It amazes me that there are kids out there today who don’t know who Jimi Hendrix is. I’ll be in a guitar store, and I’ll…
It’s been more than three years since Miramax released Swingers, the film that helped the swing-dance movement creep out of the underground and guaranteed that we’d all hear the phrase “Vegas, Baby, Vegas,” every time that desert city was mentioned. Then, after legions of potential Gap shoppers heard Louis Prima…
Over the course of the last decade or so, rappers have made a tradition of exaggerating the misery of their childhoods. Some emcees truly grew up in environments marked by grinding poverty, rampant crime and utter hopelessness, but plenty of others who claim to know about the mean streets firsthand…
