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Best Band With the Worst Name

Machine Gun Blues

It's a rule of thumb: Never include a musical genre in the name of your band. Metal groups with "metal" in their monikers? Bad. Punk outfits called the Punk Rock something-or-others? Even worse. Machine Gun Blues, though, never got the memo. Which sucks, because the quartet's music is a writhing, scorching convulsion of blues rock that sounds about a hundred times more compelling than its handle. Whether MGB christened itself after the Nick Cassavetes movies, the venerable blues standard or the Smashing Pumpkins lyric, the fact remains: Machine Gun Blues, for the love of God and rock and roll, you need a new name.

Best Band Name That Sounds Like a Pee-wee's Playhouse Character

Cowboy Curse

Way before The Matrix, a struggling actor named Laurence Fishburne donned Jheri curls and a ten-gallon hat to play a character called Cowboy Curtis on the Saturday-morning kids' show, Pee-wee's Playhouse. Today we have Cowboy Curse, a trio featuring bassist Tyler Campo, singer/guitarist Ben Bergstrand, and Ben's brother, Josh Bergstrand of the Symptoms, on drums. The band name actually comes from a pitchforkmedia.com article that talks about how touring acts view Denver as a cursed place. But it's much more fun to imagine Cowboy Curtis perched on the band's shoulder like a muse, belting out bucktoothed harmonies and playing air guitar to Cowboy Curse's angelic, Shins-infused indie pop.

Best Band Name Change

The FlashBangs

Tobias Jupiter was a strong contender for this year's "Best Band With the Worst Name" award, but the quintet dodged that honor by changing its name last month to the FlashBangs. Where Tobias Jupiter stumbled clumsily off the tongue, the group's streamlined new moniker efficiently sums up its sound: a bright, loud burst of indie-powered rock and roll sparkling with cruel hooks and brash female vocals. The band recently finished recording its debut CD with Bryan Feuchtinger of Hot IQs -- and The FlashBangs, thankfully, will be the name emblazoned across its cover.

Best Band Name

Lyin' Bitch and the Restraining Orders

You say love has no boundaries? Tell it to the judge, fucker. Then back up a thousand feet.

Best Band Reunion

Rocket Ajax
January 29, 2005

When Rocket Ajax disbanded in early 2003, many scenesters were befuddled. Just a few months earlier, the band had picked up stakes and headed for the West Coast in search of fame and fortune -- or at least a record deal. At the time, Ajax was one of the most promising hard-rock bands around. Shortly after relocating to Los Angeles, though, the outfit inexplicably imploded. Just like that, Ajax was no more. No farewell show. Nada. So when the Rocketmen regrouped for one night in January, it was a chance to mourn what might have been.

Best On-Stage Conniptions

Luke Fairchild
White Dynamite

For two years, White Dynamite has been leveling stages and logic itself with its off-kilter, hardcore-spawned pandemonium. But the real show is singer/guitarist Luke Fairchild. A veteran of such Denver bands as Why Planes Go Down and Sparkles, Fairchild has at last completely surrendered to whatever demons possess him. He barks. He jerks. He chews at the air. He falls down and goes boom. And somehow, in the midst of all that rabidity, he manages to beat guitar chords into the shapes of hallucinations. Somebody, please: Stick a belt between his teeth.

Best Frontman

Brian Hagman
Black Lamb

Back in the day, Brian Hagman was the only real reason to watch local punk act Wretched Refuse. But when Black Lamb (né the Lambs) formed at the dawn of the millennium, the singer finally found a band that could keep up with his intensity. Crooning like some three-headed clone of Ozzy Osbourne, Ian Astbury and Glenn Danzig, Hagman prances through a veritable minefield of thunder-conjuring, sludge-boogie riffs with a derangement that borders on outright bloodlust. Catch the group live, and you'll see: Nothing short of a mushroom cloud could tear your eyes off Hagman's force-of-nature performance.

Best Frontwoman

Marie Litton
Ghost Buffalo

Anyone who dismisses Ghost Buffalo as just a Planes Mistaken for Stars side project doesn't quite get it. While guitarist Matt Bellinger and drummer Mike Ricketts do indeed split shifts between the two bands, Ghost Buffalo is a full-time passion for leader Marie Litton. The songwriter lends her soaring, haunting voice to the group's heartache-weary country rock; on stage, she's nearly dwarfed by her acoustic as she gazes heavenward and pours her heart out to the universe. The dazzling contributions of Bellinger, Ricketts, guitarist Josh Coyle and bassist Tom Ventura can't be overstated, but it's Litton who's the front, center and soul of Ghost Buffalo.

Best Unheralded Guitar Virtuoso

Dave Beegle

Artist, producer, teacher and one-man guitar battalion Dave Beegle remains an underground six-string phenom. After launching power trio Fourth Estate in the late '80s, the Fort Collins homeboy used his masterful tone -- something that mates Joe Satriani and Paco de Lucia with Johann Sebastian Bach's blessing -- to explore the instrumental nuances of flamenco, world fusion and ethno-acoustic rock. As fluent with the blind-dog blues as with a Balkan-flavored arrangement, Beegle, lauded nationally as "a guitarist's guitarist," has issued a handful of exceptional solo and group-oriented discs via brother Morris's Hapi Skratch imprint, proving what can be accomplished when simple wood and wires merge with virtuosity and heart.

Best Bluegrass Band

Open Road

Bluegrass traditions may not be ancient by the standards of Greek mythology, but they have a proud history that Fort Collins-based Open Road limns with love and skill on its latest disc for Rounder Records, ...In the Life. The longer Bradford Lee Folk and his musical partners perform this music, the deeper and more natural their playing and singing becomes. They bring the past into the present.

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