Before Sidetracks is half over, Steve Earle’s assertion that its thirteen tunes are not outtakes but underexposed gems is as credible as an Enron annual report. While there’s plenty of good stuff here, the hit-and-miss quality of the collection makes clear that it’s less a creative outpouring than a contractual…
We all know that wine can make even the best music sound that much better. But thanks to some party-pooping liquor-code policies, vino has been vetoed from the list of picnic items that concert fans can pack in for this summer’s outdoor performances at the Denver Botanic Gardens. Those who…
Will Britain’s Ed Harcourt, Saturday, May 11 at Tulagi, make you sell all your Jeff paraphernalia on eBay? Nope. But Here Be Monsters, Harcourt’s much-buzzed-about debut, delivers groovy, gauzy ballads for you lovesick dreamers. The tunes are notable for their piano-driven soft-rock arrangements dressed up with horns, woozy backup vocals…
Vocalist and guitarist Pete Vincelette recorded the bulk of Twilight Motel’s CD, One in the Oven, all by himself in the basement of his home. Only later did he add the work of drummer Rick Arsenault, bassist Eric Taylor, violinist Joel Denman and mandolin/lap-steel player J.T. Saint on four of…
Lawrence Golan knows firsthand that classical music can be a tough sell. As a professor of conducting and director of the Orchestral Studies program at the University of Denver’s Lamont School of Music, Golan spends his time teaching the classics to music students and conducting the school’s orchestra. Along the…
As “She Don’t Care,” the first cut on Will Hoge’s debut studio album Carousel, roars to life, it sounds very similar to something by those ’80s rabble-rousers the Georgia Satellites — with a much better singer. Hoge’s sinus-headache-hangover verses give way to a full-throated Van Morrison wail of a chorus,…
The Band’s 1976 farewell concert at San Francisco’s Winterland Arena was an extravagant affair, complete with turkey dinners for the show’s 5,000 audience members, each of whom had paid the then-exorbitant ticket price of $25 to attend. Produced by legendary promoter Bill Graham, the Thanksgiving show, billed as “The Last…
Like Bob Hope or a common housefly, punk music outlived its usefulness in a hurry, subsisting on bland, discarded jokes and stale cheese. By the time the Sex Pistols called it quits in 1978, an isolated American youth was finally coming to grips with the budding romance of not caring…
Randall Shipp is not a newcomer to the entertainment business. He’s owned the Paramount Theatre for ten years, a veritable eon in the concert industry. But the wealth of Shipp’s experience lies in mortgage brokering — he’s the owner of the Denver-based Mayflower Capital Company — which makes his current…
If your cheesy, green-beer-swilling, American version of Saint Paddy’s Day got a mohawk and a few tattoos, then did a fat line of blow along with its usual bucketfuls of Jameson, it would look a lot like Flogging Molly. This band, which appears Sunday, May 5, at the Ogden Theatre,…
Laymen Terms vocalist Andy Tanner puts emphasis on expression over angst, a quality that just might endear this band to listeners wary of punk’s bratty edge. In fact, there’s plenty to set this Colorado Springs four-piece apart from the pop-punk pack. Fond of roving melodies and vocal harmonies, the band…
In “Dolemite,” the raunchy routine that helped define his career, profanity-spewing comedian turned ass-kicking, ass-baring cult-film favorite Rudy Ray Moore describes a character who takes no shit from anyone — even his own father. “Why, the day he was dropped from his mommy’s ass,” Moore brashly announces in his trademark…
In the world of music, change is the only constant. Movements mutate. Yesterday’s vogue is today’s punchline is tomorrow’s retro fad. Punk rock is, of course, not exempt from this fluctuation. The turnover of “wannabe” to “it band” to “has- been” can be just as rapid and precipitous as it…
Perhaps no one has summed up Johnny Cash better than Richard M. Nixon did: “Yours is truly the voice of America, as rich and strong as our nation itself.” Cash’s nearly fifty-year recording career has produced an enormous body of essential American music, most of which has been spottily issued…
We expected Barry Fey, head of the Denver extension of House of Blues Concerts and sworn battlefield warrior in the local concert-promotions war, to have an opinion about the possible sale of his company to Clear Channel Entertainment. Clear Channel, which had made moves to acquire the heart of the…
David Bazan, aka Pedro the Lion, who performs Friday, April 26, at the Bluebird Theater, with Damien Jurado, Gathered in Song and TW Walsh, has been called many things: whiny, self-absorbed, full of “minor-league anxieties.” But the born-again Christian singer-songwriter has a gift for telling stories in an offhand, lo-fi…
With a big voice and even bigger ambitions, Xiren (pronounced Seer-in) has wasted no time making a name for himself in the Mile High City and beyond since relocating from Detroit in 1996. Known off-stage as Daryl Kenny, the singer sports an eclectic style and a soaring tenor that makes…
Some bands trumpet their presence like a parade of angels. You know — God’s gift to music. The recent elevation of Bono to the status of world diplomat and would-be savior is just one example of the messiah complex rooted in the rock-star psyche. John Lennon spent the latter half…
Martin Sexton is the central character in one of those bootstrapping success stories Americans love. The performer, who began his career by busking on Boston street corners, has built a supportive fan base of thousands across the nation while remaining independent of the machine that perpetuates mediocre talents better suited…
The improvement in home-recording technology has caused an explosion of material from bedroom auteurs. But a not-so-funny thing often happens on the way to the iBook. Many performers spend so much time polishing their sonic rocket that their finished products sound slick and lifeless, thereby reducing the initial spark of…
Like St. Francis Xavier in a coonskin cap, Fruit Bats frontman Eric Johnson has a way with animals: For starters, dancing moths, honeybees, fireflies, mastadons, mountain goats, chestnut mares, poison frogs and bison herds are all over Echolocation. But while a mismatched menagerie inspires his sweetly rendered retreats from big-city…
If this is all Bloom has to say after a more than two-year break from releasing new original material, he may as well take another extended hiatus. Although eminently listenable in a chamomile-sipping, NPR sort of way, there’s little here worth hearing for anyone but diehard Luka lovers. The most…
