It’s only early evening, but the smoke in Sputnik is already hanging low when Erin Roberts shows up clutching a beat-up, pre-Oprah’s Book Club copy of John Steinbeck’s East of Eden. In her other hand is the eponymous debut full-length by Porlolo, the semi-acoustic project that revolves around her and…

Chris Soucy sure keeps a packed schedule. Besides having played guitar for everyone from Aubrey Collins to Sally Taylor, the Longmont resident is currently a member of the Sixers, the backing band for Massachusetts-based songwriter Stephen Kellogg. Kellogg’s not a big name yet, but that’s not a surprise: His latest,…

Jimmy Page could have written and performed the entirety of Black Is Beautiful — the debut disc by L.A.’s Rolling Blackouts — with his left pinkie. But that doesn’t mean the quartet’s cocktail of riffs and struts doesn’t rise to the top of today’s polluted rock-revival reservoir. Minus the shtick…

Good teachers learn from their students — and Utah Phillips is the best. For fifty years, the California-based folksinger and activist has crisscrossed America via hopped trains and hitched rides, absorbing songs and stories to pass along to all who would listen. But it hasn’t been a one-way street. While…

“If you don’t like the ‘scene,'” proclaims Nick Houde of Transistor Radio Sound, “then create something you do like. It’s really that easy!” And he means it. Transistor Radio Sound is a collective that revolves around Houde and Kara Jorge, and to them, “do it yourself” is more than a…

Seattle’s rap scene will forever be overshadowed by that towering titan of the mike, Sir Mix-a-Lot. Okay, maybe not so much. But the sleety city on Puget Sound hasn’t been well known for its output of hip-hop — that is, not until the Oldominion crew sprouted amid the town’s grunge…

Sleep pumped through an atomizer. A vast battlefield littered with phoenix feathers and dying warrior elephants. Cough syrup used as embalming fluid and flushed through the collapsed blood vessels of Western ontology. Lagoons full of discarded time. A fossilized spinal column, cervical to coccyx, from a human-Yeti love child. Genealogies…

Destroyer, by nature, is a band that conducts hyperbole. Its music is vast. Its scope is epic. Even its name is foreboding, in that late-’90s ironic kinda way. Funny thing is, Destroyer does destroy. It destroys indie-rock wussitude by channeling it into the sonic equivalent of a passive-aggressive apocalypse. Destroyer’s…

“The Two-Man Who” is one way that Swearing at Motorists describes itself. But just as apt might be “The Two-Man Who?” Although associated with tons of bigger names throughout its history — including founding member Don Thrasher of Guided by Voices, recent tourmate the Hold Steady and enigmatic songwriter Scout…

Who’s seven feet tall, has flow like a fractured iceberg and gets his paycheck signed by Omar A. Rodriguez-Lopez of the Mars Volta? Giovanni Marks, leader of the underground hip-hop cabal Subtitle. The L.A.-based rapper might look more like a starting forward for the Lakers than a musician, but his…

The grizzled, gray-bearded guy who played piano behind Aaron Neville and Aretha Franklin during their rendition of the national anthem at Super Bowl XL wasn’t recognized by most of the broadcast’s millions of viewers. But Mac Rebennack, better known as Dr. John, has been a New Orleans music deity for…

In the documentary No Direction Home, Bob Dylan comes off as uncaring and clueless about the effect America was having on him and the reciprocal effect he was having on it. Deceiver or dumb fuck? It was hard to tell. Chris Adolf, the core of the indie-pop collective known as…

Deadboy & the Elephantmen’s crime isn’t that the group sounds too much like the White Stripes. It’s that the coed garage duo doesn’t sound enough like the White Stripes. It would be a thousand times more tolerable to listen to a decent, inspired ripoff of Jack and Meg than We…

Some local bands are like runaway trains, picking up steam as they rocket toward inevitable whatever. Most, though, stumble along in fits and starts, hamstrung by speed bumps like school, jobs, lineup changes and the simple struggle to get good. The Hot House began a couple years ago as a…

The first thing Out on Bail wants to talk about isn’t the songwriting process or artistic integrity or any other of rock’s bullshit shibboleths. It’s booze. “Picture yourself in Pierre, South Dakota,” bassist Mike “Mad Dog” Taylor jumps in before the tape recorder is even rolling. “We’re touring with our…

Adolescence is a scam, a pigeonhole chiseled out by sneaky shrinks and marketing strategists. Any sane human knows firsthand that sexuality starts far before puberty and that the need to pound beers and pop zits lasts way past pre-adulthood. Likewise, it’d be asinine to dismiss music of the Milkshakes as…

Unless you’re a barfly or an Enzyte stockholder, “stiff” isn’t a very fetching adjective. At best, it connotes cold reserve and efficiency; at worst, it means corpse. And yet stiff will go down as the prevalent rock descriptor of the early ’00s, when the Strokes and Interpol appropriated plenty of…

Metal-core must be a harsh mistress; otherwise, you’d think that more bands in the genre would at least try to inject a shred of originality or imagination into their music. If Orange County’s Scars of Tomorrow don’t necessarily succeed in escaping from the thud-chunk-growl straitjacket, at least they try –…

It’s not a stretch to imagine Robert Earl Keen as a wannabe journalist. With an eye for detail and an ear for a great story, he writes songs that almost betray the fact that he studied journalism at Texas A&M before hooking up with a young nobody in the early…

Some of the best music ever made came from hardcore kids who woke up one day with an itch to twist punk rock into something weird. Granted, the four men of Big Timber — members of groups such as Bailer, Pariah Caste, Murder Scene Clean Up Team and Call Sign…