When Groove Armada signed with Jive Electro (the dance-music arm of Jive, the label that’s home to ‘N Sync and Britney Spears) in 1999, the nu-soul house-music unit was a cool London secret and not much else. Two years later, Andy Cato and Tom Findlay have created a top-of-the-line disco…
Shannon Wright (who also goes by shannonwright) picked up her ball and went home after a label merger at Big Cat in 1998 left the band she originally fronted, Crowsdell, curbside. Gnashing her teeth at the soulless bean counters of the music industry, the Jacksonville native sequestered herself on a…
A master at indulging the exquisite ache of romantic longing, Cousteau comes off like an absinthe-sipping amalgam of del Amitri without the bitterness and Bowie without the coke. A lush, languid bitch-slap in the face of perky teen pop idols everywhere, this CD shimmers most menacingly when the subterranean stylings…
Rarely have songs so down in the dumps sounded so blindingly sunny as those on the Pernice Brothers’ The World Won’t End. Like famous pop depressives such as Brian Wilson and Ian Curtis, frontman Joe Pernice appears to transform all the things that bring him down into pure bah-bah-BUH-bah sing-along…
Somewhere in their office on York Street, the three owners of nobody in particular presents are having to find room for their Herculean huevos. On Monday, nipp’s Jesse Morreale, Doug Kauffman and Chris Swank filed an anti-trust lawsuit against Clear Channel Communications, Inc., the radio/entertainment behemoth that has been swallowing…
Drum and bass was supposed to make the world safe for electronic music, replacing the predictability of “techno” with an expansive arsenal of shifting polyrythms. But when it digressed into another predictable set of formulaic thumps, the term Intelligent Dance Music (IDM) was coined to describe the work of a…
Aggressive Persuasion is but one of ten bands on a scintillatingly scary bill touted as “The Immaturity Show” and slated to hit the Aztlan Theatre on Saturday, August 11. Though the Pueblo-based quartet’s origins reinforce the values of the nuclear family — the band began shortly after leader David Bryant’s…
For the country artist with principles, preserving a career in these days of shlocky commercial twang requires survival skills. Jim Lauderdale’s life-saving methods have helped him somehow earn dollars in the mainstream as well as credibility among country’s fringe. But along with his more obvious skills — stellar songwriting chops,…
When Norman Blake performs at Swallow Hill on Saturday night, more than a few audience members will probably be there because they bought the soundtrack to the movie O Brother, Where Art Thou?, a wonderful collection of rootsy country music. On it, the 63-year-old Blake performs two numbers: “You Are…
The life of a jazz singer can be rough. First you’re in London, in early July, opening for George Benson at the historic Royal Albert Hall. Then it’s a full week of dates at Ronnie Scott’s, Europe’s premier jazz club, in nearby SoHo. Then you’re off to Copenhagen for a…
Once upon a time, back in the dark ages (before advertising tie-ins were cool), performers who sold their music for use in peddling products were seen as artistic heretics. But such thinking now seems as outdated as the eight-track-tape player or condoms that only come in one color. Turn on…
Not only does this CD feature the hit song “Sugar,” but it’s endorsed by Radio Disney and the Disney Channel. Plus there’s a free AT&T Calling Card inside! It’s good for five minutes — billed in one-minute increments. There’s a surcharge for calls made from pay phones, but you can…
Pennywise has got to feel a little like Prince Charles at this point: Both have been waiting and waiting and waiting to assume their respective crowns. While the day-to-day doings of Queen Elizabeth don’t give royalty watchers much to complain about, just about everyone who keeps up with punk rock…
It might have seemed like a mini-metal marathon last week, when an unusually dense lineup of some of Denver’s more hard-hitting bands took the stage at Sports Field Roxxx, the East Colfax venue that has become one of the city’s metal meccas: One by one, the musicians assaulted crowds with…
Perhaps the only thing worse than being an unknown, struggling musician without a hit song is actually scoring that hit and coping with the sudden, unfathomable fame that goes along with it. Just ask Kurt Cobain — or Warren Zevon, who performs Sunday, August 5, at the Fox Theatre. After…
Reshaped from Pornographic Memory into one of Northern Colorado’s most adventurous live acts, the Fort Collins-based quartet the President’s Wives — opening for Armchair Martian Friday, August 3, at the 15th Street Tavern — serve up a punk-influenced hootenanny of free-range improv based loosely around the writings of citizenly frontman,…
For songwriter Jim White, finding hidden blessings in times of catastrophe is nothing new. A charming backwater intellect who is as comfortable discussing Carl Jung’s collective unconscious as he is Alfred Hitchcock, Hurricane Earl or Jefferson Davis (“the mad scientist who got a $60,000 grant from MIT to record information…
It’s 10 p.m. on a Friday, and the Orb’s Alex Paterson enjoys the beautiful view as he works his way through the evening’s third interview. “It’s almost a full moon tonight,” he quietly interrupts. “It’s a very clear night, and I’m standing in the garden.” At home with his girlfriend…
Has the Wu-Tang dynasty fallen off? Rumors of strife within the group, along with Old Dirty Bastard’s legal troubles and declining record sales, all suggest the kings of Shaolin may have lost the power that they once wielded over the rap industry like a mighty sword. With so many Wu-affiliated…
The first thing listeners will notice about Lucinda Williams’s new album, Essence, is how dramatically it differs from her 1998 Grammy-winning classic Car Wheels on a Gravel Road. The rich narratives and roadhouse swagger have given way to a starkly introspective sound that ranges from gentle repetition on “Lonely Girls”…
This long-awaited four-CD collection contains nearly every song commercially released by Buffalo Springfield, the short-lived but seminal Los Angeles-based rock band. In fact, disc four presents, in their entirety, newly remastered versions of the group’s first two albums: Buffalo Springfield and Buffalo Springfield Again, its masterpiece. And most of the…
The passage of years tends to color perceptions of music conceived for the stage, no matter how good it is. Take Oklahoma!, which has been referred to so frequently as the play responsible for revolutionizing American musical theater that most folks consider it to be as musty and cobwebbed as…
