As the decade drags to a close and music fans are left to make sense of it all, one thing is clear: Amid the massive success that genres such as indie pop, rap and metal have had over the past ten years, Americana is alive, strong and continuing to evolve…
Bill Nershi hasn’t had a shortage of talented musicians at his side over the years. As a founder of the String Cheese Incident, leader of Honkytonk Homeslice and part of the Emmitt-Nershi Band with Leftover Salmon’s Drew Emmitt, Nershi has found simpatico accompaniment for his wide range of songs, which…
Previously taking place every Friday, but now going down once a month on First Friday, the live-music event known as Backwards Records Night might seem at first glance to be surfing the runoff of the nearby Santa Fe Art District. But even as edgy as the Santa Fe gallery crawl…
Dario Argento isn’t exactly a practitioner of cinematic restraint. But few films by any director can touch the lurid, phantasmagoric spectacle of Argento’s 1977 masterpiece, Suspiria. The Denver Film Society is showing a rare, archival, 35mm print of the horror film, including five minutes of material cut from the original…
The music of Fort Collins’s Drag the River has never been short of heartache. But with his debut solo album, Smile Sweet Face, Drag co-leader Chad Price has stripped away the band’s comforting layer of drunken revelry to reveal something far more painful. Bearing nothing but acoustic-folk chords, a whiskey-scarred…
After paying tribute in record to both Don Henley and Black Flag — not to mention collaborating with both David Byrne and Björk — over the past few years, it’s hard to pin down on paper what Dirty Projectors is all about. A listen to the group’s acclaimed 2009 album,…
In the rock world, singing drummers are almost as rare as talking dogs. But Grant Hart, the man who assaulted the kit for Hüsker Dü throughout the ’80s, was more than a novelty back in the day. Besides writing and lending his voice to almost as many Hüsker classics as…
Even bands like to dress up for Halloween. Last October, Boulder funk outfit the Motet picked the Talking Heads as the inspiration for its annual string of tribute concerts — but this time around, the funk will be a bit less tidy. The Motet is taking on the music of…
Author Jonathan Lethem created a huge fan base with the rich, imaginative fiction of Motherless Brooklyn and Fortress of Solitude, books that catapulted him to the heights of the literati. But he let us down with You Don’t Love Me Yet, a hollow, ill-conceived, spare yet clunky paean to the…
Denver has no shortage of young, hungry metalcore bands. The Skyline Surrender isn’t any less ambitious than the rest — but its debut EP, This Is Character, shows that the quartet has more than just high hopes. The disc draw equally from the metallic undertow of Darkest Hour and the…
Never afraid to lubricate the dance floor with a little well-slung mud, Darren Keen of Nebraska’s one-man band The Show Is the Rainbow is as known for his frequent lambasting of the prominent Omaha indie-rock scene as he is for his own abrasive yet massively catchy dance jams. Keen seems…
Born Against, Millions of Dead Christians, Christ on a Crutch: Traditionally, hardcore punk bands haven’t cut the Christian religion a hell of a lot of slack. San Francisco’s Christ on Parade proudly considers itself part of that lineage, and for good reason. After forming in 1985, the group released its…
The Victorian era is known for many things — but sexual openness isn’t one of them. The reign of Queen Victoria during the latter half of the nineteenth century in England saw strict moral codes and crusades against prostitution and promiscuity, the particular target being “fallen women” who dared to…
Last year, Denver’s MileHiCon ran concurrently with the World Science Fiction Convention, one of the biggest and longest-running events of its kind. During the 41st annual installment of MileHiCon this weekend, however, things will be a bit quieter — but that doesn’t mean the convention will be short of glorious,…
Rock and Roll Hall of Fame inductee Tommy Ramone knows a thing or two about sheer volume: As a founder and producer of the Ramones, the drummer helped pioneer the sound of rock as we know it. Now in his sixties, Ramone spends his time apart from the drum kit…
Unlike their sonic brethren the Animal Collective on the East Coast, San Francisco’s the Dodos keep it simple — but hardly stupid. Steeped in psychedelic folk and classic pop, leader Meric Long and crew focus on tattered guitars, huge yet warm drums and the kinds of melodies and harmonies that…
Let’s live hard together!” So declares the MySpace bio of Ault-based singer-songwriter Chad Price, a man known to pack more heartache and drunkenness into a single song than some do in their entire careers. No one who’s been following Price’s alt-country band Drag the River up close over the past…
The world grows stranger every day — not that that’s a shock to fans of The Twilight Zone. The seminal television drama not only injected existential angst into the age of Leave It to Beaver, but it cast a long shadow over popular culture that hasn’t faded. This year marks…
When Michael Chabon won the 2008 Locus and Hugo Awards — two of science fiction’s highest honors — for his novel The Yiddish Policemen’s Union, it caused quite a few raised eyebrows. Sci-fi, after all, can be an insular scene, and the Pulitzer-winning Chabon has been a darling of the…
Hindsight may be 20/20, but it still seems too soon to truly get a big-picture idea of what the ’90s were all about. Luckily for St. Elias, the big picture is moot. With its debut full-length, Believe It, the Denver trio has homed in on one tiny but worthwhile slice…
When performing solo, Washington state’s pop savant Phil Elverum operates under the name the Microphones — but when he hauls his troupe of players along with him, the project is known as Mount Eerie. The difference may be mostly academic, but the live experience is vastly different; drawing from a…
“Don’t take me away, spaceman/I want to stay here on this wasteland,” sings BrakesBrakesBrakes’ Eamon Hamilton on “Don’t Take Me to Space (Man),” one of the many high points of the British band’s new and third full-length, Touchdown. The outfit’s weird, sinewy yet innocent garage rock is far sleeker and…
