In promotional materials intended to hype its latest album, Mustang Lightning is called “unmistakably the most energetic and hard-driving band to emerge from the Denver music scene.” And guitarist/vocalist/phrasemaker Phil DeVille doesn’t back down from this claim. “The music that we play is the kind I like,” DeVille says from…
In Europe, New York and Los Angeles, rhythm and blues guitarist/vocalist Sammy Mayfield has made a name for himself as the musical director for legendary soul and gospel shouter Solomon Burke. But in Denver, where Mayfield was raised, he’s just another musician about town. He’s respected in musicians’ circles, but…
David Byrne David Byrne (Luaka Bop/Warner Bros.) Apparently this is the season for faded new-wave stars to search for their roots. Like Elvis Costello, whose recent Brutal Youth was a blatant attempt to return to the days when he got good reviews simply for existing, Byrne has temporarily abandoned his…
Although rap music became commercially viable only a few short years ago, the style itself has been around in one form or another since at least the late Sixties, when the Last Poets’ brand of incendiary verbal politics first scorched the intelligentsia. A quarter of a century later, many members…
John Carter has his work cut out for him. In a city where there’s a Sound Warehouse in nearly every strip mall, Carter is trying to carve a niche for himself with Locals’ Music, a store that sells only locally made recordings. And he hasn’t exactly made the job any…
Mike Love: The name conjures up a particularly Californian image of sun, fun, peace and happiness. If Love, the longtime vocal anchor of the American institution known as the Beach Boys, hadn’t been born with this name, he would have been well advised to adopt it. But Love is a…
Many of you men and women out there probably think “bitch” is a bad word. According to the members of the punk quartet 7 Year Bitch, you’re wrong. “It’s a compliment, really,” says Valerie Agnew, the drummer who powers Viva Zapata!, the group’s propulsive new disc on C/Z Records. “That’s…
Colleen Fitzpatrick, lead singer of the New York City-based power-pop quartet Eve’s Plum, may not be a star yet, but she’s already getting the star treatment. “Last night we did this big show in L.A., and we shot a video,” she says, “And it was a circus and a zoo,…
Blues harmonicat Charlie Musselwhite looks a lot older than his fifty-something years, but in his case, that’s okay: He’s earned every line on his face. After four decades of playing and living the blues, Musselwhite is indisputably among the top harmonica players alive, as well as one of the funniest…
“I am the undisputed world champion of this band,” says Mike Kirschmann about his group, the Christines. “And I play guitar and sing.” As any good bandleader should, Kirschmann has surrounded himself with talented musicians who are so happy to play together that the warm fuzzies could fly all afternoon…
Kokane Funk Upon a Rhyme (Ruthless/Relativity) I admit it: When I saw the cover of this album, I figured that the disc would bite. The reason was simple–there’s too much lame, redundant, boneheaded gangsta rap out there right now, and a recording by someone named Kokane (real name: Jerry Long)…
Primal Scream, Thursday, May 26, at Fiddler’s Green, with Depeche Mode and Stabbing Westward, has little in common with either of the bands on its current tour. In contrast to the keyboard-tapping Modes or Westward’s junior Trent Reznors, the Screamers combine Scottish roots, British dance rhythms and American gospel into…
If Oklahoma City doesn’t go down in pop-rock history as the next (yawn) Seattle, Flaming Lips guitarist/vocalist Wayne Coyne won’t mind. He likes his hometown the way it is–boring. “We’ve sort of gone out of our way to say, `Look, there’s nothing going on here. Just do what you want…
Peter Himmelman is definitely not a material guy. The 34-year-old singer-songwriter from Minnesota (best known to the tabloid-reading public as Bob Dylan’s son-in-law) says, “I try to view the world as being constantly made manifest by the will of God, in every single blade of grass that moves in the…
Sweet De, the lead voice for Denver’s Cool eMCees, is at the microphone at Aurora’s Platinum Studio, freestyling a new set of rhymes meant to conclude “The Funky Joint,” a tune set for inclusion on the group’s upcoming album. De’s partner, Skoolboy Fresh, and semi-official DJ Chilli E. sit in…
Maggie Estep No More Mister Nice Girl (NuYo/Imago) Calling Ms. Estep a spoken-word artist is tantamount to describing Richard Nixon as a former congressman from California: It doesn’t exactly tell the whole story. Sure, Estep speaks a lot of words–as a former student at Naropa’s Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied…
Perhaps it’s testimony to America’s essential greatness that a culture seemingly dominated by news of Roseanne and Tom’s marital problems still manages to produce artists as inspired as Georgia’s Vic Chesnutt. Chestnutt isn’t a ringer for Eddie Vedder, his voice isn’t as cherubic as Steve Winwood’s and he can’t step…
After asking guitarist Dick Dale a question, hold on. This rock-instrumental innovator, this creator of surf rock, this influential wild man beloved by players as disparate as the Beach Boys’ Carl Wilson and Sonic Youth’s Thurston Moore has a lot to say, and he says it fast and furiously. The…
Barkmarket, with Spongehead, Tuesday, May 24, at Seven South, is a band that inspires strong opinions. Relatively meek listeners likely will hate this trio–hate it with a passion not unlike that exhibited by the mob that recently celebrated the execution of John Wayne Gacy. But the more adventurous among you…
Jeb Bows, the seventeen-year-old guitarist in the Longmont-based band called Linus, doesn’t care for the term “Generation X”–and with good reason. Bows and his bandmates–vocalist Dan Parris, guitarist Andy Rothbard, bassist Jason Barlowe and drummer Mike M.–hardly fit the blank-eyed, TV-worshiping profile some observers use to describe the under-25 crowd…
John Trudell Johnny Damas and Me (Rykodisc) No getting around it: Trudell is dogmatic, didactic and driven to say more about most topics than many listeners are eager to hear. But he’s also utterly genuine, aggressively intelligent and as fierce as a radical vegetarian in a butcher shop when it…
“In Spanish our name means `the specter, the ghost,'” drummer Steve Shiramizu says of El Espectro, a local alternative-rock group in which he’s teamed with vocalist John Meggitt, guitarist Fletcher Necley and bassist Chris Kennedy. That’s appropriate, since Shiramizu and Meggitt have haunted the Denver music scene since 1986, playing…
