Nixon in China Saturday, June 7 Ellie Caulkins Opera House Although Nixon in China premiered way back in 1987, the John Adams-Alice Goodman opera still feels fresh and quirky. But neither the brashness of the piece itself nor Opera Colorado’s energetic and imaginative rendering of it during its June 7…
This was not taken at the hi-dive Dosh, Anathallo, L’elan Vital Saturday, June 7, 2008 hi-dive Better than: A makeshift drum circle. Martin Dosh is one of the more interesting artists to come out of Anticon’s multi-colored stable of artists. Over the course of four albums, he’s created a stream…
Dugout Canoe, Milton Melvin Croissant III, Fissure Mystic, Slight Harp and Vivian Girls Friday, June 6, 2008 Rhinoceropolis, Denver Better Than: A line-up of music that’s pretty much the same throughout. Fissure Mystic’s set at Rhinoceropolis this past Friday was only its second since taking a nine-month hiatus following Simon…
LOCALS ONLY D.O. The Fabulous Drifter may be bouncing between the east and west coasts, but the Mile High City runs deep in his veins. He’s planning to release his new album, Resilience this summer, which is a collection of tracks from other projects he’s been involved in including His…
Wow. We had a considerably more difficult time tracking down a clip of Flobots performing on Leno last night than we did when they played on Last Call with Carson Daly. In fact, after trolling You Tube and refreshing our Google search every ten minutes or so, we came up…
Slideshow by Jon Solomon Maceo Parker Thursday, June 5, 2008 Boulder Theatre Better Than: Seeing a gal wearing hot pants in a cold sweat doing it doing to death. It’s been more than a decade since the last time I saw Maceo Parker perform, and the 65-year-old funk sax master…
Flobots continue their swift march upwards tonight with an appearance on the Tonight Show with Jay Leno. From all indicators, the band hasn’t lost any momentum. Fight with Tools is continuing to sell briskly (the album is once again Twist & Shout’s top seller), and “Handlebars” is still doing quite…
Photo by G. Wigler Twenty-five years ago today, on a unseasonably dreary June day presumably a lot like the one we’re experiencing right now in the Mile High City, a marginally known band from Ireland played a now legendary set at Red Rocks. The gig essentially turned Bono and his…
Photos by James Mitchell Evans The Dead Science, Physics of Meaning and Dan Kaufman Superstar Eruption Wednesday, June 4, 2008 Hi-Dive Better Than: Playing Indie-metal free jazz by yourself In any “movement,” there are going to be the moderates and the radicals. Both groups have equal claim on the direction…
When I’m a Boy kicks into its set, you may start to wonder exactly what year it is. Not because the music is dated, but because the band’s music has the lean, focused quality that characterized early songs by the Who. The group’s shows may make you flash back to…
The Germany of popular imagination is a place ruled by efficiency, order and a rigid, uptight worldview. How is it, then, that so much incredibly sexy, funky house music originates there? Okay, the fact that so much of it is of the stripped-down, minimal variety lends credence to that whole…
In Woody Allen’s film Sweet and Lowdown, Sean Penn plays guitarist Emmet Ray, who said he cried every time he listened to the great gypsy jazz guitarist Django Reinhardt. Some of Reinhardt’s beautiful ballads have the same effect on me, and knowing his history makes the music all the more…
Driving eastbound on I-70, Ellison Park has one hand on the wheel while the other navigates an iPod mounted to his dash. Scrolling through the songs, Park makes his way to the batch of demos he recorded on his MacBook and pushes play. As his voice pours from the speakers…
Beehatch, Beehatch (Lens Records). Frequently danceable and consistently dark, Beehatch is a collaboration between Phil Western and Mark Spybey, both previously members of Skinny Puppy side project Download. Beehatch often sounds like the soundtrack to both your nightmares and your wet dreams, but trance beats and the occasional melodic hook…
If writing obscenely accessible pop is a crime, Set Forth should get the chair. Radio-friendly? Hell, these guys might as well send BFF pendants to program directors with copies of their four-song debut. Figures that the group formed at the behest of a radiohead. Shortly after catching Steve Melton and…
No, the world hasn’t been waiting for another folkish band fronted by a precocious, big-voiced singer, and the familiar nature of the strummier material on Let’s Build doesn’t help separate Girl Named Kyle from the pack. Take the concluding “Epar,” which contains the confession “I feel like I’ve been here…
Singer-songwriter David Berman is as much of an ironist in life as he is in art. Note that after landing in rehab following a Xanax overdose (an act with sardonic aspects of its own), he belatedly embraced Judaism — a belief system he’d never taken that seriously despite his band’s…
Husband-and-wife team Jason Hammel and Kori Gardner seemingly make gorgeous indie-pop songs as casually as the rest of us shower in the morning. Much has changed since they released their 2006 debut on Barsuk, Bring It Back; they’ve moved to New York and had another daughter, for starters. But Re-Arrange…
“We like to do 2 percent jazz and 98 percent funky stuff,” proclaimed Maceo Parker on his 1992 live album, Life on Planet Groove. Sure, he’s a deft jazz player, but when it comes to funk and R&B sax, Parker is the king. After honing his chops in James Brown’s…
Emmylou Harris explored the arty side of the street on her previous three studio albums: 1995’s indelible Wrecking Ball, helmed by studio auteur Daniel Lanois, plus 2000’s Red Dirt Girl and 2003’s Stumble Into Grace, made with Lanois protegé Malcolm Burn. In contrast, All I Intended to Be, her forthcoming…
You know your band is in trouble when it’s being covered by MTV and lumped in with a movement called “Lo-Fi Punk.” Fortunately, the music of Columbus, Ohio’s Times New Viking does not lend itself well to vast commercial accessibility. In both recordings and live performances, the group brings a…
“Post-rock” may not be the most ridiculous descriptor in contemporary music; I’d cast my vote for either “sadcore” or “neo-prog.” Still, the term means next to nothing when it’s applied to a band like Russian Circles, which co-stars on this roster with Daughters and Young Widows. On 2006’s Enter and…
