Shannon Wright (who also goes by shannonwright) picked up her ball and went home after a label merger at Big Cat in 1998 left the band she originally fronted, Crowsdell, curbside. Gnashing her teeth at the soulless bean counters of the music industry, the Jacksonville native sequestered herself on a…

Reshaped from Pornographic Memory into one of Northern Colorado’s most adventurous live acts, the Fort Collins-based quartet the President’s Wives — opening for Armchair Martian Friday, August 3, at the 15th Street Tavern — serve up a punk-influenced hootenanny of free-range improv based loosely around the writings of citizenly frontman,…

Not only does this CD feature the hit song “Sugar,” but it’s endorsed by Radio Disney and the Disney Channel. Plus there’s a free AT&T Calling Card inside! It’s good for five minutes — billed in one-minute increments. There’s a surcharge for calls made from pay phones, but you can…

For songwriter Jim White, finding hidden blessings in times of catastrophe is nothing new. A charming backwater intellect who is as comfortable discussing Carl Jung’s collective unconscious as he is Alfred Hitchcock, Hurricane Earl or Jefferson Davis (“the mad scientist who got a $60,000 grant from MIT to record information…

Back when Robert Pollard’s liver was pinker, Guided By Budweiser earned its cult stripes with a foolproof formula: It created jillions of lo-fi, anthem-baiting sketches that recalled mid-period Beatles/Who, sported intentionally vague lyrics and rarely exceeded two minutes. Pollard hasn’t stopped honoring his forefathers of the British Invasion — he…

Who let the satyrs out? Pleasure Forever — performing Saturday, July 7, at Tulagi and Sunday, July 8, at the 15th Street Tavern — offers Bacchanalian excess the likes of which haven’t been heard since Jim Morrison rode his panther-drawn chariot into rock-and-roll Valhalla. Preoccupied with eternity, drowning and the…

With plenty left on the kitchen spice rack, Joey Burns and John Convertino offer up an EP of tasty tracks held over from last year’s Hot Rail, the duo’s sparse, time-traveling pastiche of Americana, roots, postmodern jazz, mariachi and psychedelic gypsy music. But where the heat gets to most people…

Marilyn Manson’s pissing match with God continues — stop the presses! For a guy who’s written almost as many suicide anthems as Barry Manilow (when’s the last time you heard “It’s a Miracle” and didn’t want to bump yourself off?), yesterday’s dog-eared nemesis — still regarded as a “shock rocker”…

Remember that weird childhood game of sitting in the dark on Halloween, passing around “human body parts” — carrots for fingers, peeled grapes for eyeballs and chilled spaghetti for guts? The mere power of suggestion (combined with too much candy corn) could make for a rollicking evening of disgusting fun…

There hasn’t been enough laughing in classical music for centuries,” claims local guitar phenom Janet Feder. “Too much composing and performing gets caught up in itself. I spent years practicing scales and doing all that. Hopefully, I’m sort of returning the fun back to guitar playing. Because sometimes, when I’m…

Jay Vance — once a ska bassist for Skankin’ Pickle and the Blue Meanies — had such bad luck with bands that he finally decided to build his own. But infinitely worse than any ego-addled, carbon-based life form, his new musical associates (a Rasta-locked timekeeper called DRMBOT0110 and the menacing…

Andy Falconetti’s 6-5 frame challenges the ceiling in a tiny northwest Denver basement. As rehearsal space for pop confectioners the Breezy Porticos, the cement-walled bunker serves multiple purposes: It’s a sound lab, clubhouse and, above all, a storage room. With his head grazing overarching cobwebs and support beams, the singer/guitarist…

Southern California’s brand of sun-soaked Americana evokes a playful, hedonistic teen utopia of endless summers, surfboards and the ocean’s heartbeat, for starters. Without thinking too hard, you’ll likely recall Annette Funicello’s bare little midriff, Gidget’s wiggle, and Malibu Barbie’s tan, polyvinyl-chloride skin. But for Colorado’s Maraca Five-O, the instrumental surf…

The third and best Hamster Theatre release finds melody-muckers Dave Willey and Jon Stubbs once again traipsing on the fun-wheel of suspended disbelief. From the opening strains of “Vermillion Hue Over Lake Lausanne” (an homage to the Swiss ensemble Nimal), the fuzzy Front Range rodents bake their brains on a…

Uwe Schmidt (one of Germany’s quirkiest electronic musicians, with over two dozen alter egos to his name, including Atom Heart, Lassigue Bendhaus and Lisa Carbon) masquerades as South American composer /dancer Señor Coconut on this release — the remastered precursor to 1999’s El Baile Alemán. For that album, Schmidt reconfigured…

As alleged “gay supremacists” who once rattled the cage of underground music with 1989’s cult classic It’s Only Right and Natural, Dennis and Jimmy Flemion have gone beyond telling the world, “We are homos, hear us roar.” Racially Yours found them singing about ethnic tension — with one brother in…

For a media whore like John Vanderslice, fifteen stinkin’ minutes probably aren’t enough. “I think a lot of bands are afraid of publicity,” says the 33-year-old indie rocker from Bethesda, Maryland, who presently resides in San Francisco. ” afraid that they’re prostrating themselves. Like they’re not supposed to be looking…

El Toppo borrows precious little from Alejandro Jodorowsky’s wildly fantastic Western of the same name, a gun-slingin’ cinematic nightmare with a cast of midgets and amputees. Not that it should. What you get instead is a succinct, catchy and likable album — the followup to 1999’s debut Dead Letter Chorus…

The killer awoke before dawn. He put his boots on. He took a face from the ancient gallery. And he walked on down to the mall. Lost in a Roman wilderness of pain, he came to a CD outlet between Orange Julius and Dress Barn. He looked inside. “Father?” he…

Patsy Cline’s plane went down outside Camden, Tennessee, on March 5, 1963 — roughly one month before singer Paula Frazer let out her first newborn squall. And while reincarnation makes for nifty tabloid copy, Frazer certainly does conjure the spirit of the Grand Ole cowgirl. At least, most music critics…

In 1993, Dave Willey’s seven-month-old orange tabby killed a squirrel — a big, black one with pointy ears. The incident provided inspiration for “The Cat Song” and further motivated Willey to flesh out ideas he had gathered while busking across the Eastern Bloc. Almost a decade later, the Boulder-based multi-instrumentalist…

British birdwatcher Alison Goldfrapp digs spaghetti-Western soundtracks and can sing and whistle to beat the band. After providing vocals for both Tricky (Maxinquaye) and Orbital (Snivilisation), she expands Bristol’s artsy acid-jazz scene with a remarkable debut — one that waxes pure nostalgia for sultry torch songs (think Eartha Kitt, Sarah…