Here’s a selection of the best of last week’s music blogging from around the Village Voice chain: The clubs editor for one of our papers runs into an occupational hazard and thereafter has trouble exercising her critical faculty enough to muster a proper review of a DJ competition…
Hope the November 22 Evanescence profile or this extended Q&A with lead singer Amy Lee didn’t get you too revved up to see the combo in concert. Turns out that the show, scheduled to take place on November 25 at Magness Arena, was canceled at the last minute…
The members of Fall Out Boy, who headline the Young Wild Things tour that stopped at DU’s Magness Arena on November 23, are new millennium anachronisms: musicians who became famous thanks to MTV video airplay. Of course, the video medium is currently the province of YouTube, while MTV prefers to…
Jonathan Bitz has an unbridled enthusiasm for the music produced here, and a genuine passion for the musicians creating that music. That’s evident just from talking to him at shows or reading his pieces in Syntax, the ad-free literary-arts magazine that he’s been publishing on his own dime since 2004…
I probably listen to more Tom Waits songs in November than in any other month. “November,” with its somber imagery of dead leaves, shiny black ravens, cold rain and a moon that’s the color of bone. And “Martha,” which always tears me up not only because it’s incredibly poignant, but…
Love is a funny thing. It can open your eyes to beauty, truth and all the joy the world has to offer, and it can shield you from the all the ugliness and negativity. When love is fresh, thoughts of your beloved can also take over your every waking thought…
Making music has long served as therapy for Evanescence frontwoman Amy Lee — but when she gets down these days, she has other treatment options. In May she married Josh Hartzler, a professional therapist. As a result, she announces with a laugh, “I’m so healthy now, it’s crazy!” Lee’s known…
Mike Relm is single-handedly introducing turntablism to parts of middle America on his second stint with Blue Man Group, opening its current production, How to Be a Megastar Tour 2.1. With between 7,000 and 12,000 people at each show, it’s the San Franciscan’s biggest gig. He’s already a YouTube celebrity…
Saxophonist Marcus Strickland was listening to John Coltrane, Stevie Wonder, Parliament and Jimi Hendrix before he was even born. While Marcus was still in the womb, his father, a DJ and classical percussionist, played tunes on a open reel deck and placed a speaker near his mother’s belly in hopes…
Baby Bash, Cyclone (Arista). The Basher plays up his Latin roots on “Mamacita,” but the sauce he uses is mild instead of spicy. The other tracks couldn’t be any more radio-friendly if their lyrics promised DJs $1,000 a play. Still, only the title cut, boosted by Lil Jon’s signature synth…
Once “Mad” Max Rockatansky became an action-movie archetype of stoic masculinity and righteous anger, some heavy band was bound to reference him in its name. One of the area’s better post-stoner rock bands staked claim to that moniker, only it knocked off the e at the end before claiming it…
Ali “Dubfire” Shirazinia is half of the legendary DJ duo known as Deep Dish. Striking out on his own, he’s crafted an appealing sound that recalls his work with Dish while expanding those horizons considerably, like a wild-eyed, experimental side of Deep Dish — still in service to the beat,…
BJ Serekis, former drummer of the Bedraggled and the Skivies, has finally issued the followup to his 2003 release, The Colors Bleed Through. While that record was a disturbing, claustrophobic portrait of a mind and soul consuming itself, Eat My Brain is about reaching out into the world rather than…
While Mike Fitz-maurice is best known as the bassist for Colcannon, his latest release looks toward the Middle East, not the Emerald Isle. Inspired by The Adventures of Hajji Baba of Ispahan, a book first published in 1824, Continuing Adventures provides a soundtrack for an imagined sequel as rendered by…
Unlike most singers cast in the diva role, who are all about pipes and persona, Alicia Keys is a multi-faceted artist adept at songwriting and arranging as well as vocal emoting. For that reason, she’s among the current performers least in need of help from studio pros — yet the…
Australia’s Dukes of Windsor — heralded as the best thing to come from Down Under since the Minogues — finally brings its dance-crazed international noise conspiracy to the States. You’ve heard the nasal vocals, twitchy guitars, caffeine-fueled beats and stinging synths before, but this quintet brings a fresh brattiness and…
There’s never been the slightest doubt that Trans Am drivers Nathan Means, Phil Manley and Sebastian Thomson have a sense of humor. But the question remains: When are they joking? Founded in 1990, the band has a lengthy discography stuffed with electro-oriented tracks that alternately encompass homage, pastiche and loving…
When Gym Class Heroes frontman Travis McCoy spoke to Westword in September 2006, his band was searching for a niche between youth rock, represented by the group’s patrons in Fall Out Boy, and hip-hop, whose aficionados regularly attacked the outfit for watering down the medium. Since then, McCoy and his…
The three members of Porter Batiste Stoltz have a lot to live up to on their own. Collectively, the funk-fueled trio has amassed an impressive pedigree that includes stints backing the Meters, the Neville Brothers, Dr. John and New Orleans musician, songwriter and producer extraordinaire Allen Toussaint. With the departure…
Most well-known Viking rock has come out of Scandinavia. Long before Mayhem murderously imploded, though, Poland’s Vader played some of the darkest, most brutally intense death-metal thrash to ever emerge from behind the Iron Curtain. In the early days, the act promoted itself through an underground network of tape trading…
Tori Amos: Earth Mother, faerie songstress, suckler of pigs, piano goddess. The 44-year-old singer has worn many a persona over her two-decade-plus career, but never so literally as on her latest concept album, American Doll Posse, in which Amos is joined by four alter egos — each female archetypes based…
Received word last week thatAchille Lauro’s Matt Close, was recently hospitalized after the bike he was riding was hit by a van. The accident, which left Close with a fractured pelvis and rib damage, has sidelined the singer/guitarist from performing for the time being. (In a bit of cruel irony,…
