Two front teeth. That’s what Shanda Kolberg, lead singer/guitarist for local punkers the Swanks, feared she would lose when her band played its first gig in the summer of 1999. She had good cause for concern. For one thing, her fellow Swanks had a serious predilection for losing their own…

The Double-Barrelled Slingshots run up a riot on Destroy Rock City, the band’s first (and aptly titled) full-length release. A detonation of no-nonsense old-school punk, the disc crisply lays bare the local coed outfit’s unrelenting live energy. The fourteen songs rev into the red on an engine of crash-and-burn guitar,…

There’s a fine line between punk-rock recklessness and downright criminal behavior. It’s a line the Otter Popps have crossed on more than one occasion. “After our shows, we used to go out and light fires,” says Myke Martinez, the trio’s frontman and guitarist. “We’ve all been in the clink before.”…

Fort Collins’s alt-honky-tonkers Drag the River make music that’s best served in a seedy boondocks barroom, the listener’s beer firmly in hand. This spirit — minus the smell of so many empty Bud bottles — is fittingly captured on Live at the Starlight, the band’s third release. The record is…

Just outside Denver’s city limits, before the parched, sparsely populated plains swallow the last of the suburbs, there is a basement that regularly reverberates with a certain primeval intensity. Remarkably, the water heater still functions, even after its cumulative absorption of innumerable decibels. This small, underground room — nicknamed Helm’s…

For the youth of America, rebellion becomes trickier every year. The radical is the norm, tattoos and piercings are more mainstream than not, and the parents of today’s kids might well be rebel kids themselves. “My mom’s favorite band is U2,” says Eddie Clendening, the barely 21 frontman for the…

More likely to set fire to the Punk Inc. bandwagon than jump on it, the Emmas are throwbacks to a different time — when young misfits on society’s fringes created simple, squalid, stripped-down rock and musical proficiency was a damning trait. Favoring prickly attitude over technical talent, the Denver-based band…

Dr. Bug and I, we were basically playing in dumpsters and garbage cans in alleys around the Denver area,” says Log frontman Harry Lug Nutz, the essence of haute couture in a Mexican-wrestler mask and a pink polyester muumuu. “We would occasionally go down to Tulsa, Oklahoma, for aromatherapy conventions,…

Rock-and-rollers once distressed Middle America with a few pelvic thrusts and a smattering of suggestive lyrics. This phenomenon evolved into a penchant to outdo the competition with the most outlandish psychosexual and/or Satanic imagery available. Then punk, metal, thrash, hardcore and countless other genres and subgenres took turns pushing the…

The year 2001 produced its share of catastrophes: major terrorist campaigns in D.C. and New York, a widespread anthrax scare — and J. Lo’s solo debut. Fortunately, there’s plenty worth remembering about the first official year of the new millennium, as artists of every genre proved that music still matters,…

Pulsing out of an invisible electro-chemical reaction, a thought originates deep inside the skull and flutters through a seemingly chaotic labyrinth of synapses. Then there is the innate tendency to impose structure on this boiling, gurgling randomness — to refine a thought and cast it into the tangible constructs put…

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…

Music may not be the cure for all of our ills, but the healing power of rock and roll has certainly been tested again and again. For some of us, patriotic anthems and religious hymns can’t compete with the cathartic crush of a big, fat guitar riff. If you’re looking…

The rampart sprung from the defeated, shattered shopping mall, where not enough people spent enough of their money. Concrete debris and misshapen metal amassed into a hundred-foot peak, much less natural and stately than the ones to the west, but somehow more personal — especially because the viewpoint was a…

For Michael Trenhaile, the lead guitarist, co-vocalist and co-songwriter for Denver’s Worm Trouble, a musical mishap is creative gasoline. When he sits down to pen a tune, he favors chaos over control. It’s an artistic strategy that’s more Jackson Pollock than Michelangelo, one that prizes abstract originality over rigidly defined…

The first time Pam Puente, the front-woman/vocalist/guitarist of Denver’s Double-Barrelled Slingshots, had the pleasure of meeting her future bassist, Amy Davis, there was more than a little tension in the room. Their predisposition toward one another was antagonistic. Had the introduction snowballed into a full-fledged tussle, few in the room…

The reaper had finally arrived for the white Chevy van, thirteen years and 350,000 miles after its birth on a Detroit assembly line. Last year, the van’s keepers — the members of the pajama-clad pop-punk trio Sketch — made the difficult decision to put their old friend down. Dave Allen,…

It’s a balmy, hazy afternoon in Southern California, and the ocean is beckoning. The year is 1960. On this day, the Ventures have a number-two hit called “Walk, Don’t Run” in heavy rotation on AM radio, and surf music is just about as bitchin’ as it gets. From a garage…

If your punk-rock gauge reads “empty,” fill up your tank with Regular at the 15th Street Tavern, Friday, February 23. Dishing out inferno-style punk driven by thermonuclear riffs and wanton energy, Regular is a family affair: Singer/guitarist Miguel Lopez jammed with his brother — Regular drummer Manuel — for nearly…

The BellRays are pissed off. Independent thought is an endangered endeavor. That pisses them off. Modern politics are more akin to marketing Brand X over Brand Y than they are about solving problems. That also pisses them off. The music media insists on slapping labels on them. That pisses them…

Punk or dub? Dreadlocks or Mohawk? Spiked leather or braided hemp? Can’t make up your mind? Don’t: Just head over to the Soul Brains show, Saturday, February 3, at the Ogden Theatre. There you can mosh and praise Jah in one fell swoop. The Soul Brains — aka the original…