As any karaoke audience can tell you, context is everything. But when directors Sally George and Stephen Walker made the 2007 documentary Young@Heart, they proved that context, as well as musical beauty, is in the eye and ear of the beholder. The film follows the Young@Heart Chorus, a group of…
Radiohead? Arcade Fire? Interpol? The Strokes? The White Stripes? Animal Collective? Yeah, we’ve heard of ’em. For us, though, there was a much more intriguing, compelling batch of bands that weren’t — for the most part, anyway — overhyped and overexposed this decade. (Plus: As much as we love that…
The ridiculousness of Christmas has been fodder for comedians since, oh, the genesis of the holiday in the Middle Ages. But the past few decades have brought an abundant new source of yuletide yucks: popular culture. From cinema to commercials, the birth of Christ has been hijacked by the pious…
Good movies move people. Granted, the emotional effect sometimes lasts no longer than the film itself — that is, unless you’re Denver Film Society program manager Keith Garcia and the film in question is Word Is Out, the 1977 documentary Garcia selected as this week’s installment of DFS’s monthly Cinema…
Most people have heard Duke Ellington’s music. But for some — like Scott O’Neil, Associate Conductor of the Colorado Symphony Orchestra — Ellington’s lure is much more personal. “My father was a high-school band director and had his own stage band through college,” O’Neil remembers. “He’d play albums around the…
“Our production of The Westside Oratorio is appropriate and timely,” says development director Tanya Mote of Su Teatro’s latest show. “But it’s the story that Su Teatro is always telling in different ways. The history of Chicanos in the Americas is a history of tenacity and resilience. We believe that…
Most people in their right mind run for cover when they hear of yet another new band described as indie folk or Americana. Letting that dissuade you from the music of We All Have Hooks for Hands would be a grave mistake. While there’s definitely plenty of jangle and twang…
Hoarse, coarse and slavishly crude, the Texas outfit known as O Pioneers!!! might come across as a punk band at first — and, at its heart, it is — but beneath the growled aggression and blocky chords churns an artlessly artful, melancholy pulse that peels skin from flesh and pretention…
Celebrity foodie Anthony Bourdain recently appeared on the dignified stage of the Buell Theatre — but the cosmic balance will reassert itself when Bourdain’s polar opposite, Guy Fieri, chews up the Paramount Theatre tonight with his Guy Fieri Road Show. As one of the Food Network’s most visible (read: garish)…
Trimming most of the flab that the indie world has packed on over the past ten years, Pacific Pride is more than just a fine physical specimen. Airy yet athletic, it’s a tribute to the immaculate jangle of acts like latter-day Pavement and Luna, one that serves only itself, not…
Joanna Newsom came on strong earlier in the ’00s, peaked early and has seemed to all but disappear from the limelight now that the decade is winding to a close. But the odd, arty folk of her debut, The Milk-Eyed Mender, lives on in Polka Dot Dot Dot. That’s not…
It would be easy to peg Big D and the Kids Table as the de facto leader of some sort of ska revival. But the truth is, the band has been at the skanking game for almost a decade and a half. Formed in 1995 at the height of the…
In addition to its luscious organic cuisine, the Mercury Cafe has always been known for its live music – everything from punk in the ’80s to alternative rock (including Radiohead’s ill-fated first Denver concert, believe it or not) in the ’90s to the quieter sounds of the last few years,…
Even at the height of Bright Channel’s popularity and on-stage volume, leader Jeff Suthers played occasional acoustic shows as a solo artist. When Moonspeed, Bright Channel’s successor, debuted, Suthers seemingly had found a way to indulge both his predilections: vast, untamed soundscapes and whispery songcraft. Flowers of the Moon (whose…
Hailing from the state that brought you Mastodon, Georgia’s Baroness is likewise a critically lauded metal outfit that seems to have sprung fully formed with the release of its 2007 debut, Red Album. But where Mastodon traffics in massive conceptual gestures and passages of ping-pong prog, Baroness reins in the…
Referencing everyone from Silver Apples to Suicide to Young Marble Giants, Iowa City’s Wet Hair takes the keyboard-smeared, minimalist-art-rock-duo shtick to a new extreme of awesomeness. Granted, the sub-subgenre isn’t broad enough to brook much fakery — and frontman Shaun Reed (along with collaborator Ryan Garbes) carves a singular niche…
Putting your heart on your sleeve is one thing — but Fort Collins’s A Melodic Daydream takes it a big step further. Fronted by the songwriting couple LnZ Kaid and Chris Newton, the group has packed its new eight-song disc, A Little Weird, with more unabashed emotion than most emo…
Not to be confused with fellow art-folk group Vetiver, Washington, D.C.’s Vandaveer sports a smokier yet more straightforward sound that feels born and bred in the back room of some bohemian cafe. And while that may sound like damnation with faint praise, Vandaveer manages to stagger between Tom Waits rasp…
Looking for a shovel to bury the Aughts with? Millions of Brazilians seem happy to oblige; just do us all a favor and throw the band into the grave along with the decade it so laughably typifies. Sounding like a factory reject of the Killers, the Bravery and Franz Ferdinand,…
Jazz, as everyone from Ken Burns on down will tell you, is a uniquely American music. And yet some of its greatest practitioners have hailed from other countries. Clarinest and tenor saxophonist Anat Cohen may be a longtime New York resident, but she grew up in her native Israel —…
Mickey Rourke’s masterfully depressing turn in last year’s The Wrestler — not to mention the increasingly dark theatrics of TV shows like Extreme Championship Wrestling — have pretty much disavowed the notion of professional wrestling as light, goofy entertainment. And yet there’s still some levity in the gloomy and garishly…
To many, Creedence Clearwater Revival founder John Fogerty is second only to Bruce Springsteen when it comes to roots-fueled Americana. Those folks got a real treat this August when Fogerty released The Blue Ridge Rangers Rides Again, an album of cover songs that included a duet between him and the…
