Having weathered a number of lineup changes, hiatuses and a name change, esovae is standing — and sounding — stronger than ever: Years of musical tribulations and triumphs have served to refine the quartet’s songwriting. Led by the vocally striking and visually stunning Marilyn Taylor, the band presents an esoteric…
When Morphine frontman Mark Sandman died of a heart attack on stage in 1999, he left behind friends, loved ones and an exceptional body of musical work. He also left behind a curious batch of crudely rendered cartoons drawn on everything from cocktail napkins and bowling score sheets to fancy…
Grand Junction, on Colorado’s Western Slope, has numerous claims to fame. It’s the largest community between Denver and Salt Lake City and, thanks to uranium tailings that once were sprinkled across the area, the most radioactive, too. Additionally, the city boasts the state’s only surviving Wienerschnitzel drive-through — a point…
If El Tri’s Alex Lora gets his way, after the nuclear holocaust, his band will be kicking out the jams for the cockroaches and Keith Richards and continuing to be a voice for the Mexican people. It’s hardly an inconceivable proposition, given Lora’s unnatural career longevity, which can be attributed…
Anyone who pays the slightest attention to popular music knows that punk rock hasn’t been the typical nihilist’s soundtrack of choice for many years, so don’t bother stopping the presses. But there remains plenty of irony in the degree to which the genre has been mainstreamed. Whereas punk acts were…
When listening to current R&B, one might marvel at its distinct lack of anything resembling either rhythm or blues. Modern-day studio auteurs like D’Angelo, Raphael Saadiq and even the abstract Madlib have certainly helped reanimate the tradition of classic Stevie Wonder-esque production, though their antiseptic arrangements usually end up pumping…
Hot Club of Cowtown’s latest release is a jaw-dropping, head-shaking collection of stripped-down Western swing, cowboy jazz and saloon send-ups. Ghost Train expertly mines the two extremes of American folk music — joy and despair — while significantly improving upon the group’s three prior recordings. What lifts Ghost Train above…
Not long after midnight on Saturday, August 3, a pair of young men whipped out handguns outside La Rumba, firing bullets into the air as clubgoers spilled out of the venue and into the night. Save for a shot-out car window — and the near-cardiac reaction of some Golden Triangle…
Hot Snakes have quite a serpentine history. Singer/guitarist Rock Froberg fronted Pitchfork and Drive Like Jehu, two late-’80s/early- ’90s San Diego bands that stabbed jarring shards of guitar and fanged invective into sinuous post-punk rhythms. Jehu’s other guitarist, John Reis, is now notorious as Rocket From the Crypt’s frat-rock ringleader,…
The Colorado Country Music Hall of Fame Fourth Annual Festival has earned the sort of official endorsement that arts groups dream about. Governor Bill Owens christened the third full week in August “Country Music Week,” recognizing the cultural value of the nonprofit CCMHOF and its yearly celebration of in-state twang…
Anyone who wants proof of the sorry state of mainstream country music needs only to look at the struggling career of thirty-year-old Allison Moorer, who by all rights should be a major star by now. The Alabama-born singer and songwriter made a big splash in 1998 when her heartfelt ballad…
Throughout the ’90s with Mazzy Star, Hope Sandoval’s voice combined with David Roback’s shimmering, darkly psychedelic slide guitar to create some of the most memorable indie music to come out of Los Angeles’s so-called paisley underground. It wasn’t exactly a rocket ride to the top: The band’s flirtation with recognition…
This week, Backbeat writers clear out their N-Z files and assess a batch of new releases from area artists. See the August 8 “Local Color” for reviews of acts in the A-M group. O’er the Ramparts Waves of Static The Ramparts should have cleaned a bit of lint out of…
Perhaps the truest line ever written about Bruce Springsteen appeared in Village Voice scribe Robert Christgau’s 1975 review of Born to Run: “Springsteen may well turn out to be one of those rare self-conscious primitives who gets away with it.” As Christgau implies, Springsteen isn’t the sort of fellow who…
It used to be that people struggled to place Sonic Youth’s music within some kind of context. Was it avant-garde improv or pop-culture pastiche? Was it fueled by theoretical abstraction or punk-rock impulse? Self-indulgence or self-negation? Now that Sonic Youth (appearing Wednesday, August 21, at the Ogden Theatre) has become…
If Kruder and Dorfmeister are a blunt before breakfast, then Jazzanova is cocktails after dinner. Stylish and sophisticated, Jazzanova’s debut LP (discounting 2000’s remix collection), In Between, is a journey through nu jazz that you’re not likely to forget. The six-man team from Germany has dominated the jazz-dance and downtempo…
In Denver, the concert-promotions war continues to play out like a Shakespearean epic. From dead fish dumped at box offices to royal blow-offs for important jobs, the rivalry between Clear Channel Entertainment and its biggest local competitor, House of Blues Concerts, has included bloody intrigue and betrayals aplenty. For spectators,…
With all of the recent drooling over nouveau/retro straight-up rock outfits like the Strokes and the Stripes, you’d think someone would have noticed the Deathray Davies by now. This Dallas-based garage-pop band, which appears at the Bluebird Theater on Friday, August 16, with Superdrag, is the brainchild of former Bedwetter…
When it came time for 16 Horsepower to release its newest album, Folklore, the band turned first to Europe, where the largely acoustic album has been drawing all kinds of glowing accolades for the past two months. Six weeks later, on August 6, the disc saw stateside release on Jetset…
There may very well be something terribly wrong with the members of Speedealer. “Everybody in this band is pretty pissed off,” says bassist Rich Mullins. “I think our attitude is that in order for something to rock, you have to really mean it. Jeff calls it ‘a tremendous amount of…
Denver-born trumpeter Shane Endsley migrated this summer from balmy, laid-back Los Angeles to dense, teeming Brooklyn so he can be closer to his fiancée — and to New York’s fertile experimental-music scene. For some people, such a move might have been a shock to the system. But at age 27,…
Statewide drought be damned, releases from Colorado musicians continue to flow into local retail bins — and the mailboxes of Backbeat writers. In the first installment of a two-part batch of reviews, we focus on artists whose names fall into the first half of the alphabet; see next week’s issue…
