Shoegazers sometimes get a bad name. There’s something to be said for bands that investigate the more restrained spaces of ethereal, dreamy pop — rather than attempting to shatter the passageways of their listeners’ inner ears — while contemplating issues of the heart. On its self-titled debut CD, Breathing Eve,…
About 24 hours before arriving at a friend’s home in Ann Arbor, Michigan, for a rare day off following a string of live dates in the northeastern United States and Canada, Dan Bern is happy about a couple of things: that he’s touring behind his fourth and best album, the…
Harlan Hendrickson has issued a challenge to all the closet lovers of ’80s metal: It’s time to step up — fist held high, pinkie and index fingers extended — and get ready to rock. “There’s no need to be embarrassed any- more for loving Mötley Crüe,” he says proudly. Grab…
It’s probably safe to say that no one really predicted a second generation of pleasant lo-fi bands that emulate heroes such as Elliott Smith and Built to Spill. You start a band in hopes of becoming the next Beatles or Rolling Stones, not the next Death Cab for Cutie. And…
Back in the 1980s, singer Shelby Lynne was supposed to be Nashville’s Next Big Thang — she even recorded a duet with George Jones — but the girl from Alabama never quite jibed with Music Row’s by-the-numbers approach to music-making. After putting out five critically acclaimed but poorly selling albums,…
While Julie Andrews twirled around the Swiss Alps as Rodgers and Hammerstein’s favorite singing fräulein, little Lord Bertrand Burgalat, the son of a minor government official, languished in Corsica. Forced to learn classical piano under the threat of constant Brie, he grew up to not only dazzle jet-setting Euro-hipsters, but…
If that heart attack several years back wasn’t proof that the Hoosier half-pint is running out of steam, this CD is. Clocking in at just over forty minutes, Heads suffers from a navel-gazing focus that a successful 53-year-old artist such as Mellencamp should have outgrown by now. Usually at his…
There’s something immediately arresting about David Bazan’s vocals, though nothing particularly dramatic is going on. His words are almost always delivered in a slow, off-hand lope. Bazan sounds somewhat congested, as if he barely has the strength to form the words and tap out a somnolent rhythm with one drumstick…
For more than two months, the American powers that be have given us plenty of indirect warnings that Westerners who dare set foot on certain soils in certain parts of the world will be immediately jailed, dismembered or at least diabolically scowled at. Yet all of the shadowy imagery that’s…
Candye Kane, Thursday, December 6, at the Boulder Theater, is a bisexual ex-porn vet, a poster girl for the pleasingly plump and an entertainer extraordinaire. Kane miraculously incorporates her charmingly candid perspective on various vices into one of the most uplifting rhythm-and-blues shows imaginable. Her difference-destroying performances have made her…
If you were to imagine folk music made on a faraway planet called Aquatari — where Sonar’s Captain 69, Commander Colt 44, Commodore 64 and Doctor NC 17 claim to hail from — you might expect a robotic kind of electronic music, with lots of erratic little Jetson-y space noises…
Let’s begin with a stubborn rumor: The Glands’ first album, 1997’s Double Thriller, was so titled (the story goes) because the console upon which it was mixed was also used for Michael Jackson’s Thriller. How that console was supposed to have gotten into a studio across the street from the…
Suffice it to say that Mystic’s career as a hip-hop artist got off to a difficult start. On the day the young, Oakland-based rapper signed with Goodvibe Records in 1999, her excitement was quickly tempered by some tragic news. “The day that I got my record deal was the day…
At first blush, DJ Swamp holds all the intrigue of a nicely edited movie preview. The man smashes records during his sets and rubs the shards on his chest! He sometimes scratches his tongue with a stylus! He even sets himself on fire when he’s really into it! How much…
Pulsing out of an invisible electro-chemical reaction, a thought originates deep inside the skull and flutters through a seemingly chaotic labyrinth of synapses. Then there is the innate tendency to impose structure on this boiling, gurgling randomness — to refine a thought and cast it into the tangible constructs put…
Some items from the what-ever-happened-to? file: When Skull Flux, the visceral and heady Denver-based combo that trudged along for more than six years (and along the way snagged three nominations in various Westword Music Showcases), finally splintered for good two years ago, some suspected frontman Conrad Kehn couldn’t stay quiet…
You can peg British DJ Paul Oakenfold five ways: as record producer, remixer, A&R man, label head and gas bag. He might even be an honorary local, given the number of times he’s spun in Colorado this year. His upcoming appearance at the Fillmore Auditorium on Tuesday, November 27, however,…
Not only does Armando Zuppa have the distinction of being one of Denver’s first and only Italian-born and -bred banjo players, he is also the neo-grass world’s first bona fide superhero: On Wednesday, November 28, at the Soiled Dove, the leader of recent European transplants New Country Kitchen will release…
In some parts of Mexico, Jaguares frontman Saul Hernandez is more popular than President Vicente Fox, political muralist Diego Rivera and his iconic artist wife, Frida Kahlo, and revolutionary Emiliano Zapata. At least that was the suggestion last year, when a Mexican Web site asked citizens to vote for their…
Many performers haven’t a clue about the inner workings of their own hype machines — but Kelly Hogan is a big exception. From 1997 to 1999, a few years before Chicago’s Bloodshot Records released her latest album, the wonderfully evocative Because It Feels Good, this indie-music veteran worked for the…
There’s a great story behind Roots Volume 1, Merle Haggard’s delightful new disc, his second for the Anti- label. By chance, Haggard discovered that Norman Stephens, who played lead guitar on some of Lefty Frizzell’s 1950s recordings, lived just fifty miles from Haggard’s Northern California home. Frizzell, one of country…
It’s a Scottish supah-group, y’all, and the only thing you should really be scared about is whether anyone will ever be able to top this record. Gary Lightbody of twee-poppers Snow Patrol birthed the idea of a giant Scottish musical collaboration while drinking at a Lou Barlow show in Glasgow…
