WOVENHAND With Git Some 01.15.11 | Marquis Theater On the cusp of its tour with Wovenhand, Git Some seemed in high form to win over at least a few people in the audience on Saturday night at the Marquis Theater. Less chaotic than earlier incarnations of the band, one thing…
Wovenhand (due at The Marquis Theater tomorrow night with Git Some) is the current musical project of David Eugene Edwards. In his early bands, Bloodflower and The Denver Gentlemen, Edwards was developing an aesthetic that some consider synonymous with all the significant music to have come out of Denver…
In the early ’90s, Liz Phair (due at the Bluebird Theater this Tuesday) started releasing tapes she called Girly Sound. These early tapes revealed a wide-ranging and playful musical creativity and helped to establish Phair in the underground music scene in Chicago. Somehow these tapes made it into the hands…
GEM TRAILS With Thundercade and Kevin Costner Suicide Pact Meadowlark | January 7, 2011 Gem Trails is the solo side project of Trevor Peterson from Woodsman. From this performance, the name is appropriate for the spectral, glistening streaming of guitar that Peterson often does in his more well-known band, but…
After releasing a short run of independently released cassettes titled Girly Sound in the early ’90s, Liz Phair quickly garnered critical acclaim for her offbeat sense of humor and knack for quirky, inventive pop songs. On the strength of those releases, Phair signed to Matador Records, which released her debut…
There seems to be a big influx of reverby, neo-garage rock everywhere lately. School Knights fares better than many bands because its youthful exuberance is not a pose. It’s obvious from these four songs that this duo has listened to more than its fair share of No Age and Siltbreeze…
Darwin Smith, like certain prominent musicians on the indie circuit of recent years, once attended Wesleyan University. Either there’s an alien virus on campus that imparts a knack for an inventively catchy pop song, or it’s pure coincidence. As part of the band Darwin Deez, Smith and his Deez-surnamed compatriots…
Based in Minneapolis, Zoo Animal has sometimes been identified as a Christian band, but you’re not going to get vapid Songs 4 Worship fare or the sort of thing that gets featured at a Cornerstone festival from this act. Instead, Holly Newsom’s plaintive vocals and the group’s introspective, minimalist pop…
Clearly there are some nods to Nick Drake in the way that the May Kit’s Max Winne puts a song together. It’s there in his ability to conjure images of flights of fantasy — the kind that strike you during your workday in a moment of reprieve from the prosaic…
Every night, people clapped and they were very kind,” says David Eugene Edwards about Wovenhand’s stint opening for Tool last year. “Of course, we had a few diehards in the front row that don’t want to see anybody but Maynard, you know. They were like, ‘Get the fuck off the…
When Peter Pisano moved to Minnesota from Milwaukee with his old band, the Wars of 1812, he sacrificed an offer of grad school and a teaching job for an unknown future in a town where he was not aware of any real music scene. What he found was a community…
These two singles represent a further shift from even the boundary-pushing material heard on 2007’s Necrogeister. “Bicycle Tropics” sounds like a Can tune pulled apart to its basic components and reworked into an IDM pop song. “Savage Orb,” meanwhile, seemingly dispenses with all connection to conventional rock instrumentation. A chillingly…
Thin White Rope and Green on Red may have been some of the early artists in what became known as “alt-country,” but Uncle Tupelo took that style to much greater prominence. Along with his friend Jay Farrar, Tweedy led that band for seven years before the former left to form…
Since its inception in 1990, New Orleans-based Cowboy Mouth — named after Sam Shepard and Patti Smith’s play about misfits musing on the foibles of the American Dream — has produced the kind of eclectic sound that defines most of the music coming out of that town. The group delivers…
When you hear death metal or any of its offshoots, you either appreciate its technical precision or you hate it. Ashes of Ruin (due this Saturday, January 8, at Cervantes’ Other Side) combines elements of that kind of metal with more melodic guitar leads, yet the rhythms are no less…
WARLOCK PINCHERS with Il Cattivo 12.31.10 | Gothic Theater Around 9 p.m., the safety videos started up and it looked and sounded like something straight out of Wonder Showzen. Puppets and people in a gorilla and a robot costume interacted as they would on a warped, faux kids’ show: surrealistic,…
LOW With Charlie Parr 12.18.10 | Larimer Lounge Fellow Minnesotan Charlie Parr opened the show and brought a classic blues and folk sensibility to his performance. It was a pretty minimalistic, stripped down set-up but if you paid attention to what Parr was doing on guitar, it was intricate, but…
Since its inception in 1993, Low (due at the Larimer Lounge this Saturday, December 18) from Duluth, Minnesota, has created a body of work characterized by a fragile intensity. Although often lumped in under the banner of “slowcore” with a group of bands of similar sonic leanings, like Red House…
“Chillwave” is a buzzword used to describe a sound built on brezzy melodies with songs heavy on electronics. Even a short list of artists that have fallen under this umbrella, including bands like Small Black and Washed Out, reveals more diversity in approaches to songwriting than a genre title generally…
Chris Westin has become something of a fixture on the DIY scene in Denver since 2008, when he moved here from Oklahoma City and met nervesandgel’s Johnny Wohlfahrt while the two were working at the same restaurant. Westin had experienced the underground world before, but it was recording on Wohlfahrt’s…
“5low” sounds like what it must be like to wander around a sprawling mansion in the dark, guided only by the muffled voice of your would-be murderer three rooms away. If someone made a movie about a benevolent occult group trying to conquer the world through the use of remote…
When Low formed in Duluth, Minnesota, in 1993, no one could have guessed it would become one of the most respected underground bands of the next two decades. In an era when most acts traded in sheer volume, Low focused instead on raw emotional honesty expressed with a quiet and…
