The basement where Cost of Living practices is like the armpit of a buried corpse. The stairwell is pitch dark. The brickwork is crumbling. It stinks of decay. But inside this ten-by-ten-foot tomb beneath the Conspiracy Skateboards warehouse on the outskirts of Five Points, there’s a buzz of life as…
When Cammie O’Nassis of Mannequin Makeout squeals, “Dance mania! Dance mania!,” you’d better believe it. The coed Boulder outfit injects urgency and fun into rigid dance punk, discarding slick beats and airtight production for a raw, rabid sound that scrapes grease off the garage floor and favors clunky Casios and…
When Death Cab for Cutie’s Ben Gibbard started a little side project called the Postal Service, Barsuk, Death Cab’s label at the time, probably didn’t bat an eye. A few hundred thousand moved units later, the imprint probably wished liked hell it had snapped up the Service when it had…
Scores of independent labels succumbed to the ska implosion of the late ’90s. Asian Man Records — one of the most visible and successful proponents of third-wave ska — was one of the fortunate few. But luck isn’t the only reason Asian Man’s owner, Mike Park, is a survivor; the…
You’d have a hard time finding a link between the abrasively lysergic Comets on Fire and the sinisterly ambient Current 93. But over the last year, Ben Chasny has joined both bands — and that makes a weird sort of sense, seeing as how his main gig, Six Organs of…
Knuckle Down comes with a precious, fancy-papered chapbook stapled into the middle of it. Filled with bare lyrics and even barer pencil sketches, it’s the perfect manifestation of everything that sucks about Ani DiFranco: pseudo-literary pretension, coffeehouse glibness and the false impression that she’s some kind of grassroots underdog rather…
I used to work at a preschool, and when the kids would get mad at me, they’d say, ‘You’re not my friend anymore,'” remembers Sara Thurston with a laugh. “I just told them, ‘That’s okay. I’ve got plenty of friends already.'” Thurston — better known in Denver as DJ Sara…
Few Denver bands can boast of having a palindrome for a name — let alone one cooked up at a brainstorming session with Courtney Taylor of the Dandy Warhols. But CAT-A-TAC can. A late-night bender with the Warhols’ notorious frontman a couple of years ago led to the flip-flop-able moniker,…
Before the Album Leaf’s Jimmy Lavelle started hobnobbing with Sigur Ros, he played in a few little bands in San Diego: the Locust, GoGoGo Airheart, Black Heart Procession and Tristeza. And although Tristeza — minus its superstar since 2003 — has been treading water over the past few years, there’s…
From Gummo to Roger and Me, the rusted infrastructure and trailer-park peculiarity of the Midwest has been a font of much present-day mythology. But beneath all that John Deere-cap patronizing lies a fixation on the geographic and moral core of America — it is the heartland, after all. But what…
It may be hazardous to give less than a shining review to a rockabilly band — after all, the guys in the CD booklet look like total bruisers — but here goes: Slingshot misses the target. The third release by Englewood’s Paul Galaxy and the Galactix is a stab at…
Maybe all the dance-punk plasticity and garage-rock cock-grabbing of the last few years are starting to take their toll, but there’s been a new trend bubbling up from the underground lately: simple, drunken earnestness. If it catches on (yeah, right), the Enablers are going to win a ton of Grammys…
Does this ring a bell? A small-town band with a three-letter name attains cult status by issuing a string of entrancing albums full of cryptic jangle and mumbling majesty. Bored, the group eventually starts to tinker with the very formula that put it on the indie-rock map. Yes, Low has…
With the demise of ’90s bands like Silver Scooter and Butterglory, the universe was left with an aching void. Indie rock got operatic. Emo got numb. So where does that leave your average devotee of spastic wussiness and crackly pop? In fine shape, actually, as long as Palisades is around…
From the punk-industrial insurgency of the Beatnigs to the messianic agit-prop of the Disposable Heroes of Hiphoprisy, Michael Franti has been a relentless enemy of ignorance and bigotry. His outfit of the last ten years, the funk-infused Spearhead, has traveled even further into the realms of groove-locked protest. But this…
Robert Schneider has had a year that actually kept up with his head-spinning hyperactivity. Besides releasing 010, the raw, compelling debut by his new group, Ulysses, he recorded a new disc by Marbles, his perennial solo project. Set for release later this month, the expo is a synth-driven, pupil-dilating dose…
Promises are worth about as much as the bullshit they’re written in. Local bands are the worst: They come on all young and passionate but wind up riding their initial spurt of inspiration into the dirt — usually in the form of a lackluster debut. In under a year, Constellations’…
Strange We Should Meet Here, huh? Not really. After all, you expect a flashy, sassy new band like Idiot Pilot to wake up in bed with a major label. Signed to Reprise right out of the gate, this teenage duo makes moody electro-punk that reeks of self-conscious novelty and haircut…
Anthony Gonzalez lives in Antibes, France, but if you didn’t know that, you’d swear M83’s mastermind was from fucking Pluto. He’s like the Little Prince, ensconced on his tiny planet of solitude and ice, transmitting the occasional broadcast of bleak atmosphere and barren loveliness. Before the Dawn Heals Us is…
Long-distance relationships suck. Without a constant stream of casual intimacy, the lines strung between lovers start to short-circuit and fray. Phone calls sound forced. E-mails read like laundry lists of halfhearted flirtations. All those Xs and Os begin to cancel each other out. Other people — those who you can…
There’s a kind of tiredness that slinks up your legs and into your stomach, tendrils of fatigue that twine around your spine before plunging deep into your midbrain. It’s along this same path that Okkervil River flows. Sleep and Wake-Up Songs is a gorgeous five-track somnambulation through watercolors and Star…
I was a little bit self-conscious after everybody dubbed our last record a road record,” confesses Limbeck singer/guitarist Robb MacLean. “We didn’t intend for it to become a concept album or anything like that.” An unintentional concept album? Doesn’t sound too likely. But oxymoron aside, Limbeck’s 2003 opus, Hi, Everything’s…
