Music

Joel Haertling doesn’t lack high-art credentials. A slight, brisk-mannered fellow with a weakness for vintage suits and snappy fedoras, he’s worked alongside director Stan Brakhage on a number of projects, even joining the well-known avant-gardist at a series of European festivals where celluloid offerings made by Haertling were also viewed…

With impeccable timing, Syd Barrett appeared at Abbey Road studios in the spring of 1975 after seven years in a sanatorium. His old bandmates were adding the finishing touches to “Shine On, You Crazy Diamond” — a tribute to Barrett’s drug-enhanced schizophrenia and the lengthy centerpiece of Wish You Were…

In some ways, artists whose debuts are lousy, or competent, or fairly strong but not fabulous, have an easier time of it than do performers who knock the cover off the ball during their first at-bat. After all, no one counts on acts that occupy the vast qualitative middle ground…

Can the music be called Brit pop if the musicians in question take more influences from the Mississippi Delta than from their Liverpool-area origins? Lacking a better term, Gomez describes its music as “psychedelic blues.” And while there’s no easy way to explain the trippy country-blues-electronica-folk-rock genre melt that defines…

Electronic-music promoters have had a tough go of things in Denver for the last couple of years, ever since a statewide crackdown on clandestine events pushed most parties up from the underground and into more conventional venues. Today’s club events may lack the spontaneous, kitchen-sink-and-disco-ball thrill of the golden age…

The band’s name is shorter by three letters — namely R, E and O — but its songs are getting longer. Though Speedealer used to play twenty songs in under fifteen minutes, its new album, Second Sight, showcases more finesse, maturity and songwriting depth. Some songs on the album even…

Craving a little Rock Soup? The title of the debut CD by Concrete Sandwich is partly a description of the hodgepodge of musical influences working upon the Denver trio. It’s also a recommendation for an appropriate side dish. A hard-rock-and-loud-guitar outfit that’s been plugging away in the local music circuit…

Joe Ely, Jimmie Dale Gilmore and Butch Hancock were once known as the Flatlanders. But truth be told, they’ve hardly used the name since 1973, when their debut, Jimmie Dale and the Flatlanders, was released — exclusively on eight-track, believe it or not — to little acclaim and fewer sales…

More likely to set fire to the Punk Inc. bandwagon than jump on it, the Emmas are throwbacks to a different time — when young misfits on society’s fringes created simple, squalid, stripped-down rock and musical proficiency was a damning trait. Favoring prickly attitude over technical talent, the Denver-based band…

Dean Fertita, songwriter and lead guitarist for Detroit-based pop group the Waxwings, might be the least career-minded musician this side of Guided by Voices’ Bob Pollard to make a great album. Fortunately, he has luck on his side — as evidenced by the chance way in which his band wound…

The Athens, Georgia-based duo Jucifer an alt-metal combo comprising Amber Valentine on guitar and her boyfriend, Ed Livengood, on drums mixes up a lethal cocktail of punk, heavy metal and plain ol buzz-saw rawk, redefining Southern gothic. The couple self-released a debut album in 1998 titled Calling All Cars on…

Worldly and wild, MaggieJack mixes funky-feeling Latin and African grooves into a unique concoction. Lyrically, the band offers a rootsy environmental message; it’s music to make you think as you dance. Led by the boisterous Lisa Maria Maestas, who sings lead and plays a variety of percussion instruments — including…

It could have been a beautiful score. “The guy in front of me was dancing around, and out of his pocket came a vial of my drug,” recalls Steve. “It was sitting on the floor in front of me. I was looking at it.” For many years, Steve was the…

Earlier this year, Tony Hajjar was in Vancouver, recording a new album with his band, which is both exactly where he should have been and not where you’d expect. Let’s back up. In 2000, At the Drive-In, an El Paso quintet featuring Hajjar on drums, released Relationship of Command, the…

It’s a buyer’s market for jam-band fans as the ranks of musicians with heroic endurance have swelled in the years since the Grateful Dead went belly-up and Phish went on permanent hiatus. Everyone from Les Claypool to that kid down the street is in a group these days. The challenge…

My landlord knew a drug dealer in high school. The dealer had a bunch of acid — two sheets’ worth of quarter tab — stashed in his sock. It was a hot day. His feet got sweaty, and he absorbed most of the blotter. After a week in the emergency…

Record companies specializing in musical subgenres regularly market certain releases to tourists, literal and otherwise. For instance, blues labels tend to balance albums aimed at consumers who know the form well with lowest-common-denominator platters intended for people who think it would be cool to purchase a blues CD once every…

On Blue Country Heart, Hot Tuna guitarist Jorma Kaukonen goes country, singing heartfelt versions of songs by Garth Brooks, Toby Keith and Tim McGraw. Guest vocalists include Martina McBride and Faith Hill, who help Kaukonen shed his blues-steeped image. Just kidding. Sure, Blue Country Heart was recorded in Nashville, but…

For host Sid Pink and his helpers, Portia Needlewax and Professor Snarly, the Westword Music Showcase Awards Ceremony, held Thursday, June 20, at the Bluebird Theater, was fraught with peril: At one point, an unknown artist, frustrated that he wasn’t among the sixty acts nominated on the Westword Music Showcase…

Denver’s Czars, who appear Tuesday, July 2, at the Gothic Theatre with Lift to Experience and the Devics, have been compared to Radiohead, probably because of the atmospheric, swirling, textural quality of some of their songs. But the band also recorded “Song to Siren” for a Tim Buckley tribute album…