Blink-182

Blink’s return on a bill co-starring Weezer, Taking Back Sunday and Chester French could be really, really good or really, really bad. Pros: Because the trio’s only been on the shelf for four years, the rust isn’t that thick — and the impetus for their hatchet-burying, a horrific airplane accident…

Amanda Blank

If all you know about Amanda Blank comes from her guest spots with Spank Rock, you’re hardly prepared for everything she can do. On her debut album, I Love You, the multi-talented diva forges hip-hop, electro and punk into a dance-friendly amalgam while literally invoking R.E.M. and Romeo Void, among…

Obituary

High priests of Florida’s legendary death-metal scene alongside Death and Deicide, the members of Obituary have been grinding morbidity and decay into heavy, guttural masterpieces since their seminal 1989 album, Slowly We Rot, a disc that helped define the genre and lock it forever into the metal pantheon. After a…

OvO

Hailing from Milan, Italy, OvO is essentially an international duo at this point, keeping up a rigorous yearly tour schedule that traverses Europe and North America. The act’s sound could be termed “gothic power violence,” in that its sharp-edged dynamics and acidic drones are an alloy of black metal’s unblinking…

Honey Don’t

Rambling down a country back road of old-time bluegrass and Americana-inspired ditties, Paonia’s husband-and-wife team of Bill Powers and Shelley Gray (best known for their work with the Sweet Sunny South) lead a nimble acoustic formation through a musical holler of lazy hounds, yawning porches, banjos and long-gone neon motels…

Snake Mountain

People don’t push enough — especially rock musicians, a generally sedentary lot who love to remain at rest, both on stage and in their brains. Snake Mountain, however, is all about pushing. And pulling. And yanking you through a ditch, a deep one full of dripping hypodermics and raw sewage,…

Little Fyodor

The subtly disturbing “Death Sides Now,” a Joni Mitchell cover, opens the latest full-length from Little Fyodor. Recalling the more demented side of Sun City Girls, Peace Is Boring is possibly this act’s most actualized release to date. Before punk became codified, weirdos like the Residents, Ranaldo and the Loaf…

The Motet

For the Motet, the groove is paramount — no shock, since the band’s de facto leader, Dave Watts, is a drummer. But despite the presence of African inspirations that are at least as prominent as jazz-fusion influences, the beats on Dig Deep (available for free download at www.myspace.com/themotet) are slicker…

Travis Egedy’s Pictureplane is taking off

A native of Santa Fe, New Mexico, Travis Egedy, who performs under the name Pictureplane, has been rapidly gaining the attention of popular underground bands such as HEALTH, which praised the act on Pitchfork, invited Pictureplane to go on tour, and brought it to the attention of the Lovepump United…

Wolfgang Gartner at Vinyl

After releasing a slew of records under such aliases as Mario Fabriani, White Collar Criminals and Frequent Fliers, Joey Youngman hit it big with his latest and greatest nom de beats: Wolfgang Gartner. Under that alias, introduced in 2007, Youngman has quickly built a worldwide buzz for his brazen style…

Win stuff in our random midweek contest!

Welcome to the debut of our random midweek contest in which we give you a bunch of you a bunch of random things from our office for answering a bunch of random questions every week. Kind of random, eh? Anyhow, for the inaugural edition of our humpday hoedown, we thought…

Dulcinea’s to re-open as Pete’s Monkey Bar

​When it opened in 2002, Dulcinea’s 100th Monkey was hip jazz, blues and funk spot, but within a few years it gradually morphed into more of club that embraced the jam nation. It was a fine addition to the Bianchi brothers empire that now includes Cervantes’ Masterpiece Ballroom, Quixote’s and Sancho’s Broken Arrow…

Single File rock (girls jeans) at the Gap

Behold another edition of the Single File road files: In this week’s episode, we find our heroes set up on the showroom floor of the Gap performing “Zombies Ate My Neighbors.” The in-store is purportedly in honor of the retailers 40th anniversary (really? forty years? who knew?). Which Gap? Dunno…

End of Empires lose gear to thieving d-bags

If karma truly is a boomerang, then may the thieving, unscrupulous jerkoffs who stole a truckload of gear belonging to End of Empires get audited by the IRS — or at least, like, I don’t know, come down with a nasty case of swine flu or something. Earlier this week,…

Over the Weekend: Hall & Oates at the Paramount Theatre

Hall & OatesSunday, August 30, 2009 Paramount TheatreBetter Than: Seeing most other bands of this vintageThe Hall & Oates show this past Sunday at the Paramount Theatre attracted a well-heeled, recital-worthy crowd. Aside from a few rogue, enthusiastic fans who just couldn’t resist dancing in their seats, the majority of the audience…

Over the Weekend: Ratdog at Chautauqua

Bob Weir & Ratdog Sunday, August 30 Chautauqua Auditorium Better Than: Parts of the reunited Dead’s performance in Denver a few months ago For those of us who were introduced to the Grateful Dead as elementary school kids in the late-1980s by the San Francisco band’s ubiquitous MTV hit “Touch…

O.N.E. (of Infinite Mindz) is an ‘Inglorious Basterd’

Infinite Mindz is currently hard at work on the followup to last year’s Monkey Rebellion Musik, but in the meantime, crooning member O.N.E. is branching out on his own. He recently connected with DJ Quote for his new mixtape Inglorious Basterd, which showcases his rapping skills as well as his…

What is the Twin Geminorum Complex?

Those who carry the Gemini sign celebrate their birthdays between May 21 and June 21, and apparently there’s a lot of them who rap in Denver: Mane Rok, InkLine, and Ichiban are coming together with a bunch of other Gemini rappers to form the Twin Geminorum Complex. The project, tentatively…