Music

Musically, the pallindromic 2002 was much like any other, just with slightly different outfits and different purty colors flashing on MTV. There was some really great stuff released, as well as some truly awful dreck. Most of the hundreds of thousands of CDs released in the world fell somewhere in…

Since pointy-headed son of Dixie Trent Lott was forced to turn in his bullwhip last week (reduced to a lowly Senator in a Grand Dragon costume), the Mississippi tourism board might consider letting their prize goofball moonlight as a spokesperson for the state’s regional delicacy: largemouth bass. The Magnolia State…

Ross Kersten probably owes Paul Westerberg about six million beers. As the leader of the LaDonnas through the ’90s, the Wisconsin-born singer-guitarist crafted a deliciously rambunctious, lager-laced rock-and-roll sound that owed more than an aesthetic debt to the Replacements. (The band’s cover of “Can’t Hardly Wait” became a live staple.)…

When Bill Hill was first given the gift of music, he didn’t want it. In 1995, while he recovered from hand surgery, a friend gave him a plastic recorder. The instrument, familiar to elementary-school music students the world over, was intended as a simple therapeutic tool to help Hill exercise…

Love reigned supreme during Samsonite and Delight-Ya’s recent tour through the cold corridors of Oregon State Hospital, the stark and unpredictable location where Milos Forman’s One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest was filmed in 1975. Rather than butt heads in mortal combat, the large inflatable Godzillas that accompanied the duo…

During musical periods when no single genre dominates, artists often look to earlier styles for inspirations — and judging by Electro Nouveau and We Are Science, synth pop, that most quintessentially ’80s of approaches, is getting ready for another close-up. Whether this news is good or grisly is up to…

Cry, the fifth album by country singer Faith Hill, opens with a loud crash of drums, a throbbing electric bass and a screeching electric guitar. The song is called “Free,” and it’s about liberating oneself from the chains of the past. The point is obvious: Hill wants to shed her…

When talking roots, it’s hard to get farther down the musical tree than Africa. So when searching for rootsy compositions evocative of deep blue seas, rural villages where chickens cluck about the streets and a soulful spirituality far removed from the media-saturated din of contemporary life, your first stop should…

Vincent Gallo once described himself as the kind of guy who’d attend a football game in a visiting uniform and cheer until he got killed. Divisive as a portcullis with the stare of Rasputin, the Buffalo-bred director/actor /composer has certainly garnered his fair share of praise and scorn over the…

The Colorado Music Association unveiled its Music Directory at a holiday party this past Sunday, passing out copies of the comprehensive talent guide. The directory, more than two years in the making, lists the vital statistics of as many working bands and artists as COMA was able to gets its…

Annie Quick, who appears Thursday, December 19, at Ziggie’s Saloon, has a way of both blending into and stepping out of her environment. Her band, Stickman Jones, shed its hippie upbringing when it moved from Santa Cruz to New York City in 1997. Surging with the flash and urban energy…

Blister 66 has attained a musical fluidity that allows it to change with the tides — as well as trends in mainstream commercial rock. Today the band’s lineup is almost completely different from the one that unleashed a rap-metal mélange on Denver in the late ’90s. Yet the big prize…

There’s a fine line between punk-rock recklessness and downright criminal behavior. It’s a line the Otter Popps have crossed on more than one occasion. “After our shows, we used to go out and light fires,” says Myke Martinez, the trio’s frontman and guitarist. “We’ve all been in the clink before.”…

ost Americans have a love-hate relationship with yuletide music. They can’t imagine the season without it, but they sometimes wish they could. Such conflicting emotions are easy to understand after plowing through the more than thirty holiday platters that made their way to our door this year. As usual, the…

White people long to be funky. They want elasticity: the rubber knees, the fluid flow, the boiling blood, the innate understanding of the rhythms they pine to create. They want the funk; they are willing to give up everything for the funk. But the funk remains buried by centuries of…

Members of Three Degrees of Freedom recently made a very serious investment in their future, one that suggests a rock-and-roll variation on the Oscar Meyer wiener car and the Orkin man’s bug-eared auto. The jam-happy Denver outfit bought a huge white Suburban and plastered the sidewalls with a blazing, blown-up…

At Bob’s Bad Vapors in Memphis, arguably the birthplace of karaoke, you can see a different Elvis impersonator every twenty minutes — if you’re an absolute masochist, that is. Seemingly rolled off some glitzy assembly line in Dante’s Inferno, sneering exhibitionists from all walks of life converge year round upon…

Following the murder of his uncle in the early ’50s, young Otis Taylor accompanied his shattered parents as they uprooted themselves from Chicago and moved to Denver — the once and future bluesman’s adopted home for the last five decades. But that single childhood atrocity wasn’t the first act of…