The Strokes are the Chipotle of modern rock. Sure, there’s better, more authentic stuff out there, but when it comes down to it, all the basic ingredients are done just right and delivered in one tight, delicious package. Likewise, there are bands that are less affected in their posturing and…
Throughout her career, Mary J. Blige has transformed her misery into listeners’ bliss. But even though her life is happier than it was during the bad old days, her current work benefits from sorrowful experience. On The Breakthrough, her triumphs mean more because they were so hard won. Celebrities have…
Once you get past the sophomoric band name and the junior-high-level double entendres, Morningwood is pretty darned irresistible. The New York group’s oft-delayed full-length debut whirls in a hormone-charged haze of fizzy new-wave cheerleading chants, punkish dance beats and vocalist Chantal Claret’s little-girl-lost coos and snarls. Gil Norton’s production touch…
Mark my words: In the coming year, no fewer than three independent-label punk bands — at least one Nordic — will record sloppy versions of “Automatic,” Resolve’s amazing closing track. Moreover, the pressing substance of Resolve will inspire approximately 163 kids to clear boxes of wrapping paper out of the…
It doesn’t matter if Be Mine, Valentine is described as emo, screamo or even Zima, for that matter. By any name, this six-track, twelve-minute-long EP is an assault on the senses — the kind of disc that packs a wallop and leaves a mark. Drop Dead, Gorgeous’s size partly accounts…
Some of the best music ever made came from hardcore kids who woke up one day with an itch to twist punk rock into something weird. Granted, the four men of Big Timber — members of groups such as Bailer, Pariah Caste, Murder Scene Clean Up Team and Call Sign…
Dabrye, Additional Productions Vol. 1 (Ghostly International). Glitch-hop darling Dabrye remixes obscure tracks from Trans Am, Nomo and Ill Suono, slathering on his signature touch of fluttering, saw-toothed synth tones. While the remixes are fresh, the original “Nite Eats Day” (money mix featuring Beans) brings world-music flavor with a crazy…
Urban Folk Scarf Rock: That’s how Margot & the Nuclear So & So’s were billed at last fall’s South Park Music Festival. Someone was being cheeky — there’s no way that anyone who’d heard this Indianapolis-based act could genuinely claim that it had crafted a new, wholly unique sound that…
It’s not a stretch to imagine Robert Earl Keen as a wannabe journalist. With an eye for detail and an ear for a great story, he writes songs that almost betray the fact that he studied journalism at Texas A&M before hooking up with a young nobody in the early…
Unlike many of the jam-banders who play Boulder, Hampton isn’t a poseur whose look and sound hark back to an era he didn’t experience firsthand. He spent much of the ’60s working the Southern club circuit before helping to form the Hampton Grease Band, whose double-LP debut for Columbia Records,…
A dozen years back, when North Dakota native Celeste Krenz arrived on the Denver music scene, she was categorized as a country artist, and rightly so. But even though she now makes her home in Nashville, her latest music has relatively little in common with the twangy genre so closely…
Great music is birthed when a collective of people get together and believe in the silly idea that banging on instruments can somehow change the world. It won’t, of course, but when a band like the North Atlantic comes along, it doesn’t really matter. Drummer Cullen Hendrix and bassist Jason…
Metal-core must be a harsh mistress; otherwise, you’d think that more bands in the genre would at least try to inject a shred of originality or imagination into their music. If Orange County’s Scars of Tomorrow don’t necessarily succeed in escaping from the thud-chunk-growl straitjacket, at least they try –…
“Bro Hymn,” from Pennywise’s self-titled, full-length 1992 debut, ranks among the most singular songs in punk history. None of the group’s peers could pull off such a staggeringly earnest ode to friendship: Bad Religion is too brainy, Green Day too wimpy, and Rancid too proudly purist. Like most powerful shmaltz,…
Listening to New Orleans’s Soilent Green is like being dragged along the bottom of the Mississippi by a speedboat driven by a chain-smoking, velvet-clad demon. At almost inconceivable velocity, the sludge of Scott Crochet’s furious bass and Brian Patton’s detuned guitars gushes into your nostrils, ears and mouth, while the…
Three years ago, Aubrey Collins appeared to be on the fast track to superstardom. On Back to Me, her 2002 debut, she displayed a talent and maturity far beyond her fourteen years, turning the heads of many Nashville execs and filling them with visions of LeAnn Rimes. But then Collins…
As the in-house producer for Moonshine Music, the nation’s largest independent dance label, Dave Aude (who appears at the Church on Friday, January 20) has produced and engineered some of the biggest names in dance music — notably, Paul Oakenfold and Keoki, as well as pop stars like Lindsay Lohan…
Cooking has always been one thing that I love to do,” says Armando Zuppa. “In Italy, my mama taught me everything she knew. I still do a lot of things her way.” Ah, the old country — where hearty Genoan focaccia rivals the Roman pizza of Zuppa’s boyhood: “So thin,”…
Gooch was a sight for sore eyes when he showed up on my doorstep on New Year’s Day. The two of us have been best friends since grade school. But we’re more than that, really; we’re musical soulmates. At least, we were until we hit the proverbial fork in the…
Medeski, Martin & Wood bassist Chris Wood gets that hometown feeling every time his group performs in Boulder, where he was raised. “My parents live there, and my wife’s parents live there, too,” he reveals, “so it always turns into a big family reunion.” Then again, everything’s relative for Wood…
The laws of probability and rock tradition dictate that 2006, like every year before it, will not end without a notable musical death or two. Eventually, all of our rock heroes end up in the Afterlife All-Star Band. Those who went to the after-party in 2005 — including Luther Vandross,…
All hail Dr. Dre, who has spent his life lying down with dogs but never catching fleas (or bullets). Unlike so many of those around him, Dre has always known that gangsta rap is music, not life. But there are so many others who foolishly think that they are somehow…
