Appearances to the contrary, the first annual 5280 Urban Music Awards has nothing to do with 5280 the magazine. It does, however, have everything to do with the local hip-hop scene. The UMAs are slated to be held on Saturday, October 17, at the Crown Plaza Convention Center off of…
I am a pensioner!” Roger Daltrey declares with a laugh. “I’m not just a few years from it. Technically, I am. That’s the age we are.” Do the math. Circa 1965, Daltrey was the 21-year-old lead singer of a U.K. band called the Who – a flinty young tough with…
With a broad sonic brush, Johnny Wohlfahrt creates music that blurs the line between pop and the avant-garde with a rare daring and openness of spirit. Writing and performing under the moniker nervesandgel (due on Tuesday, October 20, at Rhinoceropolis), Wohlfahrt has been a prolific songwriter whose work, while clearly…
“Don’t take me away, spaceman/I want to stay here on this wasteland,” sings BrakesBrakesBrakes’ Eamon Hamilton on “Don’t Take Me to Space (Man),” one of the many high points of the British band’s new and third full-length, Touchdown. The outfit’s weird, sinewy yet innocent garage rock is far sleeker and…
Damon Krukowski and Naomi Yang first burst onto the international underground rock scene as two-thirds of influential dream-pop band Galaxie 500. When Galaxie split in 1991, on the verge of stardom, Damon and Naomi released their first EP as a duo. Ever since, Krukowski and Yang have produced a string…
Hailing from Olympia, Washington, LAKE has a refreshingly un-ironic and musically solid take on mixing together indie pop with R&B for a sound that is essentially blue-eyed soul. The delicate harmonies and infectious melodies present in most of the band’s material are reminiscent of popular songs of the ’70s, without…
On Liam Finn’s outstanding 2007 debut, I’ll Be Lighting, the New Zealand-based singer-songwriter played nearly every instrument save for drum tracks and some bass help from his father, Crowded House and Split Enz alum Neil Finn. Liam’s vocals definitely recall his old man’s, even more so on Champagne in Seashells,…
When performing solo, Washington state’s pop savant Phil Elverum operates under the name the Microphones — but when he hauls his troupe of players along with him, the project is known as Mount Eerie. The difference may be mostly academic, but the live experience is vastly different; drawing from a…
Denver-based jazz bassist Erik Applegate has strong enough chops to have performed with jazz heavies like Milt Jackson, Harold Mabern and Tom Harrell, but on Red Skies, his debut as a leader, Applegate shows he’s a skilled and well-versed composer, as well. Over the course of his six originals here,…
Hindsight may be 20/20, but it still seems too soon to truly get a big-picture idea of what the ’90s were all about. Luckily for St. Elias, the big picture is moot. With its debut full-length, Believe It, the Denver trio has homed in on one tiny but worthwhile slice…
On their self-titled LP, the Lords deliver a potent, sludgy blend of heavy, super-fuzzy riffs, a thundering rhythm section with just a hint of swing and throaty, passionate vocals that fall somewhere between Alice in Chains and Stone Temple Pilots. It’s a sound that would have been huge fifteen years…
This debut album from Devil Got Five reveals that there’s more to the band’s songwriting than being couched in the realm of metal. The tastefully rapid changes of pace and melodic breakdowns in “This Is Now” sound like a melding of speed metal and a more progressive aesthetic. “Can’t Abide”…
Le Loup’s 2007’s debut, The Throne of the Third Heaven of the Nations’ Millennium General Assembly, was essentially a Sam Simkoff solo project with some help from Christian Ervin that relied on a fair amount of knob-twiddling and multi-tracking. Over the last two years, Simkoff assembled a band to interpret…
The hurricane that is Beth Ditto and her band, Gossip, just released the fourth full-length of their ten-year career, their first for a major label. The album, Music for Men, produced by Rick Rubin, finds ditto and her mates — guitarist/synth Nathan Howdeshell (Brace Paine) and drummer Hannah Billie —…
All the way from France comes the sexy, deep techno of Les Freres Courvoisier. Okay, it isn’t really French; it’s local artists Jonathan Canupp (aka Ten and Tracer) and Joshua Smith’s (aka Time for Trees) collaboration as the faux-French brothers Jean-Pierre and Stefan Courvoisier. Together they produce “sexy party music…
I dropped by the Rear Inn Lounge (4991 West 80th Avenue in Westminster) on a recent Wednesday and stumbled on a roomful of kickballers. There had to be at least a dozen teams there, the players all wearing their team’s colored T-shirts, drinking pitchers of beer and playing beer pong…
Drag the River has always been about giving fans the biggest bang for their hard-earned buck. If you ever stumbled into a bar that has a Drag record in the jukebox, for instance, you’ve probably noticed that if you select the last track on the album, you’re treated to the…
Sounds like everything’s turning up roses these days for el broski with the froski. For those in the cheap seats, we’re referring to Mr. Rob Drabkin, the proud owner of Denver’s most distinctive do. The singer-songwriter was just tapped to open seventeen dates on Davy Knowles and Back Door Slam’s…
It’s rare to see a flier for a dance-music event that’s this elegant and understated. Fliers for what used to be called raves relied heavily on abstract CGI imagery, eye-scorching color schemes and faux-clever drug/pop culture references to grab one’s attention. None of that is on display here. Instead we…
With frontman Duncan Barlow currently residing in Florida, d.biddle doesn’t play very often. And so when it does, needless to say, it’s something of an event, particularly when one of the shows happens to fall on Halloween and rolls into El Día de los Muertos. With Barlow looking like an…
Wonder if the MySpace page belonging to Candy Claws has seen a significant spike in the past two days. We’re guessing that it has. Around this time yesterday, “Catamaran,” a track from the outfit’s latest effort, In the Dream of Sea Life, which has been remastered and is slated to…
On Naima’s Grass Pajamas, Paul Riola’s Bottesini Project has assembled something of a dream lineup, including guitar legend Nels Cline of Wilco, bassist Keenan Wayne, CacheFlowe, Janet Feder and Glenn Taylor. The musicians recorded a day’s worth of improvisations, then Riola and Colin Bricker spent many additional hours in the…
