Funk is a dirty word. And it should be: The style was conceived as a grimy, hormone-drenched reaction to the detachment and abstraction of cool jazz. Sadly, few funk practitioners in the decades since the style’s heyday have retained that gloriously unwholesome essence of lust and sweat. Nothing drives this…

Naturally. It’s more than just the title of the sophomore disc by Sharon Jones and the Dap-Kings; it’s a one-word manifesto. Born in James Brown’s home town of Augusta, Georgia, Jones spent decades in church bands and doing session work as a backup singer before joining the Dap-Kings, a New…

On that night eleven years ago, Uphollow was in way over its head. But you had to cut the guys some slack. It was only their fourth show, and they were still high school freshmen; they looked about as big as action figures on the vast stage of the Bluebird…

Imaad Wasif has a thing for small letters. Not only did he lead moody post-punk outfit Lowercase in the ’90s, but he insists that the name of his current band, alaska!, be spelled sans capitalization. The group’s sound, though, is anything but understated. Awash in the broad melodic gestures of…

Few soul artists of the ’70s outside of Curtis Mayfield and Donny Hathaway were able to blend funk, protest, heartbreak and harmony like the O’Jays. Formed in Ohio in 1958, the group struggled before hooking up in 1969 with the swiftly rising songsmith team of Kenny Gamble and Leon Huff…

Your biggest concern after listening to Get Some is whether your shower ought to be hot or cold. Kicking up a miasma of filthy noise and musky lust, Nashville Pussy’s fourth disc veers precisely zero degrees from its headlong rush into the depths of Dixie-fried porn punk. Still, the disc…

Going through the motions: We’re all guilty of it. But Montreal’s Wolf Parade seems incapable of sitting still and sucking. On its recent, self-titled EP and Apologies to the Queen Mary, its upcoming Sub Pop full-length, the band is grabbed, shaken and propelled from within by some kind of wind-up…

The Weather Machines may be from Rapid City, South Dakota, but the power-pop quartet almost feels Coloradan. Besides the fact that the bandmembers’ earlier outfits, the Reddmen and the Bee Eaters, made Denver a favorite stop, the Machines’ debut disc was mastered by local studio wizard Jeff Merkel at 8…

Bands in Denver’s indie scene always wonders why they rarely manage to break out of Colorado. The answer is simple: Even our most promising bands are often weak, desperately opportunistic copies of what was cool on the coasts two years ago. There are exceptions to the rule — like Vaux…

Sure, Dressy Bessy might wear polka dots and have a song on the Powerpuff Girls soundtrack. But the act’s new disc, Electrified, rocks some serious balls. Ventilating its bubbly pop with slashes of new wave, surf, folk and punk, the disc has a dark edge that can be oh-so-sweetly unsettling…

Things have recently come full circle for Voices Underwater. After playing South by Southwest and putting out an acclaimed self-titled album in 2003, the Denver outfit added two new members: guitarist Ian O’Dougherty of Uphollow and drummer Larry Joireman. Both left, though, after completing a new disc, Trip the Light…

The godfather of grunge? According to artist and former Seattle scenester Art Chantry, that crown should sit upon the unlikely head of Kurdt Vanderhoof, guitarist of Metal Church. After the demise of the Lewd, Vanderhoof’s semi-legendary Seattle punk band, he took a young King Buzzo of the Melvins under his…

Einstein postulated that mass is equivalent to energy, and the Mass proves it. Hailing from Oakland, California, the band was formed in 2002 by members of lauded Bay Area acts From Monument to Masses and Totimoshi. Within a year, the Mass’s debut disc, City of Dis, shook the heavens. A…

Rock and roll is always funniest when it’s not trying to be. The problem with Apollo Sunshine’s self-titled sophomore album is that, instead of letting the laughs fall where they may, it attempts to pry grins out of your face with a crowbar. Not that these dozen songs aren’t tunefully…

Who knows what kind of chromosome damage the black-lunged ancestors of Lou Poster passed down to him? The singer/guitarist of Ohio’s Grafton is a native son of West Virginia, in whose hills dwelled four generations of coal-mining Posters. And his band’s racket — a tonsil-shot punk mired in brews and…

Purity, simplicity, integrity — three things that aren’t so chic in the realms of punk and indie rock right now. But amid a flood of packaged, plastic pretension, Michigan’s the Trembling isn’t afraid to shoot straight from the brain and heart. With all the head-rush riffs of Superchunk and tart…

Brian Pennington briefly played bass in the local hardcore group Shogun — and later became its drummer. It’s no surprise, then, that he’s poured his multi-instrumental talents into a one-man studio project, Radiant Republic of Texas. But where many people’s solo debuts are empty echoes of their previous bands, Lightning…

During its brief existence, Black Black Ocean was many things to many people. The soundtrack to a night of shaking ass and puking Schlitz. The rock band most obsessed with chess since Yes. And, hands down, the most spastically captivating live act Denver had seen in forever. But the flame…

You don’t have to be serious and emo to make a record,” insists Tom “Alice” Gilbert, drummer for the Maybellines. “People are happy in the world. And we’re generally four really happy people.” For the past seven years, the Maybellines have done more to push their agenda of musical Pollyannaism…