Damon Gough, who performs under the moniker Badly Drawn Boy, has a thing or two to learn about being an English pop star. Whereas most prominent musicians from his homeland dress flamboyantly, maintain piss-off attitudes and regularly issue bold proclamations about the enduring significance of their work — whether such…
Southern California’s brand of sun-soaked Americana evokes a playful, hedonistic teen utopia of endless summers, surfboards and the ocean’s heartbeat, for starters. Without thinking too hard, you’ll likely recall Annette Funicello’s bare little midriff, Gidget’s wiggle, and Malibu Barbie’s tan, polyvinyl-chloride skin. But for Colorado’s Maraca Five-O, the instrumental surf…
With all of the effort that’s put toward indoctrinating middle-class youth into the cult of suburbia, it’s not surprising to see the rate at which bohemian leanings are traded for button-down collars. It’s something that usually takes place just after college commencement. Most likely, it’s that familiar notion — that…
The trouble with all too many reissues is overfamiliarity: Record-company execs often launch already popular titles onto the market years or decades after their debut in the hopes that people who already own them will be persuaded by the inclusion of alternate tracks, a new mix or remastering to buy…
While this Blur disc has been out for some time, it’s worth a look-see for all fans of the U.K. scene as well as anyone interested in one of the last decade’s best contributions to rock and roll. The British quartet opens its first American singles compilation with “Beetlebum,” a…
Led by the indomitable Clarence Fountain, the Blind Boys of Alabama formed in 1939 when Fountain and four other students from the Talledega Institute for the Blind began sneaking off to sing at a local military base as the Happyland Singers. In the ’50s, by then known as the Original…
Before Calypso music was hijacked by CapriSun commercials and weddings planned by Pier 1 sales reps, it was a fine, spontaneous song form that centered, to a large extent, on the art of the insult. On the West Indian island of Trinidad, where the rhumba-heavy style flourished before moving to…
No matter how exhilarating the pendulum-swinging dynamics of post-hardcore music can be, they’re also pretty tough on soft ears. While Q and Not U, Thursday, May 3, at Double Entendre Records, will never be confused with puffsters like Blink 182, the band makes more concessions to the cochlea than do…
Most punks have probably always wanted a good excuse to bust out their leathers, their opaque sunglasses and their favorite three-minute anthems for an unabashed bout of over-amplified Ramones worship. While last month’s premature passing of punk icon Joey Ramone was no doubt a little more extreme than what they…
John Schmersal is one week out of the studio, on the road again with his newish project, Enon; this time, the mostly Brooklyn-based foursome is touring with friends, the Toadies, Texan arbiters of amplified goodness who are on a well-funded mission to reclaim some of the commercial success they nabbed…
When most Americans think of acoustic blues, they hear the moaning and groaning, my-baby-left-me-and-I’m-down sounds of the Mississippi Delta. John Jackson, however, plays Piedmont blues, a decidedly different breed that’s distinguished from its Deep South counterpart by the same trait that marks Jackson’s personality. Piedmont blues, the 77-year-old Jackson notes…
The first time Pam Puente, the front-woman/vocalist/guitarist of Denver’s Double-Barrelled Slingshots, had the pleasure of meeting her future bassist, Amy Davis, there was more than a little tension in the room. Their predisposition toward one another was antagonistic. Had the introduction snowballed into a full-fledged tussle, few in the room…
For years, decades, ages, epochs, music journalists have been writing articles declaring that Rock Is Dead — but it ain’t, my friends. The underground rock scene, in particular, hawks up good stuff on practically a daily basis, and less adventurous stuff is still selling in sizable numbers: Of America’s ten…
Boy George gave up a good thing back in the mid-’80s when he left his new-wave reggae outfit Culture Club and its unit-moving profit potential. Drugs, egomania and personal conflicts have claimed casualties among many of pop music’s best contributors, and Mr. O’Dowd was no exception. But the dandy of…
Last Sunday night, the weather outside was frightful — but so was much of the discourse inside the Soiled Dove, at a Colorado Music Association meeting where more than 150 people had shown up to discuss the City of Denver’s recently implemented ban on under-21 music fans at small- and…
Ahhhhh, bossa nova. It’s back, you know, although — like the best art — it never really went away. Created in Brazil in the 1950s, bossa nova’s marriage of jazz and samba remains irresistible. One of its masters, pianist João Donato, a contemporary of bossa nova founders Antonio Carlos Jobim…
The Bowed Piano Ensemble is best observed from a sky-cam. The group consists of ten musicians who are affiliated with Colorado College in Colorado Springs; they’re under the command of Stephen Scott, an instructor at the school who’s internationally renowned not only for his intriguing modern-classical compositions but also for…
A couple of telling facts about Shipping News: Fact one: The band — whose approach to what we still persist in calling “rock music” is at once notably intellectual and appealingly emotional — is named for one of the most stunningly written novels of the past decade, 1993’s The Shipping…
Jim Dalton can tell that his band, the Railbenders, are growing more popular with each show they play. It’s as clear as the hats on the heads of the fans who show up, in greater numbers each time, to hear them. “A lot of people have come up to me…
From Swallow Hill to Schenectady, open-stage jam sessions tend to bring out the kid in even the most aging artists. So imagine what might happen if a good portion of the participants at a particular venue actually were too young to know Bessie Smith from the Smithereens. That’s precisely the…
New Orleans’s seedy Bourbon Street is infested day and night with barfing frat boys, bug-eyed tourists from Keokuk and nimble-fingered pickpockets. Ironically, it is also home to some of the most disgraceful music ever to sully the name of traditional jazz. Right there in the birthplace of the art –…
This two-CD set finds the 51-year-old Boss in better form than any voice coach could ever have predicted. Sure, neither he nor saxman Clarence Clemons is nailing quite as many of the high hard ones as they once did. But the fact that they’re still hitting any of them is…
