It’s probably a safe bet that Mike Donovan never met Gram Parsons — or Arthur Lee or Donovan Leitch, for that matter. He may not even be inspired by their music. But Sic Alps has plenty of garage psych stirred into its songwriting cauldron, and the act’s latest album, Glyphs,…

Middle-school friends Brandon Summers and Benjamin Weikel started playing out as Helio Sequence in 1999. Layering synthesizers to hover around the latter’s expressive percussion and the former’s minimalist yet huge guitar sound, early records sounded as though Helio Sequence was an all-electronic band. The outfit’s effusive psychedelia was reminiscent of…

Not to be confused with Penn Jillette’s mid-’90s rock band or Dee Snider’s character from Strangeland, taken from the Twisted Sister song of the same name, Denver’s Captain Howdy (due at Rhinoceropolis on Friday, October 12) is an ambient noise trio. Creating music suited to charting out the state of…

HOSPITALITY @ HI-DIVE | 10/05/12 Hospitality’s set made you think of a time when rock bands weren’t trying to mine classic rock territory or go for a specific genre, especially at the end of the show when the foursome performed “All Day Today” from its self-titled, debut full-length. Along with…

SAINT VITUS @ BLUEBIRD THEATER | 10/03/12 When Saint Vitus came on stage, the quartet went right into “Blessed Night,” with Dave Chandler letting out a wail or siren sound with wah and distortion from his guitar. From there, guitar and bass rumbled together like a high idling engine, as…

Following Ian Curtis’s suicide in 1980, the remaining members of Joy Division processed their grief in part by carrying on. While New Order’s stark and brilliant 1981 debut, Movement, sounded like what might have been Joy Division’s next step, the band went on to be innovators in electronic dance music…

Matt Gangi and Eric Chramosta grew up together in La Crescenta, California, which may account for some of the free-flowing energy of their musical collaboration. Often dubbed “electronic psych,” their music definitely has a mind-altering quality to it in terms of the layers of sound and the insistent underlying beat…

Reed Fuchs is the ringmaster of Décollage, a collection of like-minded, freely associating outsider-art terrorists who take collaged sounds and turn them into coherent pop songs. When you see these people perform, you can’t help but think that some freak folks got weirder and hooked up with crust punks, challenging…

With Flobots, we had the right song at the right time in 2008,” observes Andy Guerrero, aka Andy Rok, about his former group. “If not for that, we would probably just be another band here. A lot of that is about timing and realizing you have those opportunities.” For six…

ROB ZOMBIE & MARILYN MANSON @ 1STBANK CENTER |10/2/12 With the theme to Suspiria pumping out through the speakers as a preamble, Marilyn Manson took the stage with a huge, glowing, red, psychic cross hanging overhead — a nice touch. The distorted, driving bass line of “Hey, Cruel World” let…

MONO @ LARIMER LOUNGE | 9/27/12 Mono’s entire set felt like a grand meditation on the interconnectedness of patterns from the tides coming in and out daily in step with the tides of the moon, and changing in character with the changing of the seasons. The flow and evolving levels…

On D.E.R.’s side of this split twelve-inch, the outfit sounds like Agoraphobic Nosebleed, but with scarier, more feral vocals and more nuanced percussion. The beginning of “Servo Desleal” sounds like a sample that was captured and smuggled out of a secret prison camp for the “disappeared” — a fitting precursor…

Before Venom came along to combine the sludgy, dark psychedelia of Black Sabbath with the aggression of punk, there was Los Angeles’s Saint Vitus. Although clearly taking some cues from Tony Iommi in its guitar sound, Saint Vitus also cited Black Flag as an influence. (Anyone more than casually familiar…

Within two years of forming in 1999, Mono came to the attention of noted American avant-garde musician John Zorn, who released the band’s debut on his Tzadik label as part of the New Japan series that included Merzbow, Melt Banana and Ruins. Under the Pipal Tree (a reference to the…

Mining the past is nothing new, and goodness knows we’ve heard enough of the usual classic-rock canon being reinvented for the modern era with little being added. Some may see the Cutthroat Drifters (due Saturday, September 29, at Bender’s Tavern) and dismiss it as yet another blues-inflected rock band, but…