Photo: Tom Murphy Git Some The Frantix, Git Some, the Omens and the Purple Fluid Saturday, September 20, 2008 Wax Trax Better Than: Most so-called “punk rock” shows. Wax Trax, long a stalwart of underground music in Denver, celebrated its 30th year anniversary this past Saturday with a full day…
“Does this mean I need to find a real job?” Here’s a user-friendly guide to all the great content you might have missed this week on Backbeat Online while you were reeling in shock and horror at the news that the end of era was coming with the impending cancellation…
LOCALS ONLY DJ Vajra isn’t just one of the best turntablists in Colorado — he’s one of the best in the nation. Vajra was recently tapped to do a showcase at this year’s DMC World Finals at London’s indigO2 on Saturday, September 27. And even though Vajra himself is a…
A friend recently asked, “Which comes first the lyrics or the music.” It’s a question you hear a lot. It’s kind of like asking a photographer, “Which comes first, the lens or the camera body?” Or asking a painter, “Which comes first, yellow or blue?”…
Slide show John Digweed September 18, 2008 Beta Better than: The sounds his old partner Sasha is spinning these days. I’ve seen John Digweed at raves, I’ve seen him at clubs and I’ve spun his discs until I could hear them in my head. He rarely disappoints and tonight was…
Trolling around on this here interweb this morning, we somehow managed to come across a trio of blogs linking to vintage soundboard recordings from Rainbow Music Hall. The first one, recorded on June 25, 1980 during the British Steel tour, features Judas Priest — or, more accurately, the glass-shattering shrill…
Giving DeVotchKa an unfavorable review is a rarity on par with seeing Haley’s Comet. Chris Barton from the LA Times, however, is clearly impervious to the band’s charms. In his critique of the act’s show a few nights ago at the El Rey in Los Angeles, he gave the band…
Just stumbled across this little gem and thought we’d share: Presumably in an effort to help youngsters to stave off dreaded STDs and unwanted pregnancies, Trojan Brand Condoms enlisted a number of Warped tour acts to film 30-second public service announcements for them earlier this summer. The lady killers of…
Oh, man, please don’t compare us to Jack Johnson,” Shwayze, one half of the group that bears his name, implores from his London hotel room. “People hear acoustic guitar, and for some reason the only person in the world they think of is Jack Johnson. He’s not the only fool…
I caught the poker bug on a trip to Vegas a few years back. And when I got back to Denver, I played a ton of Texas Hold ‘Em games on my laptop, watched eleven-time World Series of Poker winner Phil Hellmuth on ESPN, and even checked out a few…
Watching DeVotchKa take the stage at Monolith on Saturday night in front of a half-empty Red Rocks Amphitheatre was a bit deflating. But by the third or fourth song, my disappointment had turned into indignation, and I felt like I’d gotten a brass knuckle junk punch from my best friend…
Punk rock hit the musical world like a bomb in the mid-’70s, and the reverberations of that artistic eruption were felt even in places like Aurora, Colorado. In 1978, Aurora was an incredibly boring town, so it comes as no surprise that a few pioneering young men put together a…
The members of Cocktail Revolution, who’ll celebrate their new disc’s release on Saturday, September 20, at Jazz@Jack’s, didn’t pick up their instruments yesterday. Saxophonist Jon Hegel and drummer Zach Pietlock are part of Judge Roughneck, Chad Aman plays keyboards for Byron Shaw Projex and Artie Moore, one of three contributing…
It’s refreshing to hear a band that’s not trying to be clever or more innovative than its peers. That said, the straightahead power pop of the Fire Drills (featuring former Westword scribe Jason Heller) is a breath of fresh air. Cheap Lies, with its bouncy rhythms and sharp riffing, disproves…
“I think I’ll drink myself into a coma/And I’ll take every way out I can find/But morphine, codeine, whiskey they won’t alter/The way I feel now death is not around.” Those lines, from Spiritualized’s latest, Songs in A & E, pretty well sum up the two topics England’s most heralded…
Few of those who attended Phantom Planet’s June gig at the Fillmore in support of Panic at the Disco probably expected much from the band. The combo’s known — if it’s known at all — as the group that once featured Rushmore star Jason Schwartzman on drums (he left the…
Black Tide, appearing with Bleeding Through and Bullet for My Valentine, is almost literally a baby band: Guitarist/singer Gabriel Garcia doesn’t even qualify for a driver’s license yet, and none of his bandmates has reached legal drinking age. Still, they’re old enough to know better than to venture too far…
Chrome was one of the most influential experimental bands, presaging the harsh, angular, mechanistic songwriting that would become industrial music. The act’s paranoid vision of a dystopian world expressed itself in sounds that recalled the late-’60s psychedelic rock of the 13th Floor Elevators shot through with a dark, sinister electricity…
For a buzz band, Blitzen Trapper is extremely modest. Instead of trying to overwhelm listeners with their awesomeness, singer-songwriter Eric Earley and crew create casually adventurous tracks that draw from American music in ways that seem both familiar and fresh. “Sleepy Time in the Western World” opens the album with…
No one really knows what to do with CSS. Not Sub Pop, not Apple, and certainly not proponents of, uh, “nu-rave.” I guess we’re supposed to dance, guiltily. “Let’s Reggae All Night” has a nice locked-in squelch to it, but I wish the line I heard as “Let’s break the…
Lindsey Buckingham is the creative force behind Fleetwood Mac, a group that remains a big concert draw and a steady seller when it comes to albums new and old. Indeed, Rumours, released in 1977, is among the most popular long-players ever released, with worldwide sales in excess of thirty million…
Alejandro Escovedo has made a career out of taking chances. He started in punk with the Nuns, joined cowpunks Rank & File, and formed the country-oriented True Believers with his brothers before going solo. Even after being diagnosed with hepatitis C, Escovedo’s rock-and-roll lifestyle helped define his music. That is,…
