In the decade since the Bad Plus has been together, the adventurous jazz trio has included cover songs on each of its recordings. Bassist Reid Anderson, pianist Ethan Iverson and drummer David King have deconstructed and reimagined cuts by everyone from the Pixies and Nirvana to Bowie and Blondie…
The last time we heard from will.i.am and friends, they were breaking every singles record known to man. In case you’ve purged your brain of the memory: In 2009, they had the number one song in the country from April 18 through October 17. “Boom Boom Pow” took roughly the…
Known to early local hip-hop heads as Shag One and, more recently, Strange Powers, Josh Powers doesn’t fit into the mold of a typical hip-hop cat. He embraces his individuality and honors his own unique global view of music and ideology through his creative endeavors — from more traditional hip-hop…
Making connections between Samuel Taylor Coleridge and Wonder Mike isn’t such a stretch for Adam Bradley. As one of the editors of The Anthology of Rap, a newly released collection from Yale University Press, as well as the author of 2009’s Book of Rhymes: The Poetics of Hip-Hop, Bradley has…
The Grammy nominations are out. You’re welcome to see the list, but we don’t recommend reading much into it. The major awards are all more or less their respective industries sitting in a circle for a giant back-rub chain, but none is less indicative of what is actually happening than…
Dan Aid is the frontman of White Leather. At first glance, he looks like any other young guitarist, with his blonde wood Gibson with an armful of tattoos. Look a little closer, though, and you’ll notice that he’s not like any other guitarist. The 22-year-old is missing his picking hand…
The Posies (due tonight at The Gothic Theatre) had the good fortune — or bad, depending on your perspective — of being a non-grunge rock band in Seattle that came into its own during the era when, for far too many people, “alternative” became synonymous with “grunge.”…
No Age (due tonight at The Bluebird Theater) isn’t a band that has hit the mainstream yet, but it has enjoyed an unexpected rise to prominence as a noisy pop band, making art grounded in notion of doing things your own way — regardless of whether or not it’s met…
The most immediately noticeable thing about Kalyn Heffernan is that she’s in a wheelchair. What takes a little more time to absorb and appreciate is that the petite Irish woman in the Timbaland boots and paint-covered electric chair (she’s also a sometime graffiti artist) fashions herself as the real deal…
As the leader of Sepultura for over a decade, Max Cavalera helped put Brazil on the map. From the beginning, the outfit was clearly influenced by punk rock as much as it was by other metal bands, as evidenced by its socially conscious lyrics, its grassroots efforts to get its…
When we last spoke with Jared Piccone of Innperpartysystem back in 2009, the act had just come off its split with Island Records. There was rampant speculation amongst fans about the future of the band, but Piccone assured us that it was a step in the right direction for everybody…
It’s officially the Holiday season, which is why Poptimystic is finally ready to address the Christmas albums on the charts. Even though they’ve been there for at least three weeks. Two of Billboard’s top ten albums are seasonal, and Billboard, remember, is about a week and a half behind what…
Michael Franti — due at an in-store this evening at Independent Records from 4- 6 p.m. and headlining tomorrow night’s Harvest Ball at Broomfield’s 1STBANK Center — is known for his social activism through his music. He started off as a rapper, spitting aware (and angry) rhymes in his early…
Bear Hands first made waves in 2007 with the release of its first record Golden EP, bolstered by a nervy energy and politically pointed lyrics on songs like “Vietnam.” On the Brooklyn band’s latest release, Burning Bush Supper Club, Dylan Rau’s incisive lyrics are very much intact, but the band…
After a year of using every platform 2010 has to offer to talk, Kanye West has fallen silent. The thing this was all about, My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy, is out now, and Kanye has every right to gloat. The reviews couldn’t be better. And yet his website remains as…
An active member of the Mile High City’s diverse music community since relocating to Denver in the early ’90s, Max Klaw currently performs as a genre-defying but ultimately bass-centric DJ, VJ and dance-music producer. We recently caught up with the pervasive bass junkie to get the scoop on his monthly…
Buried in blurbs about this week’s chart, Billboard.biz had this somewhat alarming stat: The cast of Glee debuted three new songs in the Hot 100 this week, bringing the total number of songs they’ve had on the chart to 93. To put this figure in perspective, that’s two more than…
The term “producer” has very different connotations in the worlds of rock and hip-hop. Although they’re both instrumental in shaping the sound, they serve very different functions. Generally speaking, in rock, a producer plays a variety of roles, everything from acting as an artistic filter to being an almost shaman…
According to Safehouse Denver, three women are killed each day by an intimate partner in America. DJ Bedz, of Radio Bums and Denver Nuggets official DJ fame, is doing his part to help reduce the effects of domestic violence against women and their families by donating the proceeds of his…
Lisa Wimberger and her husband, Gilly Gonzales, are percussionists extraordinaire: The two keep time for local acts Lunar Fire and Inti, but they also bring some of their other, subtler drums out to play in their project Lil Sum’n Sum’n. This Thursday, November 18, the duo is releasing Lil Sum’n…
Last week in Poptimystic, we talked about Taylor Swift and her unparalleled ability to sell albums in the current music industry wasteland. But the album is not what it once was, and the ability to sell singles may actually be a better litmus test of an artist’s influence. It remains…
Small Black’s debut EP definitely harks back to those great synth-pop songs of the early ’80s with its vintage sound, but with a kind of lo-fi production more in line with a later era in music. The strong songwriting and a keen sense of pacing and melody continued into the…
