It’s fun to be miserable — and when that’s translated into music, it can come out like Morrissey or it can come out like the Platte River Killers. The quartet has become a staple of the local metal scene, mostly because of its blend of hearty, technically intricate metalcore and…
Fans still feeling let down by the anemic, ho-hum ninth season of American Idol love to predict the show’s demise, especially now that Simon Cowell is departing. But those people have short memories. You only have to look back to the previous season to witness one of the most bizarre…
As a chart-topping group in the ’80s, Atlanta’s SOS Band bridged funk’s past and R&B’s future. It’s only fitting, then, that the act is headlining the 24th annual Colorado Black Arts Festival. The celebration takes place this weekend in the southeast corner of Denver City Park; SOS will take the…
Lust-drunk vixens and bare-chested he-men still grace the occasional cover of a romance novel. But the genre has gotten much more savvy and eclectic over the past couple of decades. With sizable crossovers into other genres like urban fantasy, science fiction, mystery and even horror, romance is back in a…
To fans of Carrie Vaughn’s best-selling Kitty Norville series, her new stand-alone novel, Discord’s Apple, may seem like a big departure. The Kitty books focus on a radio talk-show host who happens to be a werewolf, while Discord’s Apple is a much more sprawling story that weaves together magic, mythology,…
Somewhere in Denver there’s a backyard barbecue pit full of steak drippings, cigarette butts, smashed beer bottles and a couple decades’ worth of kerosene-soaked charcoal. From those rancid, grimy ashes rose Heeler. The band’s second CD, Release the Snake!, is a meaty slab of rock and roll that tastes as…
A road warrior who has crisscrossed continents in his quest for true troubadour-hood, Austin Lucas is the rare songwriter who seems buoyed by the road rather than beaten down by it. His intricately picked yet propulsive folk is as accomplished as it is effortless, and Lucas’s rough edges — honed…
Semiotics, hermeneutics, phenomenology: These aren’t standard topics for pop lyrics, even if the songs are from the geeky dance-punk band Electric Tiger Machine. Although that band is no more, singer Gary Setzer has combined his passion for art, music and philosophy into his latest performance/art project: “Supralingual/Sublingual: The Tongue is…
The Hold Steady seems like a particularly apt name for the lauded New York band following the release of its fifth full-length, Heaven is Whenever, earlier this year. After a grip of albums that cranked the populist, classic-rock bombast of Thin Lizzy and Boston through frontman Craig Finn’s hyper-literate, spoken-sung…
No amount of Westword cover stories, YouTube sensationalism or pole-vaulting to the head of the line can make Two Bedroom Apartment — the third release by Fort Collins wunderkind Danielle Ate the Sandwich — any more listenable. Luckily, the album doesn’t rely on those things, nor does it need to…
In a clever bit of self-reference, singer-songwriter and Denver native Jill Sobule opens the Jill and Julia Show with the story — in song form, of course — of her first awkward meeting with comic and Saturday Night Live alum Julia Sweeney. Clearly a mismatched pair from the start, the…
Many attempts have been made over the years to popularize the inner workings of science — ways to make laymen able to grasp the essence of the innovations in theory and technology that drive the everyday world. Physicist George Gamow was one of the first to do so back in…
Long tagged as the supreme warlords of sludge, the Melvins have crawled out of that primordial birthplace and undergone a weird yet compelling evolution over the past few years. Perhaps emboldened by signing to Mike Patton’s Ipecac Records — the home of many an experimental rock band — or simply…
When we were in high school in Fort Collins, Hayley and I would play guitar for each other on the railroad tracks behind my house,” remembers Doug Spencer, guitarist of Snake Rattle Rattle Snake. Then he laughs. “She’d always sing about this jerk that she liked.” That jerk, of course,…
In the real world, alcohol and engineering aren’t two things you want to mix. Tonight, though, it should be safe to make an exception when the Museum of Contemporary Art Denver launches this summer’s Mixed Taste: Tag Team Lectures on Unrelated Topics series with a dual lecture titled “Irrational Engineering…
The late Hunter S. Thompson, never a predictable character, surprised even his most ardent fans when he took up the cause of Lisl Auman, a Colorado woman sentenced to life without parole after Denver police officer Bruce VanderJagt was killed in 1997 by her white-supremacist friend — after she had…
During the 2008 Democratic National Convention, the world saw Denver through the filter of the mainstream media. On the ground, though, was a crew of award-winning, Oscar-nominated filmmakers led by AJ Schnack, best known for his Kurt Cobain documentary, About a Son. The result is Convention, a new film that…
It’s been two years since Wovenhand released Ten Stones. But it might as well have been an eternity. Since that last batch of songs, frontman David Eugene Edwards has cast a net across time and space and snared The Threshingfloor, an album that severs the band’s already tenuous tether to…
With Glee and Lady Gaga all the rage, one can only hope that flamboyance and theatricality are a bit more acceptable across the board today. Regardless, Jeffree Star can and will push any envelope he can find; the genre-bending artist — who seemingly turned to music as a means to…
Written off in the ’90s as yet another relic of the original heavy-metal era, Iron Maiden found new life and relevance when metal made a huge comeback in the new millennium. Still, it’s sad that resurgence had to happen in such a roundabout way: If Maiden has long proved one…
With Charlie Sheen’s upcoming jail sentence for domestic abuse getting whittled down by the minute, the Two and a Half Men star may wind up with a slap on the wrist for slapping his wife. The latest report says that Sheen could possibly serve his 30-day sentence for felony menacing,…
For whatever reason, Cincinnati-based, über-Christian metalcore band Corpus Christi has chosen Denver as the place to shoot their next video. The scream-for-Jesus quintet will be here from June 6 through 11, filming a video for “Monuments,” the lead track off of its upcoming sophomore full-length, A Feast for Crows. And…
