Before there was Britney, before Christina, Denver-based pop singer Ciria Arellano was poised for teen stardom. She had a chance to join the ranks of the cute little Mousketeers on the new Mickey Mouse Club — a program that has, in the past several years, served as a kind of…
The business of making music and all that it entails — touring, finding a decent record label that you can trust, keeping your band together and somewhat sane — can be backbreaking work. Just ask John Hulett, singer/guitarist for the East Bay punk act Automatic 7. When Hulett was only…
In three weeks, the Black Heart Procession finishes the solo leg of its U.S. tour and hooks up with Man or Astro-Man? for a series of dates in the Northwest and along the East Coast. Man or Astro-Man?, as you may be aware, plays manic, intergalactic surf music, Dick-Dale-on-crank instrumentals…
The sometimes-shlong-bearing Kevin Bacon (remember Wild Things?) really screwed up cocktail hour for a nation of stoned cinemaphiles and desperate party hosts with his recent appearance in the inexplicably stinky flick Hollow Man. Starring alongside an invisible person kind of complicates the playing of “Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon.” Think…
Barnyard blues for ballin. Thats what you might call the one-man mutated backcountry stomp offered by Bob Log III, who performs Friday, September 1, at the Ogden Theatre with Maraca-5-0 and Frank Hauser Jr. Stuck somewhere between Captain Beefhearts codpiece and the front-porch funk of Mississippi Fred McDowell, the Tucson-based…
Siúcra, Thursday, August 31, at Trilogy in Boulder, is an act with a deceiving handle. Siúcra is an Irish word meaning sugar,: and while this band has certainly mastered Irish music, the sound it creates is anything but sweet. True, the threesome (Beth Leachman on vocals and bodhran, Shannon Heaton…
Documentary filmmakers view rock and roll as an inexhaustible well of material, and their efforts to chronicle important musicians have resulted in some mighty fine cinema, including Dont Look Back (1967), which managed to show a young Bob Dylan as both a genius and a brat, and Gimme Shelter (1970),…
Maybe it’s his rubber-tight britches — pants so snug they’d make the Michelin Man squirm. Or maybe it’s his countrypolitan image and those knock-kneed maneuvers he’s made famous — Presleyan gyrations that make the ladies smile and the men snicker. Whatever the reason, despite his place as a trailblazer in…
In the rock-and-roll food chain, music producers get more grief than groupies. From tantrum-throwing prodigy Phil Spector and classical innovator George Martin to indie upstart Steve Albini and funkadelic mixmaster DJ Muggs, even the biggest hitmakers are eclipsed by the very artists they help launch to fame and fortune. There…
A couple of weeks after Melissa Ferrick won a Boston Music Award for Outstanding Female Singer/ Songwriter in April, she wrote about it in her online journal. But instead of waxing poetic on the magic of her moment — when her name was announced, maybe, or how she felt when…
Comedian Alex Thomas is like a profane George Gallup; he just loves taking polls. On Monday, August 21, at Fiddler’s Green, where the summer-long Up in Smoke tour took its final puff, Thomas, a veteran of The Jamie Foxx Show who served as the event’s master of ceremonies, filled time…
If you are not a member of the swelling crowd of beautiful people who frequent local raves and dance clubs, the first annual Colorado Dance Music Awards held last Friday night at the Ogden Theatre might have left you feeling as though you’d accidentally stumbled into an outtake from Blade…
John Doe, perhaps best known as songwriter/bassist for the seminal Los Angeles punk band X, stops in Denver as frontman for his solo project, The John Doe Thing, Sunday, August 27, at the Lions Lair. Far from anonymous, Doe has kept one foot firmly planted in the music world since…
Raw Material 3, Friday, August 25, and Saturday, August 26, at the Banyan Market, provides a variation on a familiar expression by proving that, in the world of experimental, electronic music, everyone dances to his own drum machine. The third event of its kind sponsored by Ancient Desert Sounds and…
You dont need to possess Albert Einsteins intellect to contribute something to the world, but it might come in handy during the 24 Hours of Boulder trivia marathon that begins at 4 p.m. on Saturday, August 26. Teams participating in the marathon — which will raise funds for both the…
At first glance, Aimee Mann’s return to the airwaves seems like the final scene in some topsy-turvy Hollywood movie. In the mid-’80s, she became an MTV darling as the platinum-blond frontwoman for ‘Til Tuesday. After falling from fave-face status, she beat a just-another-pretty-bass-player rap by releasing a pair of critically…
It is not uncommon for up-and-coming artists to be a little overzealous when it comes to promoting shows or new CDs: Just check the overcrowded windows of local music venues or the utility poles outside them, where musicians’ fliers compete for space with apocalyptic decrees and ads for miracle weight-loss…
Summer may be drawing to a slow, sad close, but there’s still plenty of time to pack up the family wagon and head for the hills. We took a bag of local releases along on a recent road trip, and while barreling down the highway, we discovered that the local…
The first minute of NOFX’s new album, Pump Up the Valluum, sounds damn near identical to the first minute of the band’s sixth album, Punk in Drublic, released in 1994. The rock-god dueling guitars fire up the intro, then the drum rolls of impending doom indicate something really big is…
Merman Jim Thomas could probably make a good living simply reproducing the surf sounds of old, or revving them up with a touch of punk rock and peddling them to a new audience. But he’s more ambitious than that, and on Road Show, his group’s latest, he proves it by…
Colorado, it’s safe to say, isn’t known for its soul men. But by creating some of the most stirring music to emerge from this state, Denver native and ex-Subdude John Magnie has been correcting that shortcoming for the past couple of decades. These days, Magnie’s crafting his spiritual sounds in…
There are two types of mourners in the world. One weeps openly in public, without shame, displaying his sorrow for all to see. The other stands stone cold and impassive, as if any show of emotion would bring on uncontrollable hysterics. Hefner definitely fits into the latter category. With songs…
