In 2002, Maroon 5 released Songs About Jane, which went on to sell something like a bajillion copies around the world. Consequently, the band hit the road for so many years that it didn’t have time to record anything other than live albums until this year’s It Won’t Be Soon…
The members of Architecture in Helsinki wrote their latest effort, Places Like This, via instant messages. Late last year, Cameron Bird, the band’s singer and founder, moved to Brooklyn, while his bandmates, who are now scattered across the globe, stayed behind in Melbourne, Australia. The six sent demos back and…
If Marco Benevento hadn’t needed to take a leak so badly, the fascinating instrumental combo known as the Benevento Russo Duo might never have existed. Benevento, who specializes in the Hammond B-3 and other keyboards, and Joe Russo, a wonderfully colorful drummer, grew up in the same New Jersey town…
I should get the dictionary out,” says Nathaniel Rateliff, “and look up the word I’m trying to say.” It’s rare for a prolific songwriter like Rateliff to be at a loss for words. But right now he is. Sitting in the living room of his home in the Baker neighborhood,…
More than a decade ago, Michael Roberts wrote a piece on the intricacies of the Colorado Rockies’ in-game entertainment, including how the music was selected at Coors Field. While it sometimes seems like there’s no rhyme or reason to what’s being played — seriously, Huey freaking Lewis?! — turns out…
Hotel work, for some chefs, is like a retreat. Because of the size of the staff, the hours are generally more kind (not shorter, necessarily, but allowing for actual vacations and days off). The kitchens are enormous — single departments (pastry, garde-manger) taking up as much space as is sometimes…
It’s been almost ten years since I last puked. Ten years without a flu vomit, a binge-drinking barf or even so much as a little spit-up. I used to be very proud of this — of the fact that on my 21st birthday, I drank 21 shots in two hours…
Sushi Den is one of a handful of restaurants in Denver that never disappoint. I’ve never had a bad waiter, meal or evening there. And I guess most everyone in Denver agrees, because when I went to Sushi Den one recent Saturday night, the place was packed to the gills…
It begins with a cheese plate. One large cube of Point Reyes blue cheese, well marbled with veins of blue-green mold, nicely cut. A small bunch of grapes. A single breadstick dusted with sea salt and black Tasmanian pepper. A little balsamic vinegar. The elements are laid out in a…
American Dreams. Vitaly Komar and Alexander Melamid were among the first artists to embrace conceptual realism in the 1960s. Although the two no longer collaborate, American Dreams, at the Singer Gallery, focuses on a body of work they did in the 1990s. The paintings and collages combine images of George…
Don’t expect to see Movado watches, Venini vases, Barcelona chairs or any other luxury item in Substance: Diverse Practices From the Periphery, the large and ambitious design show at Metro State’s Center for Visual Art in LoDo (1734 Wazee Street, 303-294-5207, www.mscd.edu). Instead, curator Lisa Abendroth has given the show…
Last week, as I stood at the corner of 15th and Delgany streets and took in the nearly finished Museum of Contemporary Art/Denver, a part of me still couldn’t believe it had actually happened. In just over a decade, this little, privately funded and perpetually-strapped-for-cash institution had grown from a…
Defiance. The second play in a projected trilogy (the first is Doubt, which took the Pulitzer Prize and will be staged at the Denver Center in spring), Defiance examines the state of the U.S. Marine Corps in 1971, when the Vietnam War had lost all vestige of legitimacy for most…
The curtain call saddened me. As the performers gathered on stage looking jacked up and happy, audience members were already pushing along the aisles and heading for the doors. I could understand their impatience: It had been a long and unsatisfactory evening. At the same time, I think it’s rude…
The setting is a hovel in England’s Cambridgeshire fens, a flimsy wood structure that offers only the barest protection from the elements, both natural and human. The protagonists are a pair of gardeners who have lost their jobs at Cambridge University’s Christ Church College — Wattmore because of accusations concerning…
The Adventures of Aquaman (Warner Bros.) The Adventures of Young Indiana Jones: Volume One (Paramount) Battleship Potemkin (Kino) Breathless: The Criterion Collection (Criterion) Commune (First Run) The Company (Sony) Fantastic Planet (Accent Cinema) Home of the Brave (MGM) Hostel: Director’s Cut (Sony) Hostel: Part II (Sony)Into Great Silence (Zeitgeist) The…
Directors Series: Stanley Kubrick(Warner Bros.) Most of the old Kubrick DVDs were crap: full-screen editions with poor pictures and virtually no special features. This set makes up for them with 2001, A Clockwork Orange, The Shining, Full Metal Jacket, and Eyes Wide Shut (hey, who farted?), all looking great and…
Whether it’s $600 PlayStation 3s or the five bucks Nintendo shamelessly charges for 20-year-old NES games on the Wii’s Virtual Console, gamers have gotten used to assuming the position when it comes to the costs of their hobby. So if you’ve just heard about The Orange Box — five of…
It’s Halloween, and you want to go see a scary movie, but you’re less than thrilled with your available choices. The Denver Film Society feels your pain, which is why, on October 30 and 31, Starz FilmCenter in the Tivoli is screening a Gruesome Twosome, featuring the flicks Murder Party…
I gave up after about 100 pages of John Burnham Schwartz’s 1998 novel Reservation Road, a typically overwritten and contrived slice of mass-market literary pablum that hopscotches between the points-of-view of three people — the grieving mom, the grieving dad and the perpetrator — involved in the hit-and-run death of…
Rock films come in two forms. The first is the concert/documentary variety, the best of which dynamically pinpoint a band’s musical moment within the context of its era: the Maysles Brothers and Charlotte Zwerin chronicling the Stones in Gimme Shelter, Martin Scorsese celebrating the Band in The Last Waltz. Then…
Named for the spot in Christian-fundamentalist hell where sinners are condemned to spend eternity, Tony Kaye’s Lake of Fire is a provocatively beautiful movie on the hottest hot-button issue in American life: a woman’s right to an abortion. The British-born Kaye, an enormously successful maker of deluxe TV commercials, relocated…
