There was agony and ecstasy at the third annual Westword Music Awards Showcase. And I should know: Of the 41 sets offered up by a like number of acts at various LoDo nightspots on Sunday, September 21, I caught 37 of them. Being a glass-is-half-empty kinda guy, I was distressed…
At this point, more people have heard of The Great Milenko, the fourth CD by the Insane Clown Posse, than have actually heard it. The disc gained notoriety earlier this year when powerful agents of Disney-owned Hollywood Records, the firm that originally agreed to issue it, balked at putting their…
Oasis Be Here Now (Epic) Many reviewers tackling this disc have complained that it’s too derivative. Well, duh. You’re likelier to get a lie-detector test from John Ramsey than originality from these blokes. But such sniping entirely misses the point of Oasis. The Gallagher brothers, Liam and Noel, aren’t trying…
At 22, Ryan Adams, frontman for the Raleigh, North Carolina-based band Whiskeytown, has already penned more songs than most tunesmiths do in a lifetime. And even he’s not sure how he’s done it. “Songs just come to me,” he insists. “I don’t really try to write them.” Maybe not, but…
In the middle of a late August afternoon, members of Denver’s Elephant 6 collective mill sleepily about the duplex shared by Robert Schneider and Hilarie Sidney, both members of the Apples. The musicians, including Athens, Georgia-based singer-songwriter Jeff Mangum and horn-player Scott Spillane of the critically acclaimed group Neutral Milk…
Elsewhere in this issue, you will find the mammoth guide to the third annual Westword Music Awards Showcase, featuring profiles of all 65 of the event’s nominees. Included in this roster is an update about the Samples, who are among the five aspirants in the Favorite Major Label Act category;…
In 1958, Ronnie Dawson, a nineteen-year-old Dallas native, cut “Rockin’ Bones,” a wildcat anthem about boogying beyond the grave whose refrain boasted, “There’s still a lot of rhythm in these rockin’ bones.” Almost forty years later, Dawson has reached an age when most of his peers are rocking in chairs,…
Now in its third year, the Westword Music Awards Showcase is rapidly becoming a Denver tradition. But it seems like only yesterday that it was nothing more than an idea. In 1995, several Westworders wondered what we could do to raise the profile of local music in Denver. From these…
Carla Bozulich, lead singer and primary songwriter for Los Angeles’s Geraldine Fibbers, is in a drab New York City hotel room, waiting to cut Kevin Fitzgerald’s hair. Fitzgerald, the Fibbers’ drummer, is not the only bandmember whose noggin Bozulich trims on a regular basis; she’s also sheared the follicles of…
As any lover of the blues realizes, one of the music’s principal themes is love gone bad. It’s a subject with which Chicago-based bluesman Son Seals is extremely familiar. After all, he was shot in the face on January 5 of this year, and the alleged gunwoman was his estranged…
By almost any measure, Wayne Shorter, 64, is among the most influential jazz musicians of the past two generations. The saxophonist first made his mark during a late Fifties/early Sixties tenure with Art Blakey’s Jazz Messengers. Then, in 1964, he took on the nearly impossible task of filling the chair…
On the surface, there seem to be plenty of reasons why guitarist Rick Nielsen should be feeling good about himself and his longtime band, Cheap Trick. The quartet (which also includes bassist Tom Petersson, drummer Bun E. Carlos and vocalist Robin Zander) is among the few hard-rock groups from the…
This year has been a bad one for a lot of prominent Colorado bands: Foreskin 500, Roots Revolt and the ‘Vengers are just three of the well-known acts to have folded their tents and gone home. And now, unfortunately, Baldo Rex must be added to the list. The factors that…
Hattiesburg, Mississippi, native Webb Wilder has produced one of the most literate, entertaining and flat-out barn-burning musical catalogues of the past couple of decades–which means that he’s done more than a few interviews in his day. So before launching into another one, he makes a declaration. “I’ve been asked everything…
Boulder’s Preacherman and the Congregation got its biggest break yet when it was chosen to open last month’s Reggae on the Rocks concert. But shortly after leaving the Red Rocks stage to a positive reaction from thousands of fans at the beginning of the daylong bash, Preacherman (given name: Herman…
Denver musicians frequently complain about the local scene. But in the minds of the musicians in Venus Diablo, Colorado’s capitol is a virtual mecca compared with their home base of Albuquerque, New Mexico. According to bassist Johnny Cassidy, a onetime member of the M80s, a trashy, Sixties-style garage act signed…
America is in the midst of another British Invasion, at least in terms of the electronica movement. Almost all of the electronic-dance groups making impressive showings on the Billboard sales charts these days hail from merry old England, and even as we speak, A&R representatives desperate to cash in on…
According to Alec Empire, a key part of Germany’s incendiary Atari Teenage Riot, the act’s songs are “not like popular music, which is there to entertain. We want to destroy the fake harmony that’s created by the music and the entertainment industry and the government.” That’s hardly the only revolutionary…
Echo & the Bunnymen Evergreen (London) Most bands on the comeback trail attempt to reproduce their previous sound but don’t quite manage it; an essential, ineffable something is missing. Not so the Bunnymen. Evergreen so precisely duplicates the act’s classic style that it’s downright astounding–and more than a little creepy…
The middle-aged men behind Denver’s Bob Gillis Group don’t look like musicians. Trumpeter/ keyboardist Gillis could pass for the realtor who lives down the block, the cop who cruises the mall parking lot on Friday nights or a youth pastor at the neighborhood church–and drummer Alan Aluisi, bassist Bob Underwood…
The Rocky Mountain Music Association, a group that’s promoted local acts and musicians for ten years, has faced plenty of challenges during the Nineties. Early in the decade, attendance at its annual MusicFest events began to fall off precipitously; in fact, the turnout for a daylong bash at the University…
Repetition is an element common to virtually every musical style. African drummers pound out beats that conform to set patterns. Rhythm-and-blues figures such as James Brown vamp atop roiling grooves that gain power through their very immutability. Pop tunesmiths like Hall & Oates sing melodic hooks again and again until…
