Music

When Death Cab for Cutie’s Ben Gibbard started a little side project called the Postal Service, Barsuk, Death Cab’s label at the time, probably didn’t bat an eye. A few hundred thousand moved units later, the imprint probably wished liked hell it had snapped up the Service when it had…

You don’t have to be “In the Navy” (where “you can sail the seven seas”!) to enjoy the classic kitsch of the Village People. Whether you like them or not, the songs of this quintessential costumed group stick in your cerebral cortex. The cop, the cowboy, the construction worker, the…

When Cammie O’Nassis of Mannequin Makeout squeals, “Dance mania! Dance mania!,” you’d better believe it. The coed Boulder outfit injects urgency and fun into rigid dance punk, discarding slick beats and airtight production for a raw, rabid sound that scrapes grease off the garage floor and favors clunky Casios and…

On Friday, January 28, milehighhouse founder Tom Hoch will host a shindig at Vinyl to celebrate his crew’s fifth anniversary. Barcelona DJ Murray Richardson, whose brand of deep, funky tech house has kept him in demand worldwide, is headlining the party, which will also feature Hoch and his fellow housemates…

Even though Jolie Holland pads her nest with jazz, folk and blues, she can’t be pigeonholed. Sometimes the 29-year-old singer-songwriter hunts for a new morning worm in the form of gospel, swing, lounge music or the occasional Civil War anthem. You might say she’s a weird bird. Then again, Holland…

Judging from the last presidential election, not many Americans are ready to make Will and Grace as welcome in their neighborhoods as Ozzie and Harriet. The passage of legislation to tighten the definition of marriage suggests that being out of the closet in America may be acceptable only as long…

It’s five o’clock Monday, January 17: Do you know where your beats are? If you’re like most savvy digital-music fans, your beats are on your desktop or iPod, courtesy of iTunes, eMusic or any of the countless other digital dealers online. Dance-music enthusiasts, however, know that the hottest beats come…

With synth pop making an unexpected comeback, the timing couldn’t be better for a new Erasure album. Vince Clarke’s infectious recordings with Depeche Mode, Yaz, the Assembly and, of course, Erasure helped create the blueprint for electronic dance pop, while Andy Bell’s soulful vocals and flamboyant persona added a critical…

For many people, funk revivalists deserve only scorn for disturbing a genre that’s been sacredly entombed — unless their efforts are filtered through contemporary visionaries like Prince or the Roots. And it’s irrational and confining that certain musical-history threads, such as Motown, dead-end, while others, like ’80s synthpop, get tragically…

Despite the constant pressure on veteran female artists not to act their age, Marianne Faithfull refuses to disguise the wear and tear caused by her four decades in rock. She eschews surgical enhancement, and her ragged voice often sounds downright ancient — although “timeless” is a better way to describe…

Does this ring a bell? A small-town band with a three-letter name attains cult status by issuing a string of entrancing albums full of cryptic jangle and mumbling majesty. Bored, the group eventually starts to tinker with the very formula that put it on the indie-rock map. Yes, Low has…

Skits have been endemic on hip-hop CDs since the days when flattops were a fashion statement, yet they’re almost always lame — which explains why the between-songs material that peppers the debut by Cash Money co-founder Fresh is so surprising. Astonishingly enough, several of the routines stand as highlights of…

Maybe all the dance-punk plasticity and garage-rock cock-grabbing of the last few years are starting to take their toll, but there’s been a new trend bubbling up from the underground lately: simple, drunken earnestness. If it catches on (yeah, right), the Enablers are going to win a ton of Grammys…

KBCO gets plenty of attention for its Studio C discs, largely because they feature national touring acts in off-the-cuff settings. In contrast, the Mountain’s Homegrown series focuses on local performers who aspire to the bigtime but haven’t experienced it yet. Although V.02 doesn’t give a real sense of this area’s…

It may be hazardous to give less than a shining review to a rockabilly band — after all, the guys in the CD booklet look like total bruisers — but here goes: Slingshot misses the target. The third release by Englewood’s Paul Galaxy and the Galactix is a stab at…

The gloomy, Americana-inflected slowcore of Bloomington, Indiana’s Early Day Miners could be the soundtrack to a lost Jim Jarmusch film or the anthem for a forgotten Nevada ghost town. On their latest Secretly Canadian release, the stark All Harm Ends Here, vocals rarely rise above a mumble, instruments are played…

After lighting the fuse for the hip-hop explosion more than two decades ago, Russell Simmons has extended his Defness to the Def Poetry Jam tour, coming straight from Broadway. With rhymes as diverse as the poets, Russell’s Jam has gone global, championing poetry competitions everywhere. This most slamming of poetry…

Twenty-something viewers of typical VH1 programming — the stuff in which desperate comics make wisecracks about pop-culture topics they only pretend to remember — can be forgiven for assuming that Biz Markie was the William Hung of his era. After all, the Markie moment most often spotlighted is the 1989…

From Gummo to Roger and Me, the rusted infrastructure and trailer-park peculiarity of the Midwest has been a font of much present-day mythology. But beneath all that John Deere-cap patronizing lies a fixation on the geographic and moral core of America — it is the heartland, after all. But what…

Before the Album Leaf’s Jimmy Lavelle started hobnobbing with Sigur Ros, he played in a few little bands in San Diego: the Locust, GoGoGo Airheart, Black Heart Procession and Tristeza. And although Tristeza — minus its superstar since 2003 — has been treading water over the past few years, there’s…

There’s no good reason why New York’s Hem isn’t the biggest band in America. Last year’s Eveningland — with Gary Maurer’s and Dan Messé’s heartbreakingly beautiful songs, Sally Ellyson’s vulnerable-yet-vibrant crooning and a sound so lush you could sink right into it — is still stuck stubbornly in the CD…