House music, an American underground phenomenon in the ’80s, has become a worldwide institution since its inception in seedy warehouses in urban Chicago. One of the key innovators responsible for staking house’s substantial claim on the global music landscape is Chicago legend Derrick Carter, whose first experience as a DJ…
Club 314 has followed Club Onyx into the darkness. Shortly after the Wreck Room closed five years ago, the void left behind was filled by the opening of Club Onyx at 314 East 13th Avenue, which served as the scene alternative to mainstream lairs like the Church, drawing drinkers and…
In my neighborhood, in the early ’70s, there was always talk of uprising,” John Bigham recalls. “I grew up in the era of the Black Panthers and the Blackstone Rangers in Chicago. And they weren’t gangs in the sense of destroying property and terrorizing people. They were gangs in the…
There’s a man lying near death at your feet. His body has been punctured by seven slugs of enemy fire, and your compatriots — the ones who don’t bolt out of fright — try frantically to plug the gushing leak in his neck. But it’s all in vain, and you…
The Cure’s new record is its first since Robert Smith disbanded the group following 2000’s underrated Bloodflowers, and it was produced by Ross Robinson, whose resumé includes work for Slipknot, Korn and Vanilla Ice. But worry not: The self-titled return sounds almost exactly like a Cure record should — almost,…
Once he was “ushered” out of the phenomenal underground crew the Arsonists, many wondered if Freestyle would be able to carry an album by himself. Three years in the making, his debut album, Etched in Stone, puts all speculation to rest. And not much has changed since fans last heard…
Plenty of scribes have unloaded on The Printz, and it’s easy to see why. This compilation of two EPs is often a mess, with Aussie provocateur Chris Colonna and one-named helpers such as Pia and Surya gleefully engaging in unnatural acts of rock, hip-hop and plenty more, without the slightest…
Echoes are cool. You know, the way they lap against your skull like waves, slapping faster and faster until they start to run into each other, clipping their edges off and ultimately collapsing into a clunky, recursive stutter. Rock-and-roll history is full of them; in fact, the progression of ’60s…
Ever wonder what would have happened if Fugazi had retroactively developed fetal alcohol syndrome and became addicted to wearing rattlesnake codpieces and huffing gold-glitter spray paint out of plastic Safeway bags on the corner of Park Avenue and California? Well, wonder no more. Eaglemaniac, the second full-length release by Black…
Out of the Darkness is one of a kind — an acoustic-folk concept album about the power-grid failure in the Northeast last year. (Why on earth a group from Fort Collins would feel compelled to tackle such a topic is a bigger mystery than the blackout itself.) In the end,…
Like the pre-Melo Nuggets, the Colorado Rockies are having a tough time putting asses in the seats these days. I mean, you can’t give those tickets away. You know it’s bad when folks would rather kick it in their cubicle farms, Joe Versus the Volcano style, than spend an afternoon…
Though the lineup has changed numerous times since the Dirty Rotten Imbeciles — named for an epithet hurled by one of the members’ fathers during an early rehearsal — formed in Houston more than two decades ago, the band’s creative core, vocalist Kurt Brecht and guitarist Spike Cassidy, has remained…
It’s no secret: Every Hot Topic sapling from Mootown to Motown knows emo’s been dead for years. What once was deemed so profound and, er, poetic is no more. Promise Ring: food for worms. Ditto Texas Is the Reason, Mineral, Christie Front Drive, Sunny Day Real Estate and every other…
Once there was this little group from suburban Illinois that somehow hit upon a brave new sound. It was an amalgam of the edgy, aggressive rock that came before and the vulnerable, melodic pop that had grown up alongside it. In accordance with this dichotomy, the four bandmembers were a…
Country-music purists often gripe about the watering-down of the genre — and Tim McGraw is as good a symbol as anyone of why it’s happened. McGraw is a good-lookin’ guy hitched to a good-lookin’ gal, Faith Hill, and he’s got an interesting backstory, too, since he was neglected by his…
James Cagney and Sham 69 might seem like oil and water, but both the venerated actor and the legendary punk group have worked on projects called “Angels With Dirty Faces.” Add Manda and the Marbles (above), whose new album is so titled, to that list — just don’t expect any…
Put another dime in the jukebox, baby: Joan Jett’s coming to LoDo. First Vixen of rock and roll Jett (aka Joan Larkin) and her all-girl band of Runaways were around long before today’s so-called grrrrls ever had a period to moan about. Spiked, edgy, yet undeniably feminine, Jett owns the…
After seven grueling years of personnel changes that took the band from a modest trio to a sprawling octet, Askimbo (which takes its name from a nonsense word coined by former guitarist Geoff Orwiler) finally stopped wandering the wilderness and settled on four permanent members: brothers David and John Simpkins,…
If drum-and-bass were the Mafia, then Scott Bourne, better known as Red One, would be the underboss of one of the most notorious families at large. Red runs the day-to-day operations of Ram Records along with Ram affiliates Liftin Spirits, Frequency and Ratio. Ram is one of the best and…
The Aztlan Theater, at 974 Santa Fe Drive, has held a soft spot in my heart ever since it introduced me to some of the amazing music available in the city I’d moved to (specifically, Moore and Love .45’s original incarnation, known as Undertow back then). But every time I’ve…
I have to let the world know that if it wasn’t for D12, there wouldn’t be a Slim Shady,” says Swift of his infamous D12 cohort, Eminem. “The name ‘Slim Shady’ stems from the creation of D12, and that’s what he introduced to the world in ‘Hi, My Name Is…’…
As a kid, Edward Ka-Spel endured his share of creepy bedtime stories — along with horrible nightmares that hounded him until the age of ten. “They were there, yeah,” the fey frontman for the Legendary Pink Dots recalls with a laugh. “But I’m also English, so just a simple nursery…
