Around this time of year, the recording industry slows down and enters a kind of commercial hibernation. With the exception of a preponderance of seasonally themed recordings (see Michael Roberts’s “Holidaze” wrap-up in the December 14 issue for the best and worst of those), release schedules grow slim as most…
Thirty-five years ago, at the height of Beatlemania — the phenomenon, not the stage show — some cynics pooh-poohed the notion that the unprecedented hysteria surrounding the Four Lads from Liverpool would endure. (“What are you going to do when the bubble bursts?” a smug, apparently drunk Tallulah Bankhead sneered…
With his latest release, Dwight Yoakam continues his reign as the King of Contemporary Country. Tomorrow’s Sounds is a brilliant collection of classic C&W filtered through Dwight’s 21st-century cowboy mind. Guitarist/producer Pete Anderson starts “Love Caught Up to Me” with one of his trademark melodic guitar figures, launching the tune…
Most popular composers, no matter how well known they are or how vast their body of work, tend to be remembered for a relatively small number of songs — and that’s certainly the case with Cole Porter. Despite his status as one of the century’s most enduring Broadway songwriters (George…
Alan Greenspan will probably never weigh in on it, but it’s generally understood that the economy for reggae music can bear about one good boxed set per holiday season. Recent years have yielded the excellent Bob Marley set Songs of Freedom, the almost-as-excellent Peter Tosh set Honorary Citizen and the…
Back in October, Mayor Wellington Webb announced the city’s plans for an exhaustive New Year’s Eve celebration that would center on the 16th Street Mall in downtown Denver. He promised that this year, the city would usher in the new year in style, noting that last year’s rather unimpressive public…
Starlight Mints, Friday, December 22 at Tulagi in Boulder, with DeVotchKa, began its life as a kind of skewed seven-piece orchestra — complete with string section — led by singer/songwriter Allan Vest and drummer Andy Nuñez. Though the band is now condensed to a quintet, its second release, The Dream…
Despite a name that might suggest otherwise, Worm Trouble, Thursday, December 21, at the 15th Street Tavern, with Hi Fidelity and the Dinnermints, has much to celebrate these days: The Denver outfit is still riding the creative crest of The Poison Kitchen, an intense, moody album that wouldn’t seem out…
Are you in the holiday spirit but can’t stand the thought of yet another performance of Tchaikovsky’s Nutcracker? (There are three productions of it in the city, you know.) How about supporting a jazzed-up approach to seasonal standbys like “We Three Kings,” “Jingle Bells” and “Oh Little Town of Bethlehem”?…
How many versions of “Jingle Bells” does the average person need? Plenty, apparently. Each year, the recording industry unleashes a torrent of seasonal discs, most of them dominated by a humdrum repertoire of tunes — and each year a percentage of them sells well enough to justify a similar deluge…
The last time William Topley was in Colorado, he almost froze his ass off. It was a week before Christmas in the faux-Swiss theme-park surroundings of Vail Village, and a clearly pissed-off-looking Topley was preparing to play a nighttime outdoor concert in 15-degree weather — for reasons unclear even to…
Several years back, when the record industry was trying its damnedest to stir up an electronica youthquake, Norman Cook, aka Fatboy Slim, was the hitmaker most likely to be denigrated. After all, how hip and underground could he be if every freakin’ tune he created wound up in the background…
On his latest offering, former Colorado picker and current Oregon resident Dick Weissman offers eighteen instrumentals that bring to mind bygone days without seeming like museum pieces — thanks to the spirit of adventure with which Weissman and sometime violin accompanist Keiski infuse them. “From Granada to Kingston,” for example,…
For more than three decades, Hank Mobley was regarded by the bulk of the jazz-listening public as a journeyman of the hard-bop idiom, one of a dozen or so competent tenor saxophonists who toured clubs, filled out various recording bands and cut the occasional side under their own names. But…
As the Denver area resonates with the sounds of the season, there’s a death knell ringing through Broomfield. Last week, the board of directors of Up With People — the do-gooder performance and service group that calls Colorado home and employs more than 260 people worldwide — suspended operations indefinitely,…
Michelle Shocked, with Sonny Landreth, Sunday, December 17, at the Boulder Theater, has always presented a deft combination of punk philosophy and folk tradition, beginning with the rustic and bluesy Texas Campfire Tapes, a sparely recorded acoustic offering that caught the attention of fans and, later, Mercury Records, in the…
Proving that there’s more to music in the High Country than après-ski singers doing Jimmy Buffett covers, the Vail-bred rap-rock quartet Sucker, Friday, December 15, at Tulagi, has spent the last three years establishing itself as one of the state’s most promising live bands. Now based in Boulder, the group’s…
DJ Euphorick is among the resident spinners who have found asylum at the Sanctuary, the newest addition to the LoDo club landscape. And although the space, which sits at 20th and Larimer, is open to the public every weekend — with worldbeat stylings from DJ Qrt on Friday and DJ…
Monica Janzen first felt the lump in her breast eight years ago, when she was thirty. It was small, and her doctors said it was nothing. In fact, a month later it went away, and so she got on with her life as a computer consultant. She continued moonlighting as…
For the musician, the romance of life in Colorado comes with a price, because the state’s geographic gifts — the Rocky Mountains, snow and the surrounding open plains — are a serious obstacle for acts that want to tour for a living. While this may not be a secret among…
A long time ago (about a decade and a half, actually), in a land far, far away (Los Angeles), I was watching U2 play “One” on the video monitors at the Tower Records branch where I worked. In the middle of the song, which the band performed as part of…
In the mid-’90s, Veruca Salt drew countless comparisons to the Breeders, and its hit, “Seether,” received massive airplay that put the Chicago band on the map with that Smashing bald guy for a while. Six years later, after a nasty split with co-founder Louise Post, singer Nina Gordon floundered for…
