Is our little Cornelius all growed up now? Keigo Oyamada’s newest album, Point, manages to preserve the wide-eyed sense of wonder that made his previous release so precious, but this time, he’s clearly on his best behavior. Cornelius’s last album, Fantasma, released in 1998, was one of those universally acclaimed…
Originally, Groundwork was a concert series built to raise money for a variety of sustainable, ongoing food projects around the world, including establishing orchards in Eritrea, producing natural honey in Armenia and building community-wide backyard livestock development in Sierra Leone. The group stayed true to its name by getting down…
How long does it take for a new art form to be embraced as legitimate by the music-listening public, a group that, as any modern radio programmer can tell you, is generally wary of change? Judging by the recent surge in the popularity of turntablism, about 25 years. Ever since…
W.C. Clark is one of those blues artists who is totally happy playing to faithful patrons in small clubs. In Austin, his hometown, he can regularly be found at modest East Side venues such as the Victory Grill and Charlie Playhouse. After roughly fifty years on the Austin blues circuit,…
Belly up to the Marshall stack when the local heroes of Abdomen inflict structural damage to pop architecture on Friday, February 8, at the 15th Street Tavern. Guitarist Mike Jourgensen nails hummable hardcore to the wall with the effects-laden skill of a master carpenter. Measuring psychedelic speed-metal to fit the…
Tan, rested and cocky, Tommy Womack returned to Nashville from a Carnival cruise late last summer with a bounce in his step. “The world was wonderful,” he says. “I got a copy of the new Dylan album in advance that nobody else had. I just met Bill Wyman at a…
Twenty years ago, Jim Salestrom was lured to Breckenridge by a folk-friendly bar culture and the Rocky Mountain mentality that John Denver made famous in his music. Like that songwriter, Salestrom built a career around writing high-altitude odes to life in the mountains: In his adopted hometown, locals still refer…
On his most recent album, The Rock: Stone Cold Country 2001, George Jones teams with Garth Brooks to sing a good old-fashioned drinking song called “Beer Run.” It’s about getting off work, jumping in the pickup truck and making a beeline for the liquor store — pretty tame stuff, especially…
It makes perfect sense that Graham’s best-known band was dubbed the True Believers. After all, he’s a songwriter and performer whose affection for genuinely American music — you know, the craggy, rough-hewn stuff that’s heard too seldom these days — is simple and pure. But he also sports an obstinate…
So far, 2002 has been a bummer year for clubs. In just one month, Denver has seen the abrupt — though not totally unexpected — combustion of three venues that regularly featured live music: The House of Rock and Alice Coopers’town have both closed, while the Flying Dog Pub has…
Felix Stallings Jr. has used many names during his ascension through the world of homeland electronica: Since the age of fifteen, when a chance encounter with Chicago’s DJ Pierre expedited his auspicious entry into the house realm, Stallings has worked under the tags Thee Maddkatt Courtship, Elektrikboy, Aphrohead and Sharkimaxx…
Orbit Service releases Space & Valium, its first full-length album, this week with a pair of shows: Friday, February 1, at Boulder’s Penny Lane, with This Film, and Saturday, January 2, at the Crowbar with Fort Collins’s DJ F and This Film. The swirling, ambient aspects of this Denver four-piece…
“I don’t really like storytelling or straight narratives,” Jay Farrar says halfway into a conversation about his new solo album, Sebastopol. The co-founder of legendary alt-country band Uncle Tupelo and its celebrated offspring, Son Volt, Farrar is speaking about the process of writing music. But he pauses for a moment,…
The story was surely blown before it began. Over the telephone, Geoff Vaughan, contact person for the groove collective Vinyl, is asked if he can set up an interview with someone in the band for early the following week. There’s a long pause. Then this: “Well, I’m the bass player,…
For a child navigating the uneasy interval of pre-adolescence, few things can guarantee nerd status like the decision to join the school band. All that lugging of equipment and shameless practicing is enough to crush the coolness out of any child who’s unlucky enough to pursue musical knowledge. Darren Kramer…
A couple of days before Limp Bizkit and its muscle-bound posse arrived in the parking lot of the Arvada Guitar Center, where one of 23 dates on the band’s current and highly publicized search for a new guitarist was scheduled last week, a teenage boy in Portland, Oregon, greeted frontman…
Not so much a jam band as a pulsating mass of sexy Latin-flavored beats, the San Diego-based B-Side Players embrace a multi-culti groove and make it theirs, urging you with horns and congas to dance, damn it, dance! Reggae it ain’t, and you shouldn’t buy your ticket expecting to hear…
Buck Wild & His Cocaine Rangers are riding high these days, roping in audiences with their dark but danceable odes to countrified rock and roll. Sporting vintage cowboy duds and a semi-crazed expression, Buck Wild (né Rex Moser) smokes on the electric guitar, while serial bassist Mike Mayhem (who moonlights…
Whenever and wherever Junior Brown performs, you can bet your Telecaster that a gaggle of guitar geeks will be standing in front of the stage, their mouths wide open, drooling over Brown’s frenzied fretwork on “Big Red,” his custom-made guit-steel. The hybrid instrument, which combines an electric guitar with a…
When Roy Haynes was attending grammar school in his native Boston — it’s been an age — a teacher once sent him to the principal’s office because he couldn’t stop drumming his fingers on the desk. Little did the authorities know: Soon the distracted imp in their midst would become…
It’s hard to tell where Evans is headed at this point, given the many directions in which she’s been tugged throughout her career. She began as a fairly straightforward soul/R&B crooner, but her involvement with the Notorious B.I.G., whom she married in 1995, and the Artist Formerly Known as Puff…
The first New Order album in eight years finds the survivors of Joy Division banging their collective drum in yet another monochromatic burst of synthetic rapture. Not that Manchester’s most brooding band ever really suffered commercially from picking at the same scab — or from adhering to the same descending…
