Let’s face it — the tuba isn’t exactly a sexy instrument. When one thinks tuba, some of the images generated are polka, old men (especially old men wearing black knee-high socks and bad plaid shorts) and flabby, elongated cheeks. Just how the New York-based trio Drums & Tuba produces such…
Uwe Schmidt (one of Germany’s quirkiest electronic musicians, with over two dozen alter egos to his name, including Atom Heart, Lassigue Bendhaus and Lisa Carbon) masquerades as South American composer /dancer Señor Coconut on this release — the remastered precursor to 1999’s El Baile Alemán. For that album, Schmidt reconfigured…
Scotsman Nick Currie’s decision to record under the name Momus, defined in one friendly Webster’s as “the Greek god of blame and mockery,” was an appropriate one. His career has been filled with oddball moments, such as those that followed “Michelin Man,” a song from 1991’s Hippopotamomus that contained a…
Like all good French boys, Thomas Bangalter and Guy-Manuel de Homem-Christo like to take things slowly, allowing time to savor the finer things in life. It’s been eight years since the Parisian duo adopted the Daft Punk brand in order to tinker with the then-underground club sounds booming across the…
In the two weeks since Denver announced that it was revoking its split-premises permit for local cabarets — a ten-year-old policy that allowed patrons under 21 years of age to be in the same building as those of legal drinking age while alcohol was served — small modules of music…
Abstract Tribe Unique, Friday, April 12, at the Boulder Theater, slowly crept into the public’s awareness in 1995, when it joined the select roster of Grand Royal Records, the Beastie Boys’ nearly mythic imprint. Since then, the crew has dropped three albums on Battle Axe Records and continues to hone…
MindGOflip, Thursday, April 12, at Trilogy, probably could not have found a more appropriate name for its second CD: bounce bounce sound, which celebrates its release at this Boulder show, is a digital document of the band’s boisterous, bop-along pop music. In two years, MindGOflip has found an audience that…
These days, AC/DC’s immaturity is starting to look awfully mature — and not just in years. The band’s membership may have shifted over the years (although not lately — vocalist Brian Johnson is the new guy, with just 21 years of experience), but its sound remains much the same as…
The reaper had finally arrived for the white Chevy van, thirteen years and 350,000 miles after its birth on a Detroit assembly line. Last year, the van’s keepers — the members of the pajama-clad pop-punk trio Sketch — made the difficult decision to put their old friend down. Dave Allen,…
As alleged “gay supremacists” who once rattled the cage of underground music with 1989’s cult classic It’s Only Right and Natural, Dennis and Jimmy Flemion have gone beyond telling the world, “We are homos, hear us roar.” Racially Yours found them singing about ethnic tension — with one brother in…
With the release of its sixth full-length recording — the second in a row overseen by Steve Albini — Low has put itself on the map. The map of Duluth, Minnesota, that is, where the band started in 1993. Stasis, you see, is part of Low’s shtick. Drummer Mimi Parker…
Being a cult hero has its advantages: Worship by millions isn’t often part of the package, but worship by thousands ain’t bad. Yet the job isn’t as financially lucrative as it might seem at first blush, and maintaining this status over the long haul is damned near impossible. Stephen Malkmus…
At seventeen, she was a wide-eyed high school girl with a silken voice, shyly sitting in at smoky Denver clubs with local mentors like Joe Keel, Dee Minor and Nat Yarbrough. Twenty-five years later, she is a Grammy winner who’s played the White House twice, has eleven albums in the…
Readers unfortunate enough to be born after April 15, 1980, take heed: You have about ten days to soak up as many punk shows, club nights, karaoke contests and rock concerts as you can possibly cram into your soon-to-be depleted social dance cards. Come Easter Sunday, youngish individuals who like…
While it’s fashionable for many indie-rock bands to dabble in electronica, precious few electronica artists successfully integrate rock elements into their styles. San Francisco’s I Am Spoonbender, Thursday, April 5, at the Cat, deftly melds the two genres into a cinematic and hypnotic whole — with sincere (yet demented) noise-pop…
Many members of the local music community regard Dick Weissman, Friday, April 7, in the King Center Recital Hall on the Auraria Campus, as a wise man: A professor at the University of Colorado at Denver and author of the indispensable text, How To Make a Living in Your Local…
For years, it’s seemed, most hip-hop acts receiving good notices in the mainstream and alternative media have subsequently been rewarded with middling album sales and dim futures — which is one of many reasons why the rise of OutKast, appearing Friday, March 30, at the Fillmore Auditorium, with Ludacris, has…
On its debut recording, Memoirs From…, the Sad Star Café suggested that it had the chops to become a good guitar-rock band; the talent was there — it was obvious in singer Mark Sundermeier’s vocals and the dexterous playing of guitarist Kirk Schneider. The songs just hadn’t quite come together…
There’s a perception in this great land of ours that masterful singer-songwriter Nick Cave makes depressing music. But, as Cave points out, this opinion isn’t universally held. “It’s always Americans who say that,” he allows. He chuckles before adding, “The French never do.” Is this an example of what cultural…
In an old snapshot taken sometime in the late ’70s, Dusty Drapes and the Dusters crowd around a ’50s-era car, donning cowboy hats, boots and Western shirts. A sticker on the car’s bumper reads “Cowboy Cadillac.” In the foreground, bandleader Drapes (also known as Steve Swenson) and a young guitarist…
The current explosion in neo-Latin jazz has been set off largely by restless, brilliant pianists — the Cuban virtuoso Chucho Valdés and the Panamanian wizard Danilo Perez, to name just two. Their music is highly evolved and relentlessly multicultural — a spicy gumbo of Latin American, African and hard-bopping U.S…
There are something like two bazillion bats in Austin, Texas. On the underside of a bridge that divides north from south, the night-flying creatures shriek, defecate and hang upside down all day long in one of the largest bat colonies in North America. Once a day, around sundown, they make…
