With a gritty, gospel-bred tenor, Tommy Thomas doesn’t skimp on punchy, electric, gut-driven blues — which gives this followup to his 2000 debut, Working Man, such universal appeal. Ironically, Thomas’s method of pushing product upon the masses is less conventional than the music itself: He avoids hustling for shelf space…
Kerry McDonald, former bassist of local emo legend Christie Front Drive, has reinvented himself with the Mighty Rime. Sounding at times like Neutral Milk Hotel’s Jeff Mangum, Built to Spill’s Doug Martsch or Lungfish’s Daniel Higgs huffing helium, McDonald takes the unpaved back road to indie-rock rusticity. “Broke Baroque” is…
Boyd Rice is Denver’s darkest iconoclast: A Web site devoted to his twisted oeuvre wasn’t named www.longlivedeath.com at random. Yet his twelfth disc for Mute (most issued under the aforementioned Non de plume) is fairly accessible, by his standards. The seven works here consist mainly of industrial drones, and while…
A followup to 1999’s excellent Collecting Empties, Rainville’s second CD is another impressive showcase for songwriter John Common, who’s emerged as Colorado’s most authentic heartland-style rocker. Now playing as a four-piece with the addition of multi-instrumentalist Ian Hlatky, Rainville displays a growth and dexterity on The Longest Street in America,…
String-man extraordinaire Tony Furtado kicks off his first effort for Boulder’s What Are Records? imprint with “Oh Berta, Berta,” a wholly successful showcase for his Everyman singing and flying fingers that sells up without selling out. Elsewhere, he blends some additional vocal turns, on the Mike Nesmith cover “Some of…
If you were to tune into KTKX 91.5/FM, a low-watt radio station beaming out of Texarkana, Texas, you might find yourself humming along to a voice belonging to Jonathan Kuiper, frontman and songwriter of Colorado Springs pop quartet Accidental Superhero. KTKX is among a growing list of similarly smallish operations…
Denali — which hits the 15th Street Tavern on Saturday, September 21, with Gogogo Airheart and Navy Girls, and joins Black Black Ocean and Façade at CU-Boulder’s Club 156 on Sunday, September 22 — specializes in atmosphere that occupies a middle ground between benign and unsettling. On this Virginia-based band’s…
If you’ve used up all of your vacation time for the year, fret not. Boulder’s Lynn Patrick celebrates the release of her third CD, When She Dreams, at the Dairy Center for the Arts on Friday, September 20. Those familiar with Patrick’s sweetly soothing, instrumental-guitar originals will tell you that…
Slug, the primary rhymesayer behind the Minneapolis hip-hop duo Atmosphere, is feeling like something of a prognosticator these days. He predicts that once Christina Ricci listens to his song “The Bass and the Movement,” from his new disc, God Loves Ugly, she’ll be unable to resist his charms. On the…
When Alexander Barck says his group is “really bad with names,” he means it. He’s a member of the six-man German DJ/producer team Jazzanova, whose time-traveling, globe-trotting sound — a deft amalgam of hip-hop, jazz, funk, soul, samba, house and drum and bass — thoroughly defies description. In Between, the…
Depending on your perspective, Rocket Ajax guitarist Todd Schlafer harbors a musical dream that is either of the loftiest or the lowest sort. “I wanna be Korn,” he says. “We’re writing singles,” adds vocalist Dan Miller. “We wanna be on the radio; we wanna be, you know, big!” Whatever your…
On its 2000 debut, Coldplay sounded like a band that took Radiohead’s “Knives Out” a bit too literally, slicing and dicing that group’s sound to bits, trimming away all the ambition in favor of sheer digestibility. Ironically, it only made Coldplay that much harder to swallow — especially with a…
Ask anyone, of any age, to name the first album she or he purchased, and you can bet that the disc mentioned will be cool: a brilliant recording that’s truly stood the test of time. And do you know why? Because people lie. Okay, maybe some of them are telling…
There’s something admirable about Darius Rucker’s mission to prove he’s more than the Dylan of the frat-boy generation. After years as the darker-skinned front man of the otherwise vanilla party band Hootie and the Blowfish, Rucker is branching out. With the release of his solo debut, Back to Then, he’s…
Even though the weather indicates otherwise, the calendar and our post-Labor Day doldrums tell us that the summer of 2002 is fading fast. And while this is always a sad annual development for the sunshine junkies and mountain-ranger types among us, concertgoers might well find reason to celebrate the turning…
Forget everything you’ve heard about nu-metal and go see High on Fire, which appears Thursday, September 12, and Friday, September 13, at the 15th Street Tavern, with Jucifer. This Oakland group, created two years ago from the ashes of Sleep, is the most vital force in the new wave of…
The annual Kinfolk Celebration is showing signs of growth, as is the increasingly popular Yonder Mountain String Band, which founded it. Named for the group’s rabidly wiggly fans, the camping-and-jamming event has moved from its old Boulder locale to the larger setting of Planet Bluegrass’s event site in Lyons, where…
Reggae fans probably know the Jamaican-born, London-based Linton Kwesi Johnson best for his protest albums, classics such as Dread Beat An’ Blood (1978), Making History (1984) and the more recent More Time (1998). But Johnson is as well-known for his poetry as he is for his contributions to reggae music…
Jason Ringenberg has lived in or near Nashville since 1981, but he’s hardly a member of the city’s country-music establishment. “I feel like an outsider in that circle,” he says from his farm west of town. “But I feel like the consummate insider in the left-of-center crowd.” Now in his…
It’s always good to put yourself in new situations,” says Scott McCloud, singer, guitarist and svelte frontman of New York City’s Girls Against Boys. He speaks from experience. Since the band’s previous incarnation, Soulside, formed in 1986, McCloud and his bandmates have perpetually reconfigured, revamped and recast themselves — first…
Just outside Denver’s city limits, before the parched, sparsely populated plains swallow the last of the suburbs, there is a basement that regularly reverberates with a certain primeval intensity. Remarkably, the water heater still functions, even after its cumulative absorption of innumerable decibels. This small, underground room — nicknamed Helm’s…
I sometimes wonder why so many hardworking bands, in Denver and everywhere else in the world, continue to regard the acquisition of a major-label contract as the singular goal of their musical careers. Especially after all we’ve heard: the consequences of a once-sprawling universe of imprints consolidated into only five;…
