GirlGrabbers

On Chicks Only, GirlGrabbers’ ode to the ladies, the crew has crafted a damn near perfect array of instrumentals, mating soul samples with vocal loops. Each track is named for a different “hot chick,” from Arcadia Lake to Paula Patton. The cuts are slinky, uber-sexy and incredibly well arranged. The…

Swells

“Cat Magick” starts this album off on a refreshing, nearly unclassifiable note: The vocals, raspy and difficult to decipher, are right out of crust and black metal, while the music has a kind of mathy but sinuous intensity, like something from At the Drive-In. Twisty guitar leads intertwine with urgent,…

The Say So

The members of the Say So have a lot to say — mostly about their faults and their past relationships, of which they remain firmly critical. “It’s not me,” lead singer Sean Palmer bleats on their latest album. “It’s you.” On The Romantic, the emotional foursome blurs the lines between…

Eric Church’s beef is outdated…and lacking taste

The American Idol model of pop-star selection is obnoxious for a variety of reasons — the regular televising of Steven Tyler’s grotesque mask/face, for example — but the biggest one is the artifice of it: the implied presumption that some contrived elimination contest can dictate what we like. Even as…

Roger Waters at the Pepsi Center, 5/7/12

ROGER WATERS @ PEPSI CENTER | 5.7.12 See Also: (Review) Roger Waters at the Pepsi Center, 11/23/10 Roger Waters at the Pepsi Center slide show “Thirty years ago, when I first wrote this album, I was rather famously not very good at being in rooms with people liking me a…

Black Star

Mos Def and Talib Kweli, two whirlwind rhyme-slingers in their own right, first came together as Black Star in 1998. Their first album, Mos Def & Talib Kweli Are Black Star, was propelled by Mos Def’s poetic lyrics and Kweli’s poignant delivery, and it instantly had heads clamoring for more…

Photos: JunoWhat?! at Cervantes’, 5/4/12

JunoWhat performed on Friday at Cervantes’ Masterpiece Ballroom in Denver with Bernie Worrell (Parliament-Funkadelic, Talking Heads) on keys and Euforquestra, which opened the show. Photos by Nick Callaio for Westword…

Adam Yauch of the Beastie Boys has died

Adam Yauch (aka MCA of the Beastie Boys) has died. He was 47. Forming the Beastie Boys as a teenager in Brooklyn in the late ’70s, Yauch was part of a pivotal assembly of artists that defined rap music for the radio. Early incarnations of the group shifted genres and…

Portugal. The Man at Ogden Theatre, 5/2/12

PORTUGAL. THE MAN at OGDEN THEATRE | 5/2/12 Portugal. The Man really, really likes Denver — at least as much as the Portland-by-way-of-Alaska act appreciates band names with unwarranted punctuation and song titles with extra parentheses, it seems. “I know a lot of bands come out and say that every…