Tjutjuna, Orbiteer, Woodsman and Fissure Mystic Friday, February 5, 2010 Meadowlark Jeff Suthers opened this show with the debut of his solo project, Orbiteer. Streaming layers of hazy guitar overlayed sketches of faintly discernible melodies in the distance. Whorls of shimmering, controlled feedback were manipulated into broad vistas of panoramic…
Although only technically together for a few months, Hideous Men has garnered interest well outside of Denver and even as far as England. The duo’s experimental pop songs incorporate samples and loops within larger arcs of songwriting that have a gently expansive emotional colorings and soothing rhythmic textures. Although the…
A telepath is a creature that can communicate directly with the mind of another sentient being without the need for vocalization. This fact appears to inform the core of what the band Telepath attempts in its music. Because music transcends language and can communicate ideas and emotions directly, Telepath largely…
When not performing as a member of the Glitch Mob, Ooah (Josh Mayer) sometimes collaborates with Martin Folb in Panty Raid. Not firmly entrenched in a specific style of electronic music, this project seems to freely associate and appropriate sound ideas and techniques from a wide variety of sources, including…
The songs on Video Games & Popsicle Sticks recall a time before non-mainstream music was splintered off into increasingly hermetic subgenres. Fuzzed-out melodic guitar over insistent rhythms and dark undertones grace each track like cuts from a secret collaboration between Throwing Muses and Band of Susans. A hint of garage…
Named after a Siberian cryptid cognate of Bigfoot, Tjutjuna emerged from the band Mothership when guitarist Brendon Schulze left to pursue a professional career in television. Rather than continue with vividly imagined, Michael Moorcock-esque tales of science fantasy, however, Tjutjuna focused on the instrumental aspect of the band’s overall sound…
The burbling expansiveness at the heart of this band’s soundscaping probably gives the impression that the music is all whimsical playfulness and wandering noise-collage melodies. With Ryan McRyhew of BDRMPPL as one of the minds behind the project, it could be enjoyed for the beauty of the songs, but with…
Caught Nouvelle Vague last night at the Bluebird and want to know more about the act? Your wish is our command. We recently caught up with Marc Collin and fired a few questions at him about the projects musical goals, the act’s artistic approach to re-contextualizing songs and how the…
Anvil, with Tauntaun and Havok Sunday, January 31, 2010 Gothic Theatre Havok opened the show with its classic thrash sound, in which you can hear a mix of influences: from Slayer’s sense of impending disaster to Overkill’s asymmetrical sonic violence to Megadeth’s speed-fueled aggression. David Sanchez’s vocal style recalls Tom…
Anvil started out as Lips in 1978, but by the time it released its debut album, Hard ‘N’ Heavy, in 1981, it was going by the name we know today. The first three Anvil albums, including Metal on Metal and Forged in Fire, pioneered a furiously fast and aggressive music…
This album’s title, Collages, serves as a statement of purpose and a summation of the aesthetic of the band up to this point. The instrumentation and sampled sounds here overlap and complement each other in vibrantly varied configurations. “Spirit Stone,” for instance, seems to channel Ceremonial-era Savage Republic in its…
Based in Paris, Nouvelle Vague has made a career out of taking old punk, new-wave and post-punk songs and giving them a unique reinterpretation — often with the cooperation and participation of the original bands. Marc Collin and Olivier Libaux put a kind of bossa nova, lounge and French pop…
In the liner notes to the reissue of the Raincoats’ debut album, Kurt Cobain wrote about how listening to those songs made him feel like a voyeur into a private world due to the intimacy and immediacy of the music. And while Dream Wagon (due at the Larimer Lounge on…
White Denim is to modern psychedelic post-punk what Alice Donut was to punk rock — weird and unafraid to let their varied musical freak flags fly. Across the Austin trio’s latest record, Fits, you can hear elements of old progressive rock, garage rock, jazz, splintered blues, as well as aesthetic…
Mustangs and Madras farewell show With Get Three Coffins Ready, Only Thunder, the Gunshy and Git Some Saturday, January 23, 2010 3 Kings Tavern Better Than: Virtually every other five-band bill I’ve seen. The five members of Get Three Coffins Ready played the kind of high-energy, glittery surf rock that…
Starting in December 2002 with former members of Fourth Gear Blue, Mustangs and Madras may not have had the most illustrious of beginnings but after recruiting a new singer a few months later, Mustangs solidified a line-up that went on to write some of the most striking post-hardcore music of…
The membership roster of Snake Rattle Rattle Snake includes former (and current, in the case of Andrew Warner) members of bands that left an indelible mark on the underground music scene in Colorado, acts like Space Team Electra, Red Cloud, Bad Luck City, Monofog, Hawks of Paradise and V-Tech Orchid…
Largely comprising veterans of Denver’s underground music scene, Snake Rattle Rattle Snake is a bit of a sonic departure for its members. Rather than assemble a clumsy pastiche of space rock, psychedelia, Americana and dark post-punk from past projects, the players created a new sound, one in which icy melodies…
At least this band delivers on the promise of its name. From the opening track, “Battle of the Rabbits,” you feel as though you’ve time-warped back to a fictional past when the club Tech Noir wished it could play music this frenetic. If Mr. Pacman fronted the Nails and ditched…
Unlike many of its brethren in the realm of neo-psychedelic garage rock, White Denim decided not to bother with a retro sound at all. The band’s bubbling, urgent rhythms and often angular guitar work sometimes sound like an accidental rediscovery of post-punk — but rather than embrace a stark aesthetic,…
As a guitarist and frontman for Swervedriver, Adam Franklin helped to write electrifying and expansive rock songs that went further than — and rocked a lot harder than — the “shoegaze” label they received from many fans and critics. Even after the alternative-rock backlash of the mid-’90s, Swervedriver continued to…
At some point in the life of everyone who ever got into punk rock after the ’80s, there was that band that wrote anthemic songs that seemed to perfectly articulate how you felt about everything. Those songs were written to be catchy and to be sung along with by the…
