When vocalist/axman Jeff Mueller agreed to borrow his band’s moniker from the Pulitzer Prize-winning novel by Annie Proulx, he hadn’t read it yet. Fortunately, the handle turned out to be appropriate anyway. Like the tome’s icy setting, the Shipping News’s music initially seems severe and forbidding, yet the players regularly…
According to the liner notes of A Frames’ Black Forest, the trio features a bassist, a drummer and a guitarist by the names of Cholera, Ricketts and Emphysema. Insert contagion metaphor here. Seriously though, the Seattle outfit makes some damn infectious music — that is, as much so as a…
Make no mistake: There’s an anti-Mars Volta contingent out there, and its members will rip this disc apart. They’ll dismiss its musical variegation as masturbatory overindulgence, its lyrics as lugubrious faux poetry, its ambitious structure as strikingly pretentious — and in some ways, they’ll be correct. Yet such complaints completely…
When the Manchester-based trio Doves unleashed its melancholy brand of Brit pop via 2000’s Lost Souls, the responses varied. Some found the album too dark and dreamy, an ethereal collection of arty, unapproachable noise. Others embraced it with Pinkerton-like zeal and sat baffled as Coldplay snuck across the Atlantic and…
By most accounts, hip-hop is all about presence: the simple (and incredibly effective) economy of lyrical force thrust onto bone-rattling beats. But avant b-boy Dalek has little time for such easy definitions, and while the challenging Absence is unlike any hip-hop album you’ve ever heard, it hardly lives up to…
Januar hasn’t played many shows in its three-year existence, but the quartet has a good reason: Drummer Katie Aiken spends more time in far-flung locales like Pennsylvania and Iceland than she does in Denver. That fact — along with the group’s unusual two-acoustic-guitarists/two-drummers lineup — might lead you to believe…
If the name Bernard Bickerstaff sets off a buzzer, it should. His father, Bernie Bickerstaff, used to helm the Denver Nuggets and currently oversees the expansion Charlotte Bobcats alongside another one of his sons, assistant coach John-Blair Bickerstaff. As for Bernard, he performs under the pseudonym Mysfyt with SleepinGiants, a…
At the 2005 Grammy Awards, Killswitch Engage was passed over in the category of Best Metal Performance in favor of Motrhead’s Metallica cover. Given the proven irrelevance and utter cluelessness of the Recording Academy, this should be considered an endorsement of Killswitch, a band that has written and rewritten the…
When DJ Icey laid eyes on Beatport.com’s debut ad in URB magazine, he practically had a heart attack. There on the page, advertising a digital-music distribution service he’d recently considered licensing his catalogue to, was a photograph of a record crateŠon fire. News flash: Vinyl doesn’t hold up well under…
Although he’s still in his twenties, Ben Lee has already been through more personal and professional changes than the average performer three times his age. In the early ’90s, when he was just fourteen, this Aussie tunesmith was already leading his own band, the punky Noise Addict. Tastemakers such as…
The name of Menomena’s debut full-length, I Am the Fun Blame Monster, is an anagram for “the first Menomena album.” Similarly, the Portland trio rearranges parcels of sound into epic pop opuses using Deeler, a software program created by pianist Brent Knopf. But there’s much more magic involved than simple…
Just when people started to figure out how to unravel Xiu Xiu’s brand of puzzling, theatrical art-rock, two of the group’s provisional sidemen — Sam Mickens and Jherek Bischoff — have spun off into the equally confounding outfit the Dead Science. The Seattle trio’s new EP, Bird Bones in the…
One of the funniest Los Lobos stories dates back to the mid-’70s, when the band had a regular gig at a Mexican restaurant in Pasadena called the Red Onion. The owner strongly recommended that the band get off the tiny, makeshift stage and partake in the demoralizing mariachi tradition of…
Guitar wizard Dave Beegle’s jaw-dropping, chin-scratching finger work with prog-rock power trio Fourth Estate should have earned him and his bandmates worldwide fame and fortune. Although the act was met with gold-lined pen strokes of praise, such acclaim never resulted in mind-numbing financial success. Eventually the threesome bowed out of…
London DJs and producers Ed Rush and Optical teamed up in 1998 for a series of landmark releases on their Virus Recordings label that earned the pair superstar DJ status. Each had achieved moderate success on his own within the techstep drum-and-bass scene; their collaboration proved to be one of…
Scott Kerr pauses, rests his chin on his hands and ponders for a minute. The clink of glass and burble of conversation overflows from the other booths at Sputnik as the singer/guitarist of Yellow Second composes his thoughts. His bandmates — guitarist Josh Hemingway, bassist Brett Bowden and drummer Jimmy…
I grew up in a country that was uneasy from the day I was born,” says Dave King. “I have a lot of friends who were imprisoned for political activity.” As the token Irishman and founding member of the Los Angeles-based Flogging Molly, King endured a childhood that wasn’t exactly…
From the outside, the building that houses Rudy’s Studio looks like all of the other tract homes in this suburb just north of Denver — which is why I’ve driven past it three times already. But then, you don’t really expect to find one of the city’s pre-eminent studios in…
With chiseled muscles drizzled in oil and an unspecified power that left him impervious to bullets, 50 Cent exploded onto the pop landscape like a Nietzsche-meets-Al-Capone Superman with a cadre of club-banging beats, itchy hooks and one-dimensional verses. For better and worse, The Massacre breaks little new ground. There are…
In 1997, Robert Schneider, a former Denverite whose best-known creation remains the Apples in Stereo, released some of his early recordings on Pyramid Landing and Other Favorites, a disc credited to the de facto pseudonym Marbles. But Expo isn’t another odds-and-sods package. The ten-song EP displays sonic unity of a…
Recorded in tandem with last year’s surgically themed Delirium Cordia, this abrasive and comical offering from Mike Patton and his co-conspirators in Fantmas throws avant-speed metal, kids’ jump-rope songs, film-score snippets and Looney Tunes-era sound effects into a blender set to “frappé” — then churns the whole mess into a…
Andrew Broder, aka Fog, started off turntabling in the vein of DJ Shadow before taking the Anticon cue and rippling out from hip-hop into musical free-for-all. But experimentalism shouldn’t be synonymous with using pretension as an excuse for not trying. Here, Fog is less Spiritualized and Wilco by way of…
