Music

Someone at Merge must have had a screw loose to okay the release of a sprawling retrospective spotlighting an obscure New Zealand act that means less than nothing to most Americanos. But please leave that screw untightened, because Anthology is capable of making the average listener nostalgic for a group…

Which lucky lady gets to be wined and dined by Mr. Biggs? Mack Daddy is large. Mack Daddy aims to take you shopping, girl. Buy you everything. Take you away in a convertible under cherry rain. After a glass of Beaujoulais and a Tic Tac, he’ll draw your bath. There…

The city of Denver wet its collective baggy pants at last week’s announcement that Def Jam founder Russell Simmons would bring his Hip-Hip Summit to Denver sometime this year. In town to launch a new credit card designed for low-income and debt-scarred individuals, Simmons made the spontaneous decree while sharing…

Pretty Girls Make Graves, appearing Sunday, June 8, at Tulagi, with Last Chance Diaries and Against Tomorrow’s Sky, is at once menacing and seductive. When the gravitational pull of the rhythm section combines with the guitar lines of hardcore’s past, then converges with the muscular, vitriolic vocals of Andrea Zollo…

Originally a three-piece, Pure Drama has evolved into a sextet, with new members Gabriel Ratliffe, David Ferguson, Chris Cardone and Tim Trower rounding out the lush musical landscape founding members Ryan Policky and Becca Gomez established in 1997. The expansion of its lineup isn’t the only sign of progress: From…

Allan Vest is from Oklahoma City, but he doesn’t want to talk about Wayne Coyne, thank you very much. His band, the Starlight Mints, emerged from the same dusty landscape that birthed the Flaming Lips and, eventually, a nation of Yoshimi-battling fans — and the connection has been difficult to…

The building blocks of rock music — a guitar or two, a bass, some drums — haven’t changed much in the half-century or so since the genre emerged and drew its first independent breath. The difference in the case of 34 Satellite’s recent turn at the Larimer Lounge was that…

Open up the May/June 2003 issue of Adbusters and you’ll find a cardboard-sleeved CD glued to the inside of one of the pages. Its presence isn’t blazoned across the cover as an incentive to buy the magazine; it’s not tagged with a magnetic strip to prevent sticky-fingered browsers from lifting…

Last fall, Sean Kelly was ready to pump gas for a living; he felt like things had gotten that bad. The list of creditors to whom he and his band, the Samples, owed money had sprawled like Southern moss. And in November, three of his bandmates — longtime drummer Sam…

The phrase “Feel-Good Summer Hit” doesn’t make any sense at all. Summer doesn’t feel good — in fact, it’s downright shitty, what with all the pit sweat and foot fungus and boiling garbage juice and blinding Caucasian leg meat. Spring is way better. Every beam of bright, warm sun is…

It’s easy to take the Dalhart Imperials for granted. The Denver-based combo has been kicking around for nearly ten years, long enough to perfect its spirited blend of Western swing, Bakersfield-style country and rockabilly. The combo’s played hundreds of shows around town, but one thing it hasn’t done — until…

I’m not one of those people who wants to hear the same thing over and over again,” says alto saxophonist and pioneer of improvised music Wally Shoup. “I always use the metaphor of the roller coaster. When you’re on a roller coaster, it’s exciting. You don’t necessarily know what’s around…

When the members of Denver’s Hilltop Klick get together with their friends in the National Blues Arsenal, they channel the spirit of Robert Johnson as much as they do any spitfire hip-hop MC. The three-piece Arsenal provides a riff-heavy, Delta-blues backbeat to the Klick’s gritty street-smart sound, creating rap music…

Colin Meloy, the singer-songwriter at the heart of the Decemberists, spent his musically formative years in Missoula, Montana, but you couldn’t prove it by Castaways and Cutouts. The first full-length by his band, which is currently based in Portland, Oregon, sounds for all the world like the work of a…

Combining top-shelf acoustic playing with an angling theme, Fishing Music: A Collection of Acoustic Folk, Blues & Swing is a platter that plays well in warm-weather months. Producers Ben Winship and David Thompson assembled some of the masters of Americana to extol the simple delights of grabbing a pole and…

Nothing’s funnier than watching a room full of carefully uncaring, strategically mussed indie rockers trying to dance at a show. That is, trying not to dance, but trying to make it look like they are dancing. But only kind of. The symptoms are universal: the nodding heads, the half-hearted hip…

Today’s mash-up craze — where artists graft the a cappella version of one popular tune to the well-known instrumental backing of another — inspired a “band” like Columbus, Ohio’s Evolution Control Committee to up the ante beyond anything that London’s Freelance Hellraiser introduced to dance floors last year. Simply pasting…

Note to the jam-band contingent: Leftover Salmon is not really one of you, despite appearances to the contrary. The band is sunny and string-heavy, yes, but its music comes out of the bluegrass tradition — a stop-on-a-dime style that’s driven by songs instead of elongated instrumental spaceouts. “The jam-band thing…

Boredom, poverty, loneliness, suicide and heartbreak. Sounds cheerful, doesn’t it? Actually, it is…as long as FM Knives are singing about it. This Sacramento four-piece, playing Thursday, May 22, at the Climax Lounge, has mastered the punk-rock alchemy of turning depression into elation, ennui into energy. On “16 DOA,” a love…

Drowning in oceans of lust, wailing hopeless lovers’ oaths and going toe to toe with oblivion itself can take its toll on a guy — especially one with a Sicilian heart condition. Fortunately Nick Urata of DeVotchKa counteracts such reckless conduct by issuing consistently beguiling sonic tapestries that weave together…