Concerts

Okay Fraysayers, sounds like the moment that you’ve been clamoring for all these years may finally be upon us. Just watched an interview that Sir Isaac Slade gave last week at Sundance in which he utttered the magic words so many detractors who have dismissed the band as being boring…

The Informants don’t really play cover songs. They don’t need to. “People seem to think they need a cover because it makes them feel like, ‘If I can hear a cover, I can have a good time,'” Kerry Pastine points out. “We give them a good time no matter what,…

Cole Rudy likes to start his Jazz Expo nights at the Meadowlark (2701 Larimer Street) with the music of Lenny Breau, who was one of the world’s greatest jazz guitarists but also one of the most underrated. A damn fine guitarist himself, Rudy was talking with Jonathan Bitz, who does…

In the liner notes to the reissue of the Raincoats’ debut album, Kurt Cobain wrote about how listening to those songs made him feel like a voyeur into a private world due to the intimacy and immediacy of the music. And while Dream Wagon (due at the Larimer Lounge on…

Upon first listen, it may be tough to discern folk singer A.A. Bondy from contemporaries like Ryan Adams or Jeff Tweedy. A.A., also known as Scott Bondy, stays above water in the overcrowded ocean of singer-songwriters by, simply enough, writing good songs and singing them well. It was this formula…

Lest you think all modern-punk package tours are monolithic blocks of terrible music, look beyond headliners Brand New and Manchester Orchestra — headlining the Fillmore on Saturday — to one of the opening acts: Dusty Rhodes and the River Band. The California-based sextet has somehow gotten away with a rootsy,…

In this economy, it’s hard to begrudge anyone trying to make a buck. Most rock stars, though, only want to rape your wallet — not molest your memories. Open Wings Broken Strings teams up three of the least essential singers of the alt-rock era — Eddie (formerly Ed; apparently Eddie…

Based in Paris, Nouvelle Vague has made a career out of taking old punk, new-wave and post-punk songs and giving them a unique reinterpretation — often with the cooperation and participation of the original bands. Marc Collin and Olivier Libaux put a kind of bossa nova, lounge and French pop…

The best punk rock always has a busted heart shivering beneath all the bluster and distortion. It’s a stretch to say that Throwaway Sunshine can be so simply labeled, but there’s no denying the punch, grit and world-weary determination of its full-length debut, For Everything We’re Not. Fronted by Cory…

Skeptics in Love follows a young couple into, and then back out of, love. It is not based on a single experience of any member of kosmøs, which is probably why lyricist Ben Tonak was able to step back far enough to view the thing from all sides. So the…

This album’s title, Collages, serves as a statement of purpose and a summation of the aesthetic of the band up to this point. The instrumentation and sampled sounds here overlap and complement each other in vibrantly varied configurations. “Spirit Stone,” for instance, seems to channel Ceremonial-era Savage Republic in its…

There’s not much appealing about the plain-Jane cover art that adorns Megan Burtt’s debut, which might prompt less-discerning listeners to pass this one up — and how wrong that would be. Over the course of a dozen tracks, Burtt shows off a stellar voice that splits the difference between Linda…

Anvil started out as Lips in 1978, but by the time it released its debut album, Hard ‘N’ Heavy, in 1981, it was going by the name we know today. The first three Anvil albums, including Metal on Metal and Forged in Fire, pioneered a furiously fast and aggressive music…

Just because a star was bred in Hollywood doesn’t necessarily mean he was born with a silver spoon in his mouth. Just take Mickey Avalon, the unlikely king of Los Angeles’s swanky clubs. He came from beginnings far beyond dubious and well into deranged, a fact he’s celebrated in his…

The Finnish city of Helsinki is one of extremes, where daylight lingers for nineteen hours during the summer yet is present for a mere six at the winter solstice. It’s the kind of place that might embrace a sunny, open approach to music at one moment while delving into the…

In case you were unaware, the darlings of the music industry have decided a regular music album wasn’t enough and moved into the visual arena. Yep, America’s favorite eukaryotic organism-themed band, Animal Collective, has teamed with filmmaker Danny Perez to make what it’s coining a “visual album” titled Oddsac. Before…

The Knife has made some ridiculously incredible music in the past ten years. In fact, the act has won quite a few awards for it, mostly in their native Sweden. Last year, one half of the sibling duo recorded an album using the moniker Fever Ray, and she just won…

Apparently Youtube launched a Pandora-esque service last week dubbed the Music Discovery Project with very little fanfare. Near as we can tell, it functions the same way as services like Last.fm and Pandora and operates based on some crazy mathematic algorithm we can’t wrap our tiny minds around, “Find >…

No doubt capitalizing on Joe King’s recent collaboration on “Undertow,” from Shock Value II, his latest effort, and the fact that the band happens to be in town that day, Timbaland has evidently invited the Fray to make a cameo at his show at the Gothic on Tuesday, January 26…