Former Raleigh frontman Bryon Parker displays his keen sense of melancholic melody on this release. Joined by Jesse Nesbitt of the sadly defunct Anti-Glacier Movement, Parker has crafted an intriguing set of seven songs, grounded in both the indie-rock tradition of slightly off-kilter sound dynamics and the aesthetics of folk…
Buzzard and FanaticsFriday, January 9th, 2009Carioca Café, DenverBetter Than: A show where everyone is a chin-stroking tourist.When I finally got to the venue, Buzzard, which was playing its farewell show, had already started its set. I’d unfortunately missed Clusterfux, but the crowd wasn’t crazy yet, so I made my way to the…
With surprising aggression and brutality, this five-song EP seethes with angst and burns with boiling, irrepressible fire. Former Mood Syrup frontman Lloyd Arcesia possesses the vocal savagery of a John Brannon, and it’s not difficult to imagine the entire band throwing itself into a performance with a frightening and electrifying…
Any time you feel like you’ve stepped through a door to another era at a show, it’s usually because the band on stage is perpetrating a hopelessly retro musical crime against the audience. Contemporary heavy music is especially guilty of this. But once in a while a group will embody…
The Potato Pirates take various styles of music considered dead — or at least exhausted of ideas — and injects them with an infectious, youthful exuberance. Part ska, part punk, part whatever it is that this quintet has absorbed over the years, the resulting sound crackles with a wiry energy…
Last week on Mile High Fidelity, my new show on 101.5 FM, I marveled at how we’d seamlessly segued from the station’s regular programming to our all-local music mix. In the not-too-distant past, listeners might have made unconscious concessions for the homegrown work, assuming that the production and songwriting would…
Leaving the Flaming Lips on the cusp of commercial success only to rejoin Mercury Rev — a group he was a part of in the late ’80s — may have, in retrospect, seemed like a career blunder for Jonathan Donahue. That move, however, has resulted in some of the most…
The cover of this album, which depicts a group of Aborigines chained together by some corny colonial type, sitting in a sunset-colored sky over a caricature of the Denver skyline, suggests the arch and subversive music within. Rapper Ancient Mith’s level of sonic appropriation is truly impressive on this release…
Dan Deacon’s name should be familiar to anyone keeping an ear to what’s going on in American underground music. As one of the founders of the Wham City collective, Deacon is one of the pillars of the modern DIY movement in Baltimore. Deacon’s exuberantly playful electronic music bears none of…
This project has all the hallmarks of something conceived alone in someone’s bedroom. And on stage, Brad Turner solo with his laptop is hardly the stuff of which rock-and-roll legends are made. But anyone with the nerve to get on stage in the first place knows it takes guts to…
If there were such a thing as a postmodern post-apocalypse, and the world existed in a kind of warping shift of dark hues, Dalí-esque imagery and Technicolor, Philly’s Aunt Dracula is the band that would write its surf music. Whorls of twisted, reverby guitar, trippy, demented vocals and shifting paces…
Comprising members of the well-known noise-rock outfit Racoo-ooo-oon, Wet Hair dispenses with live guitars entirely, but not the former’s intense drones and emphasis on rhythm over melody. Still, the electronic sounds are resonant and expansive rather than abrasive; at times the band sounds as though it’s playing a tape of…
There is no musical genre that can contain Hunter Dragon’s songwriting, because it truly runs the gamut of styles and sounds. However, within each release, there is a sonic consistency. This time out, Hunter opted for a duskier, lo-fi sound and treatment for each song. In the live setting, a…
Carbon Choir (due at the Larimer Lounge on Friday, December 5) is a band whose virtues compound with each song. At first you might be drawn in by the music’s delicate atmospherics and expertly measured pacing, because the band’s sound is definitely made for reflective moments and thoughtful observation. But…
Lawrence, Kansas, is an unlikely little pocket of American Bohemia tucked into the heart of the Midwest. So it should come as no surprise that it has its own nascent music scene, which includes the likes of Baby Birds Don’t Drink Milk. Oftentimes the most visible bands from out-of-the-way places…
Kurt Ottaway has been earning praise in this publication since fronting Twice Wilted in the ’80s — and why stop now? The debut by Overcasters, his latest project, isn’t a radical departure from TW or the Tarmints, a subsequent group. Rather than self-consciously attempting to seem au courant, Ottaway and…
This followup to Rabbit Is a Sphere’s fantastic debut, Laps in the Sleep Salon, is a shorter and decidedly more moody offering. “Dispatch” opens the disc with a fragmenting, luminous fog that evolves into an electrifying rocker, bursting the poetic angst of its lyrics with sheer urgency; it ends with…
From its dada-esque lyrics to its soaring, scintillating rock epics, Wetlands shows a great deal of artistic maturity for a band that has only formally been together since October 2007. Its new album, Babies Teeth, is a marvel of intricate rhythms, sonic textures and expansive moods. Though there is a…
As the visionary guitar wizard in Moth Eater, Kevin Richards established a unique sound. Grounded in an understanding of jazz guitar filtered through experimental improvisational music and a post-hardcore aesthetic, Richards’s playing seems to recognize no distinct sonic boundary. Temples (due at the Larimer Lounge on Friday, November 28) is…
The shimmery cymbals and distant voices in the fog of white noise that opens this album somehow recall the beginning of Days of Future Passed, by the Moody Blues. While musically the work shares little with the high-end production of that ’60s classic, artistically it’s equally as ambitious, with a…
Although essentially following the glam-metal trend of the ’80s, the members of Lizzie Borden never embarrassed themselves as egregiously as many of their contemporaries. Instead of draping simperingly saccharine pop in faux-gender-bending rock-satyr guise, the group opted for the harder-edged rock and visually engaging live shows embodied by bands like…
Few bass players possess the intensity and stage presence of former Cephalic Carnage bassist Jawsh Mullen. And for his part, Devon Rogers has been equally commanding and powerful behind the drums, keeping time for acts as diverse as Register, Hemi Cuda and Reverend Dead Eye. Munimula (due at 3 Kings…
