Looking for the latest disc from P-Nuckle, GasHead, Lisa Bell or Drag the River — but don’t feel like scouring the bins of your nearest independent retailer? How ’bout a DVD of Xiren’s live set at Red Rocks? Billie Tolles’s hard-to-find Chapulteset? A hardback copy of G. Brown’s Colorado Rocks!…
With all the energy its name implies, Kaffeine Buzz is a scattershot, ADD-fueled cornucopia of music journalism. Covering local as well as national punk, indie and hip-hop, the site features interviews, club listings, weekly show picks and CD and concert reviews. Editor Kim Owens, who also pens an impressive portion…
A professor at Colorado College, Scott does more than just teach about music. He also makes it in a very singular way. Rather than play the piano using the instrument’s keys, he and his assistants physically pluck and manipulate its strings with the assistance of everything from guitar picks and…
The authors of this tome draw from a wealth of experience. Bliesener once drummed with ? and the Mysterians, a group remembered for the garage-rock hit “96 Tears,” and went on to become a successful promoter and manager of bands such as Big Head Todd and the Monsters. Knopper, for…
Ironically, many creators of contemporary experimental music are too stuck in academia and orthodoxy to truly forge their own voice. But Michael Andrew Doherty, after earning a bachelor’s degree in philosophy and religious studies at CSU, ditched his musical studies and began orchestrating sound according to the dictates of his…
Before they appeared on Saturday Night Live and The O.C. and were lionized by damn near every music scribe in the free world, the Killers were just another out-of-town act performing at the Larimer Lounge on a Tuesday night. Although the Lounge was only a quarter full — the band…
For anyone who cuts the rug like Ravens linebacker Ray Lewis or Elaine from Seinfeld, the Colorado Prog Music Fest offered the perfect excuse to boogaloo like you just didn’t care. Area musical acts committed to precision and unusual time signatures held court for an entire day of free-form anarchy…
In a year of exceptional local releases, DeVotchKa’s How It Ends stood out like a peacock at sunrise. A dizzying feast of neo-classical strings, south-of the-border tango flirtations and punk-informed polka, the fourteen-song cycle finds Denver’s most sumptuous quartet at the pinnacle of its craft. Recorded and mixed by Craig…
Woody Allen once said, “Don’t knock masturbation — it’s sex with someone I love.” In the cocksure hands of Wanker however, love means never having to say you’re anything but horny and alone. Then again, damn near every song by these nostalgic, faux-Anglican glam-bangers revolves around frigid white girls, full-metal…
Metal bands usually get straight to the point when it comes to naming their albums: Morbid Angel had Domination; Kreator issued Endless Pain; Venom put out Welcome to Hell. Then there’s Throcult’s second full-length, Stormbringer: Conjuration of the Nighthorde. Even without umlauts, it’s a real mouthful, sporting two compound words,…
Denver Gentlemen alum David Eugene Edwards hasn’t left 16 Horsepower behind, but as an extremely prolific songwriter, he needed another venue for his efforts. Wovenhand fills this particular bill very well, and on Consider the Birds, Edwards’s third disc under the moniker, he takes advantage of it. Like all of…
Area artists always try to make their discs sound as professional and high-quality as those put out by major record labels, but very few succeed. With Antidote, pressed by Suburban Home Records, the Gamits joined this rarefied company, exciting fans who hoped the disc would propel the band into the…
With the occasional exception of standup comics, most people who use common speech as their main form of creative expression don’t fare well when it comes to compact discs. So give veteran wordsmith SETH credit for combining poetry and music in a singularly bold way. The sounds whipped together by…
CU’s sex-and-booze scandals make Animal House look like Romper Room. Still, the 1978 John Belushi film popularized a relatively raucous time in American pop culture: the era of frat rock, that surf-drenched bastardization of R&B that blared across university campuses in the early ’60s. The Orangu-tones have frat rock down…
It’s hard enough finding bandmates who are in the same musical headspace as you. But when Ryan Policky formed the shoegazing Drop the Fear, he discovered that not only were his cohorts — Gabriel Ratliffe and Sarah Marcogliese — sympathetic sonic collaborators, they were also fellow filmmakers. Fittingly, the trio’s…
Blues aficionados from Colorado and beyond know Eddie Turner best for his contributions to many of Otis Taylor’s recordings. Yet as Rise demonstrates, he’s also a fine frontman, with an expressive voice and guitar skills that blast through genre boundaries as if they were nonexistent — which, in his mind,…
The year 2004 was a very good one for electronic composer Tyler Potts. Beginning in January, he set out to record a new song every week, and not only did he stick to his Sisyphean schedule all the way through December, but the music he made over this span was…
Last December, this very publication saluted the new self-titled full-length by the Denver Gentlemen for several very good reasons. The group, led by the enigmatic Jeffrey-Paul Norlander, helped establish the gothic-roots sound that distinguished the Denver scene during the ’90s, with former members going on to found 16 Horsepower, Slim…
Forget vampires, mummies and werewolves. Last Halloween’s most frightening spectacle was an evil dachshund flying on oversized bat wings, shooting death rays from a pair of black, lifeless eyes, transforming the Front Range into a smoking crater. Amusing cover art aside, Sparky the Dog’s spooktastic holiday compilation was a fun,…
When Robert Eldridge decided to commit his acoustic wizardry to disc, he didn’t bother with pricey studios. No, Eldridge simply went to an Einstein Bros. Bagel outlet, plugged a pick-up into his six-string and let ‘er rip. Recorded live and expertly mastered by Desert Airport’s Eric Shiveley, Eclectic and Mental…
Denver’s underground rock scene is boiling over right now — and one of the individuals who’s been dutifully stoking the fires is Dan Rutherford of Morning After Records (www.morningafterrecords.com). He envisioned the label while attending South by Southwest last year, and found the perfect flagship band when he got back…
Champions of unstructured sound collage and homemade instruments, Backwards Records is home to an array of adventurous laptop jockeys and electronically minded noise artists: Page 27, Blackcell, Robot Mandala, Haunted Sound Lab, Sporadik, Kuxann-Sum and Paraclude, among others. Surviving on the distant fringes of normalcy, the unsung label creates sounds…
