For a child navigating the uneasy interval of pre-adolescence, few things can guarantee nerd status like the decision to join the school band. All that lugging of equipment and shameless practicing is enough to crush the coolness out of any child who’s unlucky enough to pursue musical knowledge. Darren Kramer…
A couple of days before Limp Bizkit and its muscle-bound posse arrived in the parking lot of the Arvada Guitar Center, where one of 23 dates on the band’s current and highly publicized search for a new guitarist was scheduled last week, a teenage boy in Portland, Oregon, greeted frontman…
Not so much a jam band as a pulsating mass of sexy Latin-flavored beats, the San Diego-based B-Side Players embrace a multi-culti groove and make it theirs, urging you with horns and congas to dance, damn it, dance! Reggae it ain’t, and you shouldn’t buy your ticket expecting to hear…
Buck Wild & His Cocaine Rangers are riding high these days, roping in audiences with their dark but danceable odes to countrified rock and roll. Sporting vintage cowboy duds and a semi-crazed expression, Buck Wild (né Rex Moser) smokes on the electric guitar, while serial bassist Mike Mayhem (who moonlights…
Whenever and wherever Junior Brown performs, you can bet your Telecaster that a gaggle of guitar geeks will be standing in front of the stage, their mouths wide open, drooling over Brown’s frenzied fretwork on “Big Red,” his custom-made guit-steel. The hybrid instrument, which combines an electric guitar with a…
When Roy Haynes was attending grammar school in his native Boston — it’s been an age — a teacher once sent him to the principal’s office because he couldn’t stop drumming his fingers on the desk. Little did the authorities know: Soon the distracted imp in their midst would become…
It’s hard to tell where Evans is headed at this point, given the many directions in which she’s been tugged throughout her career. She began as a fairly straightforward soul/R&B crooner, but her involvement with the Notorious B.I.G., whom she married in 1995, and the Artist Formerly Known as Puff…
The first New Order album in eight years finds the survivors of Joy Division banging their collective drum in yet another monochromatic burst of synthetic rapture. Not that Manchester’s most brooding band ever really suffered commercially from picking at the same scab — or from adhering to the same descending…
Finally, a bridge that spans the sometimes mighty chasm between post-hardcore and more user-friendly rock. On its third full-length release, Chicago-area trio Land of the El Caminos has managed to carve a niche wherein singer/guitarist Dan Fanelli can belt out his raspy, half-howled vocals over tunes that snag themselves like…
Although he never got the notice Robert Johnson received through Eric Clapton and his crowd, Charley Patton is generally considered the king of the country-blues pioneers. Screamin’ and Hollerin’ the Blues shows just what made Patton so special: The staggering seven-CD collection includes all the songs Patton ever recorded, a…
So far, Jay Munly is having a big year. He’s now one of the few remaining Denver-rooted members of Slim Cessna’s Auto Club, which saw a significant change in its roster following the band’s two farewell performances at the Bluebird on December 30 and 31. Those Club-gazers who managed to…
A brief entry in the 1974 edition of the Guinness Book of World Records cites the Sleepytime Gorilla Museum as the Worlds Most Closed Public Institution one that operated openly for only 47 days of its 34-year existence. Shuttered up after crowds gathered in Manhattans meat-packing district for a free…
Esperanto a sort of alphabetic goulash that, some hope, will eventually be spoken by all of the worlds people as a linguistic interface for humanity may well have found a musical manifestation in the Denver band of the same name. Esperanto, which performs Sunday, January 20, at the 15th Street…
With the release of his debut album, 1976’s Howlin’ Wind, British-born singer-songwriter Graham Parker was pegged as the classic Angry Young Man — and ever since, most reviewers have ranked his works according to where they fall on the anger scale. Scribes who were largely unmoved by his work during…
Homegrown artists have a tendency to get lost in the encyclopedic shuffle of year-end lists, such as the sprawling one Westword published two weeks ago. Here we revisit more than thirty albums from Denver-area artists who give life, and sound, to our city, many of which stand up against works…
Maggie Simpson is an acoustic guitarist and songwriter, a teacher who instructs other musicians on how to connect emotionally with their own art. Three years ago, Simpson left Boulder for Laramie, Wyoming, our dusty metropolitan cousin to the north, where many a saloon window is darted with historic bullet holes…
Minneapolis rapper Slug might not yet be “bigger than breast implants” as he boasts on his song “Guns and Cigarettes,” but the lyrical skills he displays on that track and on other humorous cuts, like the pimpalicious “Lyle Lovette” (from his cassette-only release Headshots Se7en), are as notorious as Anna…
Eric Shiveley has shed the Shive-Tones, the band that backed him since the release of Everything Is Good in late 1999. He’s also bucked any notion that his moves as a songwriter can be easily predicted. On Desert Airport, unveiled on Saturday, January 12, at Herman’s Hideaway, with Carolyn’s Mother…
In the days after the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, the nation’s radio programmers attempted to rid their playlists of material they feared might offend the sensibilities of a jittery public — a trend that temporarily left black marks on songs as disparate as System of…
The spectacular pre-holiday sales success of Echoes isn’t especially surprising. America is filled with people who greatly enjoyed taking drugs during the ’60s, ’70s and ’80s but are no longer in a position to do so on even a semi-regular basis. For them, two discs of Floyd offer a safe,…
David Hollander has an enduring affinity for instrumental soundtrack music, especially from cop shows of the ’70s. With campy credits that include Kojak and Barnaby Jones, Hollander — whose DJ handle, Lil’ Earl, alludes to his early role on What’s Happening!!, where he played opposite a dancing gastropod called Rerun…
You’ve got to love an album that begins with a song called “Bells of Saint Alcohol.” Davey VonBohlen’s matter-of-fact account of booze-as-career is somehow light and airy — or at least accepting, even reverent, of a way of life that is usually treated with more dreary concern and grimness. On…
