Talk about mood swings. Just about the time you grab a sonic handle on the Blue Noise Band (“Listen, Margaret, there’s a real purty steel-guitar waltz”), it slips away and the tune instantly morphs into something else (“Jesus, Mags, it’s Napalm Death!”). Born and raised in the musical melting pot…
In the jungle canopy of Belize grows a moisture-loving fungus — a member of the Geotrichum family, to be exact — that has recently been caught in the act of attacking compact discs, munching on their plastic and aluminum with a glee that only a fungus can know, destroying whatever…
Back when grunge was the flavor of the week, its spiritual cousin, garage rock, seemed ready to bust into the mainstream. But after Kurt Cobain aerated his head, blowing a hole through the movement he’d come to personify in the process, garage went back to where it came from –…
Few players in the jazz realm can satisfy every audience. There are traditionalists and there are progressives, and not often do the two meet. Ellyn Rucker, Sunday, July 22, at the Mercury Cafe, is a notable exception, a longtime local songstress whose music is easily as welcome on KUVO as…
In the early days of electronic instruments, the use of such noisemakers virtually guaranteed that the resulting music, good or bad, would have a certain metallic/robotic feel. But that’s becoming a thing of the past. Thanks to better equipment and an increase in the number of artists able to take…
Garnered from a series of 1999 shows that featured a who’s who of contemporary pickers and twangers, Concerts for a Landmine Free World is most satisfying when performers address the shows’ theme indirectly, if at all. A case in point is Patty Griffin’s “Mary,” which laments both the Virgin Mother’s…
Back when Robert Pollard’s liver was pinker, Guided By Budweiser earned its cult stripes with a foolproof formula: It created jillions of lo-fi, anthem-baiting sketches that recalled mid-period Beatles/Who, sported intentionally vague lyrics and rarely exceeded two minutes. Pollard hasn’t stopped honoring his forefathers of the British Invasion — he…
In the vapid days of the early Reagan years — that period when the musical world turned as gray and dreary as Margaret Thatcher’s underthings — you couldn’t walk out the door without running into a Bangle or a Flock of Something. The first ballistic surge of punk had mostly…
You expect a band as well-traveled as the Voodoo Glow Skulls to have its share of bad-luck road-trip stories. You just don’t expect them all to come from the same tour. On the phone from somewhere between Edmonton and Winnipeg, Canada, in an area he refers to as “no man’s…
Now that twangy, Appalachian-rooted singers like Dolly Parton and Patty Loveless have effectively been banished from the country-music airwaves, where lowest-common-denominator blandness rules, there’s only one thing left for a hillbilly girl to do: put out a bluegrass album. Two years ago, Parton jump-started her singing career with the critically…
At this point, no one doubts that a lot of great music has been made under the influence of marijuana: As my first exhibit, I present the island of Jamaica. But the history of songs written about marijuana is not nearly as storied; after “Legalize It” and a handful of…
Imbued with old-school flavor and the weirdest production she’s yet committed to record, Missy makes a great leap forward here. Where Supa Dupa Fly was solid if not stunning, and Da Real World stagnated somewhat (though it was spiked with a few great cuts), Miss E…So Addictive is a varied…
If you’ve gotten in the habit of heading up to Nederland for that mountain community’s Monday-night Acid Jam — an activity that sounds all the more appealing as Denver swelters — you might want to leave early next week so that you have time to figure out just where those…
Jack Johnson has an almost obscene number of things going for him. A professional surfer in his teens and a filmmaker in his twenties, Johnson only recently discovered his talents as a pianist, songwriter and vocalist. Good thing he did: Johnson’s self-titled debut album is a soulful, pleasingly simple collection…
As one of Denver’s longest-running local outfits, Jux County has more than earned the right to perform during the LoDo Music Festival on Saturday, July 14: Guitarist/vocalist Andy Monley, drummer Ron Smith and bassist Chris Pearson (an ever-present local fixture who splits time between Jux, the Czars and Sarina Simoom)…
Jeffrey-Paul Norlander just doesn’t get it. Ever since he and the Denver Gentlemen put down their instruments five years ago, the band has been swathed in an almost mythic lore that constantly eludes him: The Gentlemen, he is repeatedly told, were giants of Denver’s then-emerging roots-rock music culture. The fact…
Though he’s been part of the Kansas City, Missouri, music scene for ten years, Chad Rex has no delusions about where he and his band fit in the city’s music community. “If there’s an under-underground, that’s where we’re sitting,” Rex says matter-of-factly. That could be changing soon, thanks to the…
Miles Dewey Davis was a man of many parts, and since his death ten years ago this September, jazz fans and cultural critics have continued their long struggle to put him together. To champions of artistic understatement, he was the ultimate exponent of cool, a musical genius whose lean phrasing…
In this age of Popstars and Making the Band, the idea of a fully manufactured pop group is hardly even a windmill to tilt against. A cartoon band such as the Gorillaz, however, is an experiment that not even the most brazen marketer has attempted. It’s something of a shock…
“My whole life in Monster Magnet, and pretty much my whole life in rock and roll, has been a cross between the ultimate satirical stereotype and the times when that stereotype becomes a reality,” Monster Magnet leader Dave Wyndorf told Westword in 1998. “And the cool thing is, when you’re…
Tammy Cochran has just released the sort of mainstream country debut you figured Music Row didn’t have in it anymore. Cochran has a stunning voice that’s muscular and 21st-century twangy, though she has clearly gleaned wisdom from the old records of love and loss. Her country music is for folks…
Reason Number 894 why signing with an established record company is not always a good thing: Established or not, the company sometimes does wacky things, like filing for bankruptcy and leaving its signees in a strange state of professional purgatory. That’s a lesson Chris Daniels and the Kings have been…
