Carrie Vaughn is missing. It’s a little after ten on a Sunday morning, and this year’s MileHiCon — Colorado’s oldest science-fiction and fantasy convention — is beginning its third and final day. In a Hyatt Regency Tech Center meeting room, a panel titled “Literary Genre or Marketing Label?” is five…
Kiowa Winans stands in the garage of her West Highland home, shaking a lifeless child. “This is our stuffed Quinn,” she says, clutching the little-girl-sized doll. She’s referring to Quinn Hunchar, the actress who, at the age of eight, played Emma in the cult film Ink. The movie was written…
Since David Bowie made his first mark on the world — and beyond — with 1969’s “Space Oddity,” decoding his music has been a prime pastime for his fans. It’s also been a cottage industry for music journalists, most of whom have been content to simply rearrange the pieces in…
Considering all the Denver musicians who have moved to New York lately, it’s refreshing to see someone do the reverse. New Yorker Dustin Edge relocated to Boulder a few months ago, and the songwriter is already releasing a new EP. Unlike Edge’s previous releases — the post-punk-leaning A Forest Through…
With all the pomp and drama that never seem to fade from fellow ’90s alt-country survivors like Ryan Adams and Wilco’s Jeff Tweedy, Rhett Miller of Dallas’s Old 97’s tends to get overlooked. Really, though, that’s how it should be. While Miller’s band has never been short on fans, the…
The product of an unholy coupling of technical death metal and guttural grindcore, Engage the Mechanicality — the second and latest release by Kansas’s Diskreet — is less concerned with genre purity and more obsessed with snapping necks. That said, there’s a sinister cerebration to the group’s necro-centric onslaught. Steeped…
Hungry, simple, unpolished, unposed: Indie rock used to be a beautiful thing. But all is not lost in the age of hipster Hyundai commercials. For instance, there’s Makeout Point. Or at least there used to be: The outfit broke up recently, soon after the release of its latest EP, Don’t…
You can’t throw a vintage Western shirt these days without hitting another Americana revivalist — and few are worth the faded plaid they’re dressed up in. Then there’s Jackie Greene. Nimbly sidestepping the inherent corniness of too many contemporary twang-mongers, Greene has used his association with the jam scene —…
For Colorado authors Jesse Bullington and Stephen Graham Jones, no season — much less the holidays — is exempt from horror, weirdness, blasphemy or a little twisted humor. And so the two will read from their work tonight, head-to-head, in an event dubbed a Book-Signing Grudge Match to the Death…
It’s no secret why Meese’s bid for major-label success failed. Blame the industry all you want, but the bottom line is this: The band was mediocre. But with their new outfit, the Centennial, Patrick and Nathan Meese are trying a new approach: leading instead of following. By ditching Meese’s strum-by-numbers…
Whole generations of doom-, sludge-, and stoner-rock bands have come and gone since Buzzov•en first trod the earth in 1989. Raw, screamy and ragged, the outfit helped set the tone for underground metal throughout the ’90s and ’00s — despite the fact that the band hasn’t released a studio album…
How long has it been since the Darkness finally went away? The correct answer: not long enough. Don’t count your blessings yet, though. Steel Panther is filling the vacuum, doing to American glam metal what the Darkness did to British glam rock — namely, ass-fucking it. The group’s only saving…
There’s a misconception — particularly regarding local music — that hard work and good intentions ought to be factored in when judging an album. They shouldn’t. All that matters — all that should matter — is the sound that sprouts out of the speakers. Taste is the debut by Boulder’s…
As a genre, metal has made an incredible amount of progress over the past decade. Denver County Death March couldn’t give a fuck. Not that the band needs to: Packing meat-hook riffs and more misanthropy than a serial-killer convention, the foursome uses its self-titled full-length as a blistering tirade against…
John Statz may not be a full-time resident of Denver, but the Mile High City shouldn’t take it personally. The singer-songwriter’s unquenchable wanderlust has taken him from Colorado to Wisconsin to West Virginia to Hungary, and during his travels, he wrote Ghost Towns, a full-length dripping with folk-rock immediacy and…
Bret Hertholf — better known around Denver as Halden Wofford — is the author of The Long Gone Lonesome History of Country Music, a book that teaches children about the development of the genre Wofford has devoted much of his life to. But it’d be a big mistake to think…
Eastern Europe isn’t as far as from the Front Range as it might seem. Not only does Colorado have the gypsy-inflected DeVotchKa, but Wovenhand has also tapped into a little Old World mysticism on its latest album. Fort Collins’s Stella Luce isn’t as well known as those bands, but its…
“A Pixies album at 3 a.m./’Cause it’s the small things that win in the end,” sings Le Divorce’s singer-guitarist Kitty Vincent on “Analogue,” one of five songs on the band’s debut, Pull Yourself Together. But don’t read into that too literally. Le Divorce doesn’t sound anything like the Pixies; rather,…
Brent Burkhart — better known around Denver (and, indeed, much of the planet) as Reverend Deadeye — has taken a brief respite from his globe-trotting, one-man antics to record the debut EP by his side project, Broken Spirits. It’s titled Ghostrock Spirituals, and it’s hard to imagine a name that…
Coincidences often come in small, profound packages. The day Devin Mendoza and Justin Trujillo sit down to discuss their post-metal duo, Adai, just so happens to be the sixth anniversary of Adai’s first rehearsal — which took place in the practice space of their previous band, Yuriko. Not that Mendoza…
Few things in life are sexier than skull fragments, charred flesh and the ticking of a cold, dispassionate mind. Or so Bones would lead you to believe. The hit Fox police procedural stars Emily Deschanel as the stunning Dr. Temperance “Bones” Brennan, a brilliant, socially awkward, emotionally distant investigator who…
After a string of R&B hits in the ’60s and stints touring with James Brown and Otis Redding, Bettye LaVette’s career hit a brick wall when Atlantic shelved her 1972 album, Child of the Seventies, which was recorded with the Muscle Shoals Rhythm Section. A disco hit, “Doin’ the Best…
