The first half of the A-side of this cassette conjures a mood of being on an intercontinental flight, a peaceful sense of being out of time and floating on a journey whose destination is half a day ahead. That evolves into the sound of early analog video-game malfunctioning — like…

If you were to make a short list of the greatest bass players of all time, Bootsy Collins would surely be included. After firing his backing band in the late ’60s, James Brown hired Collins and his brother Catfish’s band, the Pacemakers, to back him up. Collins later became a…

From 2002 to 2006, Evan Patterson and Nick Thieneman were in the renowned post-hardcore band Breather Resist, from Louisville, Kentucky. After a lineup change and a decided move toward evolving its sound, that band morphed into Young Widows. Unlike Breather Resist’s penchant for distilling raw emotion into vectored blasts of…

Ed Marshall has had his hand in music in Denver for the past several years, both as a keen observer of the ebb and flow of music out of this town and as a musician with a penchant for the psychedelic with bands like Stargazer, Into the Ether, Overcasters and…

STAG HARE at RHINOCERPOLIS | 5/28/11″If you allowed your imagination to synch up with the music, it felt like you’d been on a journey through inner space across vast plains lit only by the moon.”…

Although often lumped into the category of post-rock, This Will Destroy You (due tonight at Larimer Lounge) from San Marcos, Texas, is more rooted in outright instrumental rock music with more than its fair share of an experimental edge. When the band first emerged, the post-rock designation made a bit…

Instead of appropriating an early-punk-rock singles aesthetic, these bands apparently decided to go further back and dispense with the artwork entirely for a visual result akin to an old garage-rock 45. Which is fitting, considering that the nervy power pop of “I Buried My Heart Under Bar Bar (Then Burned…

GG Allin gets most of the cred for being the most offensive punk-rocker of all time. But the scum-rock crown could probably now be claimed, at least lyrically, by British Columbia hardcore crossover act Day-Glo Abortions. In trouble with the law for the lyrical content of their songs as well…

Although she got her start in her home town of Kansas City, Kansas, Janelle Monáe gained a much wider audience after she relocated to Atlanta. There she met OutKast’s Big Boi and struck up a mutually beneficial creative friendship. In the wake of the release of her inventive 2010 recording,…

If you read the act’s self-penned bio, it sounds like School Knights was born out of two guys hijacking an established band. The truth of that story may never be known. But what is known is that drummer Zack Roif and guitarist Michael Stein don’t seem to overthink the music…

THE UNSANE With Holly 750 and Clinging to the Trees of a Forest Fire 05.23.11 | Marquis Theater With very little fanfare, The Unsane took stage and immediately played one of its best songs, “Against the Grain,” with that great doleful neck-and-body bend in the beginning that is one of…

During its relatively short life of a little over a year, Itchy-O Marching Band (due Sunday, May 22nd at Sutra) has left quite an impression on anyone who has seen this group of around thirty people in uniforms that make them look like a special unit of interdimensional troubadours…

As with the other music he has produced, Harder to Tell reveals Roger Green’s strong compositional skills, balanced in this case by an apparent fascination with a broad range of sonic atmospheres and textures, each expressing a depth of mood. This is most evident on tracks like “Hearing Into Clouds.”…

Shilpa Ray rocks on the harmonium like other players do on guitar. But she and her Brooklyn-based band, the Happy Hookers (no intentional reference to Xaviera Hollander), are currently making the kind of rock music that seems unencumbered by any direct connection to Americana, despite the presence of a harmonium…

In early 2010, Itchy-O started crashing house shows and other events with a “surprise” visit from a full marching band and a dancing, Chinese-style dragon. While not the first-ever guerrilla marching band, Itchy-O (due at Sutra on Sunday, May 22) is probably the first to fully embrace experimental music as…

For the past two years, the Burning Angels have been stoked if we get fifty people in the room,” says Casey James Prestwood. “We’re even more stoked if twenty of those people are paying attention or even dancing. So playing with Drive-By Truckers at the Ogden recently, that was a…