Ari Hoenig Punk Bop Trio Saturday, February 16 Dazzle Better than: Most jazz shows I’ve seen in the last six months. Ari Hoenig is intense. In his own right the drummer is a force to be reckoned with; so it’s no small compliment to acknowledge that the other two parts…
Locals Only: It’s been about a year since former executive director of the Colorado Hip-Hop Coalition, Apostle, aka Jeff Campbell, left Colorado to focus solely on his music career with his group Heavyweight Dub Champions. But the impact the Colorado Hip-Hop Coalition had in the late ’90’s and early 2000’s…
Welcome to the first installment of Westword’s Spiral podcast. This week, Love Me Destroyer’s Scooter James gets in touch with his acoustic side and proclaims his love for Stryper. Download the episode , or listen to the stream below…
One of the most beautiful things about the Denver music scene is the cross-pollination that occurs among bands. It seems as though every musician worth his or her salt has at least two musical projects going on at any given time. The word “incestuous” gets thrown around a lot, affectionately…
Slide Show…
It’s time once again for a trip to the past – the recent past, when every boy, man and elderly dude doddering toward the grave was singing about Kelis Rogers’ breasts. In the following Q&A, conducted for a March 4, 2004 profile, Kelis proved to be bright and blunt. She…
Clubbers, beware! Something wicked this way comes — an alien hybrid built out of the DNA of hip-hop, electro, jungle and glitch, fused together via DSP wizardry and masterful laptop skills. With bowel-rupturing sub-bass, teeth-rattling beats and mind-bending cuts, edits and processing, it’s the aural equivalent of an industrial-strength cleanser:…
Apathetic Drive’s name may cause some to scratch their heads or tempt them to come up with a clever and slanderous nickname, but these guys have beat the wags to the punch on that score. If nothing else, the “Drive” portion of the moniker captures the forward trajectory of the…
When I check out a club for the first time, I like to keep a low profile. I’ll just slide into the place, grab a seat at the bar, order a beer and observe for a bit, getting a feel for the joint. But when I walked through the doors…
EXTREMELY FRAGILE. PLEASE BE GENTLE. Watching Gared O’Donnell retrieve his guitar, I can’t help but laugh a little as I catch sight of those words painted on the outside of his hard-shell case in bright, safety-orange-colored letters. Fragile? Really? Explosive, sure. But fragile? Imagine such a timid plea slapped on…
At the venerable age of sixty, bassist George Porter Jr., who provides the effortlessly funky heartbeat for Porter Batiste Stoltz, has become a hero to today’s jam-band aficionados. But this development isn’t as unlikely as it initially seems. Porter made his bones as the anchor of the Meters — a…
Last April, when jazz drummer Ari Hoenig returned to New York after playing a gig in Denver, he was greeted by an e-mail from a woman who wrote him a long, thoughtful note expressing how much she hated the music his trio played at Dazzle. He was a bit stunned…
Thriller 25 hit stores this week. For obvious reasons, the world’s best-selling album probably won’t get its proper due, so Chicago rapper Rhyme-fest (with the help of producer Mark Ronson) posted Man in the Mirror free at his online store (www.rhymefeststore.com, click on Mixtapes). On his MySpace blog, Rhyme writes,…
One of musical prognosticators’ favorite New Year’s activities is wagering which personalities will be waved past the velvet rope into the Ultimate Afterparty sometime over the next 365 days (well, 366 this year). Last year, Britney Spears was flirting pretty hard with the bouncers, but somehow managed to stay off…
Although its members proclaim themselves purveyors of “voodoobilly,” San Diego’s Deadbolt doesn’t tread quite the same musical waters as psychobilly outfits like Mad Sin, with its overt co-opting of snotty punk-rock poses dressed in retro guise. Instead, the act’s music is closer to its obvious influences: Duane Eddy and Dick…
With the sudden demise of MTV’s Headbangers Ball in 1995, metal had nowhere to go but underground. The scene fractured, the sound intensified, and shares of Aqua Net plunged. Since then, a legion of back-to-basics core whores like Massachusetts’s All That Remains have pumped life back into the genre that…
There’s not a lot of new to be found in Black Lips’ fuzzy, skuzzy, hard-charging garage rock. Take a spin through last year’s Good Bad Not Evil or any of the band’s older releases and you’ll find the usual assortment of influences: Velvet Underground, maybe a touch of 13th Floor…
As the second wave of grunge washes across the country and the globe — whinier and wimpier than the first — the world’s metal mavens have begun to scurry to their corners to formulate survival strategies. Increasingly, these Mad Maxes look to past heroes for salvation and inspiration. Among them…
The post-stoner sounds made by Atlanta’s Zoroaster can be described in extremely simple terms — “loud” and “heavy” among them. But the band’s seemingly basic approach still leaves room for aural weirdness by the truckload. “Tualatin,” from the combo’s 2007 disc Dog Magic, provides the template. The track begins with…
Who? There are two types of memory these days. There is real memory, where the wafting aroma from taking trash out can transport you back under that bridge where you first tried heroin in the 80s. Then there is internet memory, whereby the deafening buzz of the newest thing relieves…
Welcome to the first installment of Snob Talk, where we ask different writers to wax philosophic, and self-indulgent, about a new topic each week. This week, we had folks write about bands that they’re pretty sure people laud more than listen to. I’m astounded by how much of Stereolab’s music…
British Sea Power Do You Like Rock Music? Rough Trade 02:20-02:55 of “Waving Flags” Hmm, yes I do like rock music. I appreciate it when bands ask me questions. It makes me really feel like I’m involved in their creative project. It’s kind of like when an author tells me…
