Chicks with dicks love the Symptoms. So do dudes with pussies. In fact, anyone who’s ever felt the pull between the masculine and the feminine within them might get a little wet between the legs upon their first exposure to this six-song debut. Founded in 2003, the group is new,…

Few things could be as emotionally stunning as a mute suddenly opening his mouth and speaking. Over the course of the past five years, San Diego’s Jimmy LaVelle, who records under the name The Album Leaf, has honored an almost monastic vow of silence; barring the occasional collaboration with luminaries…

Pain is the great motivator, anguish the most compelling muse. In other words, a world of hurt can go a long way. Just ask Chris Fogal, singer/guitarist of Denver’s the Gamits. His group’s brand-new disc is called Antidote, and it’s meant to be exactly that: an anodyne for crushing agony,…

Song-telling? Story-singing? As weird as her self-created classifications may be, it’s a good thing Dawn “the Faun” McCarthy deigns to stoop to the level of music journalist. It saves us the agony of making up bullshit genres like “autistic folk” or “three-cents-short opera” to describe the bizarre sound of her…

In Flannery O’Connor’s short story “The Lame Shall Enter First,” shoes are a metaphor for selfishness. The doomed character of Norton is the type of kid who, when given a new pair of kicks, “walked around for days with his eyes on his feet.” Such has been the sin of…

Morrissey, the last, great postmodern Englishman, lives in Hollywood now. His concerts in Southern California are well attended by Chicano gangbangers. The cover of his new record depicts that most rarefied of pansies — himself — sporting a zoot suit and a tommy gun. Ever get the feeling you’ve been…

The first time I went on tour with Planes Mistaken for Stars, I came close to dying. It was the band’s first trek across the country, in the summer of 1998, way before it had signed with the eminent indie label No Idea or perfected its vicious collision of punk,…

Naming your band after a line from Wes Anderson’s 1998 cult masterpiece Rushmore is a dicey proposition. What happens if your music totally sucks shit? You’re gonna have a pack of rabid, vengeful Max Fischer apostles out to pop a cap in your ass. Luckily for the three members of…

Some bands are like street gangs. Others are like closeted gay relationships. The best, though, fall somewhere in between, and Detachment Kit (appearing Friday, June 4, at the Larimer Lounge) is just such a combo. Ian Menard and Charlie Davis formed the duo some dozens of months ago in Chicago,…

Yeah, we just mope around all the time,” says Mike Hudson, bassist for Aveo. It takes a half a second to realize that Hudson is fucking around. Upon first hearing Battery, the Seattle-based outfit’s new disc, you might not expect the trio to be anything but pensive, excruciatingly sincere, maybe…

Ask Alice Gilbert what gets his rocks off, and he’ll tell you: pop music. More specifically, underground, independent pop music, the stuff that makes Modest Mouse look as pretentious and impenetrable as Proust. One such unassuming outfit is Bad Weather California, which just put out a self-titled, split EP with…

It takes more than big beats to make a crowd shake it. Sure, kicking beefy 4/4 beats onto the floor is essential — but too many DJs, hip-hop producers, techno auteurs and dance-punk wannabes forget to sweeten the pot with anything resembling melody or feeling. It’s like the old carrot-and-stick…

Have you seen that new commercial on TV, the one where shit like stray basketballs and clumsy bicyclists and spurts of water from hoses start hitting the sides of a car? All those random thumps start speeding up and blurring together until they coalesce into a funky, polyrhythmic symphony of…

Tuesday night at the Lion’s Lair might as well be a night in Antarctica. The place is desolate. A couple dozen patrons loll across the bar, which is already a half-inch deep with spilled Pabst. Even with the sparse attendance, it takes ten minutes to get a beer. You’d do…

What’s the sound of one hand clapping? Probably something really close to that of a guy jacking off. Likewise, one-man bands tend to embody the more masturbatory traits to which musicians are prone: self-absorption, self-indulgence, self-congratulation and lots of other annoying qualities prefixed by the word “self.” Eric Crespo (below),…

Does Denver have a good music scene? Absolutely. The bad news, though, is that you’ll have to look somewhere besides this compilation to truly find it. Local Shakedown Vol. II is a two-CD set showcasing 43 Colorado acts and was compiled over the course of the past two years by…

I’m not interested in chamber pop. I don’t even know what that really means,” says songwriter Dan Bejar. “If it means, like, ‘Eleanor Rigby’ or something, I don’t really listen to that. Chamber pop kind of bugs me.” As captain of the Vancouver-based vessel Destroyer, Bejar knows a thing or…

There are a few things in life that are unmistakable: the saccharine sting of cotton candy, the gluey musk of sex and the voice of Calvin Johnson. Since 1983, when he formed Olympia, Washington’s legendary Beat Happening, Johnson has stood markedly apart from the flocks of cutesy, whining indie-pop singers…

“Second verse, same as the first!” When Joey Ramone, innocently enough, heisted this line from Herman’s Hermits, little did he know that it would one day become a battle cry. Since then, untold scores of punk and indie acts have clung fanatically to a simple, profoundly imbecilic idea: making every…