Rob Zombie originally came to prominence with his first band, White Zombie. With a penchant for campy horror imagery and music that was the perfect mutant blend of an industrial aesthetic with trashy metal and punk, White Zombie was one in a handful of bands that crossed the alternative-rock world…
SWANS @ GOTHIC THEATRE | 9/24/12 “I know it’s a Monday night. Can you tolerate one more?” Michael Gira asked the crowd more than two hours into the show. It wasn’t really even a question because Gira already knew the answer. Swans then played its final song: the sprawling, apocalypse-eclipsing…
Xiu Xiu got its start in 2002 when Jamie Stewart and his friend and longtime musical collaborator Cory McCulloch started writing songs in a more experimental vein, making extensive use of non-Western percussion and tones. The group’s debut album, 2002’s Knife Play, anticipated more widespread use of non-western instruments in…
MY LIFE WITH THE THRILL KILL KULT @ BLUEBIRD THEATER | 9/19/12 It comes as a bit of a shock when people slam into you for the first time after a dozen songs. That’s exactly what happened last night when My Life with the Thrill Kill Kult dialed up “After…
The first release in nine years from experimental jazz outfit Perry Weissman 3, 3 seems less abstract and slightly more organic than some of the band’s earlier music. The dissonance at the end of “Summer Circus” fits in with a possible covert theme suggested in titles like “Nobody Could Have…
Amanda Palmer came to prominence in the early 2000s as one half of the Dresden Dolls. While that band was embraced by goths, its aesthetic was, as Palmer has hinted, more in line with the conceptual musical theater embodied by the work of Bertolt Brecht and Kurt Weill. In May…
StaG (due on Friday, September 21, at Deer Pile) formed when its core members were students in Boulder. Somewhat creatively isolated from other musicians in that town, they became friends with the like-minded Fellow Citizens. During that time, StaG’s sound evolved into spare, catchy melodies that seemed to incandesce to…
My Life With the Thrill Kill Kult began as a film idea that Frankie Nardiello and Marsten Daley had that never fully came to fruition. The two met while touring with Ministry, and in 1987, inspired in part by disco, exploitation films, the industrial scene happening around them in Chicago…
SCIENCE PARTNER @ LARIMER LOUNGE | 9/14/12After ten songs, the audience didn’t want Science Partner to go — so Tyler Despres, Maria Kohler and Jess DeNicola stayed on stage to do their original Miley Cyrus-themed song. Despres had joked about how if the audience knew the words, it could sing…
Science Partner had its origins as a solo side project of Tyler Despres of Dualistics. When that band split up due to half the band moving out of state for work and the like, Science Partner became Despres main creative focus. The early shows may have been more acoustic affairs,…
MELVINS LITE @ BLUEBIRD THEATER | 9/12/12 Melvins Lite? There was nothing “lite” about this show. As soon as the stage lights dimmed, a loop of the coughing at the beginning of Black Sabbath’s “Sweet Leaf” filled the air for what seemed like a comically extended period of time until…
Resurrection, the latest release from Alana Rolfe and Brett Schreiber, both of whom used to be in the avant-garde post-punk band Slow Crash, finds the pair teaming up with percussionist Sean Spear. Opening track “Snake” is a fast-paced gypsy song, but from there the album explores a broad territory: “Camera…
Formed in 1982, Kreator quickly became one of the pioneers of thrash in Germany alongside Sodom and Destruction. The band’s breakneck pace, precision and distorted vocals proved important to the development of death metal, a sound Kreator pursued in the ’90s. Mille Petrozza mastered the art of the rapid melodic…
The Hives were supposedly formed by some mysterious figure named “Randy Fitzsimmons” in 1993, when the band’s members were still in high school. It seems unlikely that someone with that name is the mastermind, Svengali or Swedish Malcolm McLaren of the group. Whoever the Fitzsimmons character really is, he’s credited…
Stoic Dissention appears to have found a way to fuse black metal and doom in a way that does justice to both, tapping into the dark and primal spirit that flows through the work of bands like Wolves in the Throne Room and Thorr’s Hammer. Some retailers might file such…
Since 1983, the Melvins have been perfecting their brand of influential rock, inspired in part by punk and in part by the music Buzz Osborne and Dale Crover grew up hearing as kids in the ’60s and ’70s. With the Melvins, the two have taken that sound to different places…
Coady Willis and Jared Warren formed Big Business in the wake of break ups by the Whip and Dead Low Tide. Prior to that, the two had been in a number of noteworthy — even legendary in some circles — Pacific Northwest bands like Karp and the Murder City Devils,…
TWIN SHADOW @ BLUEBIRD THEATER | 9/7/12 Before ending the set, after a show full of enthusiastic responses from his audience, George Lewis Jr. said, “Denver, you’re amazing. Who was here last time we came?” A few people claimed to have been. He complimented the crowd on being honest because…
A cursory listen to its repertoire, which has a sound akin to some unlikely admixture of Molly Hatchet and the Cult, suggests that Calder’s Revolvers could be yet another band to have hopped on the classic rock bandwagon of recent years. But these guys aren’t just copying what someone else…
George Lewis Jr. grew up in Florida but moved to Boston where he formed his punk-funk cabaret outfit Mad Man Films. That band split after releasing two albums, and Lewis moved to Brooklyn, where, inspired by the music of his childhood, he started writing songs on his own under the…
WHY? @ GOTHIC THEATRE | 9/05/12 After a great set from Why?, no one seemed to be in a hurry to leave the Gothic last night, so the band came back on stage for an encore. The rapid xylophone figure meant the band was going to play “A Sky For…
Cecil Bailey and Chris Garrow first played together in the stoner-rock band Core of the Earth. As fashionable as that musical style was a few years back, Core stood out from the pack for having good, solid songs. During their time in the band, Bailey and Garrow started up a…
