Readers angry at me for giving negative reviews to their favorite bands regularly accuse me of not liking anything. This charge is amusing in part because each year since 1991, I have assembled a massive roster of recordings that I do like–the largest, most wide-ranging list of its kind that…
Concerts get called off all the time, for a variety of reasons: illness, poor ticket sales, freaks of nature like the blizzard that hit the region this fall. But the circumstances surrounding the postponing of a bash starring Puff Daddy & the Family that was to have taken place on…
Metallica Reload (Elektra) To put it as plainly as possible, the last Metallica album, 1996’s Load, made me angry: To see a band that I had always valued for its integrity change its music for what appeared to be commercial reasons was deeply frustrating. But after catching the quartet in…
It’s not all that uncommon for musicians and/or fans to found their own independent labels. But Owned & Operated, a new imprint out of Fort Collins, has a couple of marked advantages over most such startups–specifically, name recognition and connections. The principals in the label bring with them loads of…
Denverites Recone Helmut and Clark ov Saturn have not gone out of their way to disassociate themselves from their previous group, Westword profile subject LD-50 (“Lethal Dose,” March 13). Like LD-50, which broke up this past summer, their new act, pH-10, shares its name with a chemical abbreviation–and they chose…
Country artist Tim O’Brien, who appears on Saturday, December 13, at the Houston Fine Arts Center in the company of Mollie O’Brien, the O’Boys and the Swallow Hill Swing Band, left his Denver home for Nashville eighteen months ago, partly because he thought that being headquartered in Music City might…
At first blush, the decision by the members of Isis Curtain to throw a CD-release party at Antropolis, a new art gallery, seems strange. After all, standard rock-scene etiquette calls for such bashes to take place at the Bluebird or the Ogden instead of a spot more accustomed to displaying…
When the Moog Cookbook was invited to play live on MTV’s Week in Rock program, bandmembers Uli Nomi and Meco Eno, aka Roger Manning and Brian Kehew, didn’t see any drawbacks to accepting, even though it would mark their first-ever concert appearance. But after they donned their mock-futuristic costumes, they…
Do folks actually buy new Christmas albums annually? Many must, because each year brings with it a pile of recordings intended to exploit the spending mood in which so many of us find ourselves come December. What follows is an overview of the latest crop, with the prizes and the…
“I think Berlin is the best city in Germany,” says Patric Catani, who collaborates with Gina D’Orio in the Berlin-based electronic agitprop duo known as EC8OR. “But it is also the worst.” On the surface, this statement is an obvious contradiction. But as Catani and D’Orio know, it’s also appropriate…
For an aspiring party band, Denver’s Askimbo has been known to leave the occasional listener in a mood that’s far from festive. At one cafe gig, lead singer/trombonist Howard Bridges II leapt off the stage in order to confront a bouncer who was getting rough with his roommate. And a…
Click. On KBPI-FM/106.7, morning DJs Rick Kerns and Kerry Gray are trying to determine why Kerns is having such a tough time getting “laid.” A caller suggests, “Because he’s an asshole?” Gray is exultant at having received a correct response: “That’s right! Because he’s an asshole!” Click. On KHOW-AM/630, Jay…
“When you talk American culture, you’ve got to start with music,” says Ray Condo, frontman of Ray Condo and His Ricochets. “That’s the meat and potatoes of this country. It’s the music that broke all the rules, and society followed. There’s nothing better in the history of the world than…
If you think that the content of many Denver radio programs flies in the face of political correctness (see “Obscene and Heard,” page 81), consider the roles assigned to female DJs, particularly during morning drive time. Women are not entirely absent from the airwaves from 5 to 9 a.m.: Corporate…
On the CD Fly, Fly My Sadness, the Bulgarian Voices–Angelite, a female chorus from Bulgaria formerly known as Le Mystere de Voix Bulgares, collaborates with Huun-Huur Tu, aka the Throat Singers of Tuva. The juxtaposition of the women’s ecstatic, deeply felt wailing and the bottomless pitch of the Throat Singers,…
The recent death of John Denver seemed to leave Colorado without a pop star whose resume included liquor-related arrests. But as it turns out, someone is already filling the gap: Rick Roberts, lead singer of Firefall. According to a representative of the Boulder County Sheriff’s Department, Roberts–whose Boulder-based group scored…
“What we’re doing might as well be an ancient language,” explains Tom Sublett, electric bassist for Denver’s Sanskrit. “Nobody says, ‘It might as well be Sanskrit’ anymore, but at one time that was practically interchangeable with ‘It’s Greek to me.'” Sublett, age thirty, and his Sanskrit collaborators (saxophonist Bret Sexton,…
When dance-music innovator Moby was first profiled here (“The Beat Goes On,” January 20, 1993), what is now called electronica was about as commercial as tainted beef. The rave scene was flowering, and techno–a now-outmoded handle–was gaining greater popularity within the club and party scenes. But beyond this relatively small…
Wayne “The Train” Hancock should be in the mood to celebrate. After all, he’s earned critical acclaim and the undying gratitude of y’allternative listeners for his first two albums of rousing, staunchly traditional Texas swing, 1995’s Thunderstorms and Neon Signs and the new That’s What Daddy Wants. His personal life’s…
The Capitol Hill neighborhood has gone through plenty of changes during the last 75 years. But on this Thursday night at the Denver Turnverein, a funky structure at 1570 Clarkson that has welcomed the city’s German population since 1922, time is standing still. Put your ear to the door beneath…
Fans and critics have identified San Francisco-based Kitty Margolis as one of her generation’s finest jazz vocalists. But Margolis herself isn’t ready to make a similar claim. “I’m not even going to try to say that I’m a great jazz singer or that I have anything more special than someone…
At the conclusion of “Guilty Pleasures,” an article that appeared in our October 30 issue, I invited readers to send along guilty musical pleasures of their own: awful songs that they can’t help enjoying. I was simultaneously pleased and disturbed by the flood of responses I received. Your good-humored letters,…
