I’m that rarity, a native Denverite, and fascinated by my cowtown’s historic layers, many of which I’ve watched overlay the old ones with my very own eyes. Okay, so it’s not really a cowtown anymore, but I’ve been here long enough to remember when it was one — or at…
Take a break from the onslaught of sickly sweet and sentimental Christmas music with Babushka’s Naughty XXXmas Carols tonight at Cricket on the Hill, 1209 East 13th Avenue. Sing along with twisted tunes such as “Hark, Satanic Santas Sing” and “Oh, Drive All Ye Drunkards” while Babushka’s partner in crime,…
With a French name, it’s only fitting that Denver’s Amélie advertising company would have a fondness for food. So when charged with planning a five-year anniversary celebration, Anita Ashfield-Salter thought cupcakes. She wanted to pull together Denver’s best pastry chefs to generate the same kind of trendy cupcake buzz happening…
The annual Function as Fashion fundraiser will shine brightly tonight, with cancer survivors illuminating the catwalk in yoga-inspired athletic wear from lululemon athletica. The Boulder boutique is featuring the cancer fighters and their triumphant stories to launch the official countdown to LUNAFEST 2008 (a national short-film festival coming in January)…
The best part about karaoke is pretending to be a rock star for the duration of a song — or an entire evening, depending on how brave you are. And whether you’re getting down to “Billie Jean” for the first or thousandth time, there comes a moment when you’re hitting…
Running late is a bitch. It’s worse when you’re under-dressed and a tad sweaty, which was my dilemma last week. There’s a point when late turns from fashionable and sexy to stood-up, and my mark for reasonably behind schedule is 25 minutes. Racing down Larimer, I realized I had a…
Tired of hanging out on the slopes? There are a million things to do in this fine state without suiting up and freezing your tail off! Why bother when you can enjoy a relaxing weekend at a fabulous spa and resort? How about a nice, healing hot spring? Ease those…
First-place Winner Broken-hearted by Chris Burns In the spring, I wasn’t feeling well. I imagined a doctor saying, “Well, you need to start taking better care of yourself. Get some exercise, be more careful with your diet, and let’s slow down on the drinking. Here’s something to help you sleep.”…
Years before he was a filmmaker, Vincent Gallo was into music. He joined his first band at age nine, and by sixteen, he’d moved from Buffalo to New York City, where he played in Gray, an art-noise act, with Jean-Michel Basquiat. More than two decades later, he scored his film…
When the mothership lands on Earth and the aliens sift through the rubble of the hip-hop canon, their tentacle sensors are likely to pick up on the way in which many of the melanin-deficient MCs stand out for having blurred the line between beat-driven syncopation and the art of spoken…
Were Andy Warhol still aboveground, he could tweak his prescient bon mot about fame for the British music scene — something like “Every rock group in England will be called a brilliant, once-in-a-generation standard-setter at least once by New Musical Express.” Unfortunately for the Kooks, a Luke Pritchard-fronted combo that…
The phrase “It’s all good” has never been less true when it comes to hip-hop. The genre’s mainstream branch is mighty uninteresting these days, with superstars regularly coming up short and intriguing new artists getting bypassed in favor of lowest-common-denominator one-shots — or am I premature in assuming that Meech…
Richie Havens first rose to prominence in the same Greenwich Village folk scene that produced Bob Dylan and Joan Baez, and he’s had a lengthy and distinguished career. The first performer at Woodstock, Havens is immortalized in the documentary of the same name, in which he closes his set with…
DJ Garth is one of the most distinctive and exciting dance-music artists in the U.S. As a pioneer in the San Francisco house scene, Garth has been a driving force behind the famous Wicked parties and the stellar Grayhound label. His work ranges from shimmering, spaced-out excursions into druggy tribal…
When most bands leave their home town to pursue their fortunes, they generally seek out a place that’s more financially and professionally viable. The members of Light Travels Faster, however, who originally hail from Amarillo, Texas, chose to come to Denver — not an especially astute career move on their…
In one of my favorite Charles Bukowski poems, “The Insane Always Loved Me,” he wrote about how the unwanted, cowards and misanthropes would often attach themselves to him. I can relate. I’ve had many a nut sit down next to me at a bar, like the guy who made bird…
The slump that’s afflicting the music industry has apparently bypassed the holiday genre, since nearly forty new or reissued yuletide releases arrived at our door this year. We were happy to receive some of the discs reviewed below. The rest should have been returned to sender. A slew of CDs…
Why has the Hate Fuck Trio been largely inactive for most of this millennium? Jon and Sam DeStefano, the sibling tandem behind one of the best Denver bands of the ’90s, aren’t telling — or rather, they are, but their responses in advance of their upcoming reunion date are highly…
Suzy Bogguss was poised to be country music’s next big thing. After winning the CMA’s Horizon Award in 1992, she sold more than two and a half million albums on the strength of six top-ten singles. But Bogguss’s eclectic and ever-evolving musical stylings left her stranded somewhere outside country’s mainstream…
In high school, Tyler Gilmore had widely varied tastes. The burgeoning composer was into acts like the Smashing Pumpkins and Aphex Twin, but he was equally fixated on transcribing Miles Davis solos to play on his trumpet. After college, Gilmore attended a series of summer workshops taught by Maria Schneider…
There are moments where it would be real nice to sleep in your own bed,” admits Will Hoge with a rapid-fire Southern drawl. “But that doesn’t pay for shit, so I have to stay out here and work. No, we’re fortunate to get to play music for a living. Every…
This fall has certainly been eventful for members of the Photo Atlas. First, they parted ways with drummer Devon Shirley in the middle of an East Coast tour, and then word came down last week that Rob Stevenson, head of the act’s Stolen Transmission imprint, had been handed his walking…
