When someone writes the inevitable book on chillwave, a handful of artists will be discussed in terms that treat their songwriting with the respect it deserves, while others will be dismissed as bandwagoneers. Teen Daze will probably be in the former camp. Sure, there are shades of the aesthetic territory…

Out of all the bands that emerged on the New York scene of the late ’90s and early 2000s, few pushed the envelope as far as Liars. With its 2001 debut album, They Threw Us All in a Trench and Stuck a Monument on Top, Liars made some of the…

If you never saw Greg Hill’s previous band, Six Months to Live, that wouldn’t be surprising — because not nearly enough people did. Hill is a gifted songwriter with a genius for power pop; he’s also a character, something that’s in short supply in Denver (think a cross between Don…

“Erleben,” by Gemini Trajectory, starts off side one of this split with an evolving stream of textures, synth tones, and a beat that’s urgent and insistent, provoking a feeling of running headlong into Germanic death-disco territory. The song is like a mirror image of the band’s previous music in its dark…

In the middle of the last decade, Jana Hunter made a name for herself among aficionados of the pastoral psychedelia some called “freak folk.” Appropriately enough, Devendra Banhart and Vetiver’s Andy Cabic released most of Hunter’s albums on their Gnomonsong label. More recently, Hunter has expanded her sonic palette further…

Jason Anderson formed Wolf Colonel in 1996 while a student in Portland, at a time when (and in a place where) he could easily see Elliott Smith before every sweater-wearing fan of indie rock had the chance to do so. Seeing one of Calvin Johnson’s projects was not a rare…

Holophrase (due Thursday, July 5, at the hi-dive) kind of burst onto the scene like Athena from the head of Zeus. Live, the group has a kind of mystique to it, and its members sound like they grew up listening to Chrome, Magazine and Zvuki Mu. Remarkably, this is not…

From his early days as a young DJ at the iconic So What! club nights to his current role as an elder statesman of sorts among live electronic artists and underground bands in Denver, Peter Black (aka Peter Gurule) has been bringing his passion for music to clubs around Denver…

THURSTON MOORE @ LARIMER LOUNGE | 6/29/12 Thurston Moore came on stage joined by the members of Hush Arbors, one of the opening acts, and violin player Samara Lubelski. On the mike, Moore joked, “We just flew in from Boulder,” to which some wag in the audience said, “You sure…

This album marks a complete reinvention of Safe Boating Is No Accident, starting with opening track “Her New Man.” It’s as though these guys ditched the Americana/crypto-avant-garde songwriting of the past in favor of an unrefined sincerity — like their irony and incisive humor have come full circle to a…

Fitz and the Tantrums appear to have absorbed whatever was in the water during the time Daryl Hall was rubbing shoulders with R&B legends of the late ’60s. In fact, according to an interview with Rolling Stone in 2010, singer Michael Fitzpatrick was told he sounded like Hall by none…

Thurston Moore has used the electric guitar in more interesting ways than most anyone else you could name in terms of using and abusing and expanding and transcending the traditional limitations of the instrument. As one of the founding members of Sonic Youth, Moore took what he had been learning…

You couldn’t make up Joe Cheves unless you thought you were being clever and writing some film in collaboration with the Coen brothers about a folksinger from the first half of the twentieth century. Cheves, who fronts Sawmill Joe (due at the hi-dive on Saturday, June 30), looks like he…