It takes a lot of balls to put the word “hearts” in your band name — especially in these post-emo days, when wearing your emotions on your sleeve makes songwriters walking, whining targets for derision. But Randall Buckland has never had a problem wearing that particular muscle on his sleeve;…
For a rootsy duo, the Black Keys have proved themselves far more open to experimentation and collaboration than the tradition would dictate. From opening for Radiohead to being covered by Kelly Clarkson to working with a variety of MCs on the hip-hop project Blakroc, singer-guitarist Dan Auerbach and drummer Patrick…
Shea Boynton’s love of music is all over the map. But as he’ll tell you, that kind of wanderlust is just in his genes. “My grandfather was a touring jazz musician for years,” says Boynton, leader of the upbeat, hard-to-peg Denver outfit the Gromet. “He was a saxophonist. He played…
But the DIY artist and his teammates may have topped themselves with OFM’s latest production, Demons in the Sky! “We’ve brought together a fantastic band and fantastic fight choreography,” says Crosier of Demons, which premieres tonight at the Oriental Theater. “We’ve expanded the performance with added projections, aerial acrobatics for…
“Growing up, we always saw movies like Back to the Future and 10 Things I Hate About You that had really cool proms,” says Josh Taylor, frontman of local pop-punk band Redo. “Unfortunately, most proms aren’t like that. They rely on a Top 40 DJ, and nobody dances unless it’s…
Black Market Blood Bank,” one of the most brutal yet accomplished tracks of Identity Pusher’s debut CD, It Was Already on Fire When I Got There, kicks off with a second-long South Park sample. It’s indicative of the band’s aesthetic: Intricate, melodic, progressive death metal that takes the music seriously,…
It doesn’t get any more literal than writing a song about the moon and titling it “The Moon.” Patrick Dethlefs does exactly that on his debut CD, Stays the Same, and the unswerving earnestness of that track isn’t a fluke. The Kittredge-based teenage singer-songwriter uses his warm, homespun voice and…
There was nothing simple about Days Away, the epic, progressive rock band that was a fixture on the post-hardcore circuit throughout the naughts. But when the group broke up in 2008, singer/guitarist Keith Goodwin and drummer Tim Arnold announced a total about-face: Good Old War. Influenced by far more basic…
Hip-hop producer and Gnarls Barkley member Danger Mouse may be known for dabbling with everyone from Gorillaz’s Damon Albarn to the late Mark Linkous of Sparklehorse. But his partner in Broken Bells, James Mercer of the Shins, isn’t as notoriously adventurous. Danger Mouse outs Mercer’s latent experimentalism in Broken Bells’…
This week’s Rough Mixes entry focusing on Emily Frembgen contained excerpts of our recent chat with the singer-songwriter, who’s packing up her guitar at the end of June and heading by to New York. Luckily she’s not leaving us empty-handed: Her new CD, Always With You, is a gorgeous disc…
Years after moving back to Denver from New York, Emily Frembgen still has a 917 area code. It therefore shouldn’t come as a surprise that the singer-songwriter is packing up her guitar and heading back to the Big Apple at the beginning of June. But she’s not leaving Denver empty-handed:…
Movement, euphoria, freedom: Jazz evokes different responses in different people. And yet it’s always been a music that draws people together, as evidenced by Five Points’ musical heyday in the 1940s and ’50s. Back then, people would flock to the Points to hear such artists as Billie Holiday, Duke Ellington…
Female circumcision is completely alien to most Americans, but it’s a widespread custom in many places around the world — and a custom that’s become extremely controversial as a growing number of organizations label it a human-rights violation. “Most of us living in Colorado know relatively little about the practice…
Romano Paoletti opens Story of a Lifetime with “Ragtime Blues,” an ode to his grandfather, “Ragtime” Bob Darch, an inductee of the Ragtime Hall of Fame. It’s a measure not only of Paoletti’s dedication to family and tradition, but of the album’s commitment to live up to its title. Across…
The floodwaters might be receding from his home town of Nashville, but Landon Pigg isn’t wallowing in them. Still on the road behind his 2009 full-length, The Boy Who Never, the young singer-songwriter is touring through a string of smaller venues, despite the fact that his star seems to be…
When Abe Brennan, singer/guitarist for Denver punk band Joy Subtraction, saw the opportunity to play this year’s Tellerpalooza — the annual fundraiser that enlists local music talent to benefit Congress Park’s Teller Elementary School — he jumped at the chance. And he’s not shy about voicing his reasons why. “I…
Lindsey Kuhn is famous in the skate world as the founder of Denver-based Conspiracy Boards. But his vivid, iconic, screen-printed artwork is just as well known, having been a staple of rock-show posters for two decades. It’s a run that recently culminated in an eye-popping, coffee-table book titled Lure of…
For every relative youngster and casual fan who only knows Pam Grier from her scene-stealing comeback performance in Quentin Tarantino’s overlooked 1997 masterpiece, Jackie Brown, there are old-timers and film buffs who will always see her as Foxy Brown, the sexy, ass-kicking heroine of the 1974 blaxploitation classic of the…
Since drifting into Denver from parts east a couple years back, Emily Frembgen has been busy making a humble yet profound mark in town. Besides being a member of the lush indie-rock project the Language of Termites, the singer-songwriter crafts solo material that’s twice as ethereal at half the volume;…
It’s safe to say that legendary punk bands like Jawbreaker and Hot Water Music wouldn’t have existed — at least not in the form we know them — without Leatherface. In fact, it was the band’s 1999 split with Hot Water that introduced many Americans to Leatherface, although the veteran…
The genre of Americana is in as much disarray as America itself — but rather than try to impose order on that chaos, Oblio’s Arrow embodies it. Drawing from country rock, psychedelia and the singer-songwriter tradition of the ’70s, the group formerly known as Oblio Duo + the Archers has…
For anyone else, releasing an album titled Suite #420 on 4/20 would be overkill. For Devin the Dude, it’s an understatement. The veteran MC has made a career of rapping about pot in all its glorious and manifold forms, though that career has been less than blazing lately: After starting…
