Steel Pole Bath Tub was one of the more compelling casualties of the early-’90s major-label bidding frenzy that followed Nirvana’s dark-horse breakthrough. After a decade of producing enigmatic, sample-addled drone rock, the outfit was dropped by London Records in 1996 for planning to release a disc that covered the first…
Van Halen, ELP and Hella never knew they had that much in common — that is, until Darediablo. The Gotham trio of drummer Chad Royce, keyboardist Matt Holford and guitarist/bassist Jake Garcia have been kicking up an instrumental din for six years now, jabbing shards of metal and jazz sideways…
Sleater-Kinney is one of those bands you don’t like as much as you’re afraid not to like. The group’s hipness quotient and political correctness almost overshadow the fact that its music pretty much fucking sucks. The Woods is no different. While famed Flaming Lips producer David Fridmann has helped the…
FRI, 5/13 “My characters are really, really simply drawn,” Todd Goldman says of his art. “Simply drawn” is putting it mildly; Goldman’s bright, basic cartoon style makes Keith Haring look like Caravaggio. But there’s no denying the power of that simplicity: Over the past few years, Goldman has turned his…
When Tanner Olson moved to Denver from Sioux Falls, South Dakota, he brought with him quite a pedigree. As guitarist for the progressive hardcore outfits the Spirit of Versailles and Examination of the…, he’d already had a taste of forging noises both experimental and bludgeoning. But with his new band,…
Neither post-punk nor garage rock, the Ponys’ sound gallops somewhere in between. But instead of half-assed hybrid, the Chicago foursome’s new disc, Celebration Castle, comes across as a smooth synthesis of icy echoes and blood-boiling flux. Last year’s Laced With Romance was exactly that. But Castle goes even further, steeping…
Swedes with black leather jackets and fake English accents… Whatever, dude. While a quick glance at Mando Diao might not leave a very glowing first impression, full immersion in Hurricane Bar, its sophomore full-length, will more than convince anyone of the quartet’s eruptive punch and songwriting virtuosity. Amid a prickly…
For the Holiday’s self-titled debut starts with a surge of keyboards and chiming bells that sounds positively, well, holiday-like. And the disc just gets more literal from there: “On the Bright Side” waxes luminously about candles and sunlit skies, while “Ostinato” employs the same drowsy, mesmerizing arpeggio for nearly its…
Phil Cunningham, rookie guitarist for New Order, had this to say about working with his childhood heroes on Waiting for the Sirens’ Call: “Sometimes they reject stuff because it sounds ‘too New Order-y.'” If that were truly the case, Sirens’ Call would be nine minutes long. And those entire nine…
When Emma “Scout” Niblett slinks up to the mike and dribbles the refrain “Everybody needs someone to spell out their name” — as she does on Kidnapped by Neptune’s high point, “Pom Poms” — it’s hard to guess what in the hell she’s talking about. She might, of course, be…
We’ve been trying to do a tour of cult-related sites,” enthuses Dan Snaith from a van packed with musical gear en route to Montreal. “We stopped off at the Branch Davidian complex in Waco last time we were in Texas. There are still all these foundations and all this burnt…
Denver sometimes has severe amnesia when it comes to local music. Around the turn of the millennium, Acrobat Down was as hotly tipped and downright exciting as Colorado-grown outfits get. But since dissolving in 2001, its members have hovered relatively under the radar: Singer/guitarist Aaron Hobbs just recently assembled a…
Hitting the British pop scene in the late ’80s just as the Smiths were imploding, David Gedge’s band, The Wedding Present, seemed poised to pick up where Morrissey and company left off. But aside from a penchant for chiming chords and glutinously crooned melancholy, Gedge didn’t share that much with…
Rasputina’s Melora Creager doesn’t refer to her band’s live performances as concerts; she calls them recitals. Which is apt, considering the setup: two cellos, vocals and drums. Resembling some eldritch chamber ensemble, Creager, fellow cellist Zoe Keating and timekeeper Jonathan TeBeest gussy themselves up like Victorian libertines and ply a…
John Cacianti, otherwise known as John Nathan, sounds like a lonely soul. And not just because his album is titled Party of One, but because almost every song on it traffics in the kind of sad-sack, introspective Americana that George Jones popularized decades ago. Nathan, of course, is no Jones;…
Since their inception, the Raveonettes have dwelled comfortably within walls of sound. On their previous full-length, Whip It On, those walls were more monolithic than ethereal, more Kevin Shields than Phil Spector. Not so with Pretty in Black. Shorn of distortion and density, the disc’s thirteen tracks glint with a…
Doseone is no stranger to collating his muted, twisted emceeing with post-rock abstraction. Besides sharing guest-larynx duties with Sam Prekop of The Sea and Cake on Prefuse 73’s Vocal Studies and Uprock Narratives, he participated in a transatlantic collaboration in 2001 that resulted in Hood’s ambient-glitch masterpiece, Cold House. Last…
Bruce Springsteen is a phony piece of crap. This was my firm opinion as a teenager in the early ’90s just starting to seriously get into music. And I wasn’t alone. Ask anyone of roughly the same age, and you’ll likely hear a similar sentiment: Back then, Springsteen — America’s…
The name Nik Freitas doesn’t hold as much weight in the indie-rock community as it does in the skate world. In 1999, the then-twenty-year-old photographer hit the road for Thrasher and spent the next few dozen months documenting the feats of some of the top pro skaters on the planet…
The distinction between a riff and a hook is totally lost on most bands scavenging today’s retro-rock wasteland. Detroit’s the Sights not only know the difference, but they synthesize power and pop into a seething, brilliantly infectious mess of rock-and-roll soul. Singer/ guitarist Eddie Baranek formed the trio in the…
“We don’t sell starry-eyed schoolboy songs.” So declares Bailer on “Savor Control,” one of the more blatantly anthemic tracks from the group’s new disc, Sing It Like a Victim (whose release will be celebrated Saturday, April 30, at Pancho’s Villa). And that lyric is an apt self-description: With tongues wrapped…
According to such dot-com authorities as Pitchfork and Allmusic, Hot Hot Heat’s long-awaited new album is a disappointing lump of crap. Maybe everyone’s just sick of hearing shitty bands that sound like Hot Hot Heat — because it’s hard to find a single serious fault with Elevator. From the double-knotted…
