Chris Brokaw has had a career in underground music that sounds like it can’t possibly be true: He went to Oberlin College in the ’80s, where he met Sooyoung Park, Liz Phair, John McEntire and Stephen Immerwahr. After graduation he played drums briefly with GG Allin, and from there he…
Formed in 1996, Nightwish gained instant popularity in its native Finland with the 1997 release of its first album, Angels Fall First. Eventually, Nightwish achieved international success with album sales in excess of over eight million worldwide, yet the group has struggled to achieve popularity and recognition here in the…
Marilyn Manson, even more than one of his inspirations, Alice Cooper, has become a lightning rod of controversy for his provocative lyrics and visual style. The guy had an album called Antichrist Superstar, after all, and he’s been fairly open about his drug use, what more conservative members of society…
Rob Zombie originally came to prominence with his first band, White Zombie. With a penchant for campy horror imagery and music that was the perfect mutant blend of an industrial aesthetic with trashy metal and punk, White Zombie was one in a handful of bands that crossed the alternative-rock world…
Xiu Xiu got its start in 2002 when Jamie Stewart and his friend and longtime musical collaborator Cory McCulloch started writing songs in a more experimental vein, making extensive use of non-Western percussion and tones. The group’s debut album, 2002’s Knife Play, anticipated more widespread use of non-western instruments in…
Dragonette has been hot on the underground pop music scene for years, but only last year did they come charging out of the gate onto mainstream radio with “Hello,” a global party-starter that saw Dragonette collaborate with French DJ-producer Martin Solveig. Almost overnight, Dragonette went from pop’s consistently great, best-kept…
Update 9/20/12: Local string quartet Per Vita is slated to back Amanda Palmer this Friday at the Gothic Theater. The group reached out to Palmer immediately when she put out the initial call, knowing full well that it was volunteer only. “We didn’t care at all,” says Laena McDonald. “We…
Quote/Unquote is our periodic feature in which we hunt down noteworthy lyrics, examine the best lines and then get the story behind the song. This week, we got some insight from Logistixx of the rap-fusion group Drop Switch to find out what he had in mind while he was crafting…
My Life With the Thrill Kill Kult began as a film idea that Frankie Nardiello and Marsten Daley had that never fully came to fruition. The two met while touring with Ministry, and in 1987, inspired in part by disco, exploitation films, the industrial scene happening around them in Chicago…
Taking a Dylan-esque route of abandoning acoustic folk for mod rock, Britt Rodemich teamed up with local favorites Casey Banker — fresh from the now-defunct Don’ts and Be Carefuls — Miles Eichner of Tulip Wars, and Marlon Chance of Spires to form Shady Elders, an indie-rock supergroup of sorts. “Everyone…
Disgusted with the re-election of George W. Bush, in 2005 Firewater ringleader Tod A left New York — where he’d lived for the previous two decades and where he’d fronted Cop Shoot Cop — and headed out of the country on a three-year journey that took him to the Middle…
As a teenager in the early ’60s, guitarist John Abercrombie had some key recordings that helped shape his musical focus, including Miles Davis’s Kind of Blue, John Coltrane’s Crescent, Sonny Rollins’s The Bridge, Ornette Coleman’s This Is Our Music and Bill Evans’s Interplay. On Abercrombie’s latest effort, the outstanding Within…
Science Partner had its origins as a solo side project of Tyler Despres of Dualistics. When that band split up due to half the band moving out of state for work and the like, Science Partner became Despres main creative focus. The early shows may have been more acoustic affairs,…
Known for his innovative, textural approach to guitar playing, David Torn has released a number of albums under his own name and under the Splattercell moniker. He’s also used his talents for film scoring and collaborated with a diverse set of artists including David Bowie, Laurie Anderson, Sting and John…
“Metal bands want to portray the opposite of a happy life on their album covers,” says Ken Sarafin, and the Vale of Pnath frontman knows from whence he speaks. In addition to creating the awe-inducing artwork for his band’s latest release, The Prodigal Empire, Sarafin has illustrated at least a…
Colorado is an incredible place for live music — from our outdoor venues, one of which is world-renowned, to the vast festivals, shows and indoor venues we have to choose from. The growth of the music scene has created a small niche of music-industry jobs. In case you missed it,…
Twelve years in the making, the sequel to Deltron 3030 has attained mythical stature in many underground hip hop circles. The original — a turn-of-the-millenium sci-fi concept record that sprang from the collaboration of Del the Funky Homosapien, Dan The Automator and Kid Koala — balanced a dark, post-apocalyptic technological…
Quote/Unquote is our periodic feature in which we hunt down some awesome lyrics, examine the best lines and then get the story behind the song. This week, we unearthed a few gems from Joe Sampson from “Kill Our Friends.” For a certain type of music fan, most any song can…
Since 1983, the Melvins have been perfecting their brand of influential rock, inspired in part by punk and in part by the music Buzz Osborne and Dale Crover grew up hearing as kids in the ’60s and ’70s. With the Melvins, the two have taken that sound to different places…
Coady Willis and Jared Warren formed Big Business in the wake of break ups by the Whip and Dead Low Tide. Prior to that, the two had been in a number of noteworthy — even legendary in some circles — Pacific Northwest bands like Karp and the Murder City Devils,…
A cursory listen to its repertoire, which has a sound akin to some unlikely admixture of Molly Hatchet and the Cult, suggests that Calder’s Revolvers could be yet another band to have hopped on the classic rock bandwagon of recent years. But these guys aren’t just copying what someone else…
George Lewis Jr. grew up in Florida but moved to Boston where he formed his punk-funk cabaret outfit Mad Man Films. That band split after releasing two albums, and Lewis moved to Brooklyn, where, inspired by the music of his childhood, he started writing songs on his own under the…
