As if the title of the Dropskots’ new full-length, More Seriouslyer, weren’t a tipoff, the band makes no bones about the fact that it has a sense of humor about itself and its music. But there’s a telltale, shit-colored lining to the outfit’s bright goof-punk. The album’s standout track, “Miseria,”…
With a sound so basic and raw that Jay Reatard sounds like a rocket scientist by comparison, San Diego’s Wavves achieves the improbable: making a two-piece outfit come off even simpler than the sum of its constituents. It also makes for some drama: Singer/guitarist Nathan Williams had to cancel a…
An Anglophile’s tea-infused wet dream, Friday’s Boulder Theater bill brings together two British bands that epitomize their respective eras: the Psychedelic Furs and Happy Mondays. The Furs, of course, are responsible for one of the most enduring new-wave hits of the ’80s: the refreshingly gruff and guitar-centered “Pretty in Pink,”…
“The first time I saw The Big Lebowski, I didn’t have a very strong reaction,” admits Will Russell, one of the self-styled Founding Dudes of the ever-expanding Lebowski Fest. “I ended up seeing it a couple more times, though, and on the third viewing, I fell in love. I wondered…
Competition is supposed to be the engine of business — but for Nina and Ron Else, owners of the Broadway Book Mall, cooperation comes first. Formerly part of the recently dissolved Denver Book Mall (which occupied the storefront at 32 Broadway for many years), the couple’s Who Else! Books is…
When Fancy Tiger co-owners Matthew Brown and Jaime Jennings called their ongoing First Friday event Denver Made, they meant it. The monthly art-and-fashion party has become an essential part of South Broadway’s burgeoning First Friday celebration — and, as the name implies, it’s obsessed with promoting Denver artists and Denver…
People don’t push enough — especially rock musicians, a generally sedentary lot who love to remain at rest, both on stage and in their brains. Snake Mountain, however, is all about pushing. And pulling. And yanking you through a ditch, a deep one full of dripping hypodermics and raw sewage,…
High priests of Florida’s legendary death-metal scene alongside Death and Deicide, the members of Obituary have been grinding morbidity and decay into heavy, guttural masterpieces since their seminal 1989 album, Slowly We Rot, a disc that helped define the genre and lock it forever into the metal pantheon. After a…
On Experimental Dental School’s new and fourth full-length, Forest Field — which is being offered as free download on its website — the group comes across as one you’d love to dance to. If only you could. Unless you’re both schizophrenic and quadruple-jointed, there’s little chance of getting into the…
It says something about our collective cultural irony that the once-towering term “modernism” has been consigned to describe the detritus of the past — namely, the kitschy and angular trappings of mid-twentieth-century America. But even in today’s so-over-it world, there remains a real love for the bygone decades of chrome,…
Fort Collins outfit GasHead began as a solo project by guitarist Mike Lopez, then branched into a full, albeit instrumental, band — which then blossomed into a full-on, five-headed metal juggernaut with the addition of vocalist Josh Purdy on 2007’s The Isolationist. With the group’s new EP, though, things have…
When Arrington De Dionyso formed Old Time Relijun in the late ’90s, the group’s reliance on the deconstructive glee of free jazz and the mutant skronk of Captain Beefheart was a bracing formula. But over the years, De Dionyso has proven to be more than a mere dabbler in the…
Despite the fact that he once recorded Aleister Crowley-influenced songs with prog master Robert Fripp — seriously, we can’t make stuff like that up — Daryl Hall has never been given the credit he deserves. Of course, you can’t blame the public for its perception of Hall and his sidekick,…
Few musicians can cite a specific turning point in their artistic lives. Boulder Acoustic Society bassist Aaron Keim is one of them. During a visit to rural New Mexico, the young instrumentalist — then a college student in his native Wisconsin — sat in on an honest-to-gosh, down-home hootenanny in…
As if the title didn’t tip you off, the recent Rocky Mountain Low compilation isn’t a typical attempt at whitewashing a bygone era of music. Compiled by fan Dalton Rasmussen and Joseph Pope, a man whose old band the Instants appears on the comp, Rocky Mountain Low is an exhaustive…
Despite the fact that Arvada’s Aloft in the Sundry had previously recorded at the world-famous Blasting Room in Fort Collins, the members had plenty of reason to be intimidated when laying down tracks recently for their new CD, Fore. After all, the studio was co-founded by drummer Bill Stephenson of…
The individual accomplishments of Gaye Adegbalola, Andra Faye and Ann Rabson fill quite a few pages. But among all their awards for songwriting, playing and even teaching, the three musicians are best known for comprising one of the most soulful and beloved acoustic blues acts in the world, Saffire —…
Colorado is lucky to be home to Carrie Vaughn and Mario Acevedo, two of the freshest, most fun writers of urban fantasy around. And local author Jeanne C. Stein is right up there with them; while Vaughn’s protagonist is a werewolf, Stein — like her The Biting Edge blog-mate, Acevedo…
Most stage magicians bank on flash and misdirection. But Boulder’s Erica Sodos has a passion for the art that runs far deeper. Weaving together wonder, mysticism and the almost mythic stature of magicians both modern and ancient, Sodos will bring her new show, The Power of Magic, to the b.side…
That the members of Denver’s Sin Vida are of Mexican descent won’t come as a surprise to anyone listening to their recent EP, The Westwood Anthem. Besides the disc’s occasional switch from English to Spanish, the track “Mexican BBQ” even comes with a Tejano breakdown — one filtered through gruff,…
With a penchant for dense synthesizers, organic melodies and dressing up in what may well be their grandparents’ suits and dresses, Austin’s the Octopus Project looks and sounds like a beeping, bleeding contradiction. But that quirky paradox has helped the coed group rise above the indie-dance trends of this fading…
As if the title didn’t tip you off, the recent Rocky Mountain Low compilation isn’t a typical attempt at whitewashing a bygone era of music. Compiled by fan Dalton Rasmussen and a Joseph Pope, a man whose old band the Instants appears on the comp, Rocky Mountain Low is an…
