Ritzy Bryan and Rhydian Dafydd grew up together in North Wales and formed their first band, Tricky Nixon, while living in Manchester. When that outfit split up, in 2006, the two wasted little time in putting together what would become the Joy Formidable when they moved back to Wales. Over…
Christopher Owens and Chet White formed Girls in 2007, when the two met in the Bay Area. Owens, who was brought up in the Children of God cult, had effectively been cut off from the kinds of cultural knowledge most kids experience before the age of sixteen. Once he had…
To a lot of people with mostly mainstream sensibilities and cultural affiliations, grindcore, crust and death metal will always just sound like a bunch of noise with terrible vocals. But a band like Dripfed — and most of the acts that probably inspired it — found that a splintery guitar…
Sometime in 2011, a high-school student named Pete Bell started filming shows at Rhinoceropolis as part of a documentary project for his video class. Interviewing many of the people who made the place what it was and others who played there or documented the happenings of the last several years…
It was bound to happen. Travis Egedy is leaving Denver. When Egedy moved here in 2003 to go to art school, his one-man experimental music project, Pictureplane, was just getting off the ground. For a handful of years, he mostly played to his immediate group of friends, often at DIY…
There doesn’t seem to be much obvious or interesting use of stereo effects on recordings anymore. But on “Fire,” the opening tune on Sonolumina’s Solar Logos, the hand-drum sound travels back and forth from one speaker to the other so that it feels like you’re in the middle of a…
It hasn’t been that long that Trevor Powers has been playing out live with his band Youth Lagoon — or even very long since he started posting his early bedroom recordings and the blogosphere started writing about his music. While that’s a typical story these days, Powers’s music has struck…
You may have seen Kamran Khan playing bass and other instruments in Modern Witch — and while that band was one of a wave of acts that got lumped under the inside-joke genre “witch house,” it also explored electronic minimalism, dark house music, dub and performance art, all informed by…
PURE SUNSHINE II @ BLUEBIRD THEATER | 3/2/12 It would be hard to have picked the star attraction for this show because the crowd changed and switched throughout the show with some people sticking around for everything. But chances are, no one had seen Spell since its last show in…
’57 Lesbian (due tonight at the Bluebird Theater) came about when Matt Bischoff of the Fluid and the Frantix had some downtime and got together with his old friend and former Frantix drummer, Dave Stewart, and started a stripped down rock and roll band with former Twice Wilted bassist Chanin…
As is the case with many musicians who got their artistic start in another field, Evan Abeele and Denise Nouvion intended their project to be more than just musical: Nouvion’s visual aesthetic lends Memoryhouse’s output a bit of its sense of space and shadings of mood, while Abeele’s classical training…
MEGADETH @ FILLMORE AUDITORIUM | 2.28.12 See Also: Interviews with Chris Broderick and David Ellefson Last night at the Fillmore, Dave Mustaine stopped the show after “Whose Life Is It Anyway,” and the band left the stage. After a handful of minutes, Mustaine came back on and said, “Security guys…
VNV Nation (due tomorrow night at the Black Sheep in Colorado Springs) started as a kind of bedroom project for the band’s singer and co-programmer, Ronan Harris. By 1995, he had developed his music to the point that it was becoming part of the next wave of underground electronic pop…
See Also: Megadeth live review at Fillmore and interview with Chris Broderick Megadeth (due tonight at the Fillmore Auditorium) may be one of the Big Four of thrash, but in many ways, its frontman Dave Mustaine is largely responsible for the sound and aesthetic of three of the Big Four…
Magic Cyclops began making himself known to audiences outside of Fort Collins around ten years ago. Whether he was putting on a show or running Championship Karaoke Night at the hi-dive, he always left some kind of impression. Magic’s British accent and spoiled-rock-star stunts alternately made you think that a)…
Most bands offer few surprises more than ten years into their career. While people who never liked the Swayback probably won’t be persuaded by this latest offering, the guys really challenged themselves in making an album like this, one that’s diverse yet cohesive. It isn’t all over the place in…
Up until the middle part of the last decade, Charles Rowell and Brandon Welchez spent time in underground punk and noisy post-punk bands in San Diego, the most noteworthy of which was the Plot to Blow Up the Eiffel Tower. That act dissolved in 2006; two years later, the duo…
Back in the mid-’90s, with the Fluid in limbo after the release of Glue and Roadmouth, Matt Bischoff found himself yearning to get back to playing regularly. He discovered that his friends Dave Stewart, a former bandmate in the Frantix, and Chanin Floyd, who had recently left Twice Wilted, were…
Gathering of the Clouds Day 2 @ City Hall | 2/24/12One of the main reasons for the festival was the release of the new Overcasters album, Curses/Prayers and as usual, Overcasters delivered a solid set of music. Bathed in various shades and hues of shifting light over the course of…
Iced Earth (due tonight at Summit Music Hall) came out of the rich heavy metal scene in Tampa Bay, Florida in the late ’80s. At a time when melodic heavy metal, especially the glam variety, was on the wane, Iced Earth came in with the wave of metal that produced…
Zola Jesus (due tomorrow night at Larimer Lounge) started as the solo project of Nika Roza Danilova. Shortly after she released her earliest recordings, she came to the attention of Caleb Braaten of Sacred Bones Records who has since been a champion of her singular creative vision. Danilova’s 2009 album,…
Charles Ballas is the kind of record nerd a lot of people wish they were but could never be. He’s probably heard most things you’d throw his way, but he’s too good-natured and smart to be a jerk about it. While attending the University of Colorado in Boulder, he was…
