Why give anything an intent listen and fair assessment when I can review 5 albums in a matter of 225 seconds? Bullet for My Valentine Scream Aim Fire EP 20-20 Entertainment 00:30-01:15 of “Eye of the Storm” ARG! This is really, really, really bad metal. I believe that someone from…
Just received word from the fine folks at Soda Jerk Presents that the venerable Planes Mistaken for Stars will be playing its last show ever on Saturday, February 16 at the Marquis Theater in the company of friends Mustangs & Madras and Kingdom of Magic. Keep checking Soda Jerk’s site…
Dinosaur Jr., Hate Fuck Trio and Awesome Color December 14, 2007 Ogden Theatre Better than: Reading Our Band Could Be Your Life for the tenth time. As I stepped off Colfax Avenue, and into the Way-Back Machine of the Ogden Theatre on Friday night, I took a second to reflect…
Kneebody Saturday, December 15, 2007 Dazzle Better than: Watching High Noon with the sound turned off. “This is the crazy set,” Kneebody bassist Kaveh Rastegar alerted the audience before the band embarked on its second set with “High Noon,” a new song by trumpeter Shane Endsley, who was inspired by…
Here’s a selection of the best of last week’s music blogging from around the Village Voice chain: In case you didn’t hear, Ike Turner died last week. Here are some lurid remembrances of the hard-partying, wife-beating icon…
The always awesome Onion AV Club has released their annual list of the worst band names of the year, and sweet nougaty center of fuck are there some unspeakable atrocities of names on it. Now, I could spend a few hundred words heaping my own dose of mockery on such…
This may be Jay-Z’s last year at Def Jam Right now Jay-Z is celebrating a pretty good year as CEO/President of Def Jam. His label garnered 26 Grammy nominations last week, his artists Rihanna and Ne-Yo are blowing up worldwide and his own project, American Gangster, is topping year-end lists…
Although Vincent Gallo has a reputation of being a bit of a hot head at times, during a recent chat with Westword, he was more than gracious as he discussed his current tour, clarified how he and the other three members of RRIICCEE don’t necessarily improvise so much as they…
Something disturbing happened to me a couple of weeks ago. It had to do with skinheads, Skrewdriver and shopping. On a recent trip to the dollar store, a young cashier struck up a conversation with me about music. He had a shaved head and a blue flight jacket, with a…
Ike Turner, who died of thus far unreported causes on December 12 in Southern California, was one of the most divisive figures in popular music. “Rocket 88,” which plenty of observers peg as the first-ever rock-and-roll song, was largely his creation despite it being credited to Jackie Brenston, and he…
This fall has certainly been eventful for members of the Photo Atlas. First, they parted ways with drummer Devon Shirley in the middle of an East Coast tour, and then word came down last week that Rob Stevenson, head of the act’s Stolen Transmission imprint, had been handed his walking…
There are moments where it would be real nice to sleep in your own bed,” admits Will Hoge with a rapid-fire Southern drawl. “But that doesn’t pay for shit, so I have to stay out here and work. No, we’re fortunate to get to play music for a living. Every…
In high school, Tyler Gilmore had widely varied tastes. The burgeoning composer was into acts like the Smashing Pumpkins and Aphex Twin, but he was equally fixated on transcribing Miles Davis solos to play on his trumpet. After college, Gilmore attended a series of summer workshops taught by Maria Schneider…
Suzy Bogguss was poised to be country music’s next big thing. After winning the CMA’s Horizon Award in 1992, she sold more than two and a half million albums on the strength of six top-ten singles. But Bogguss’s eclectic and ever-evolving musical stylings left her stranded somewhere outside country’s mainstream…
Why has the Hate Fuck Trio been largely inactive for most of this millennium? Jon and Sam DeStefano, the sibling tandem behind one of the best Denver bands of the ’90s, aren’t telling — or rather, they are, but their responses in advance of their upcoming reunion date are highly…
The slump that’s afflicting the music industry has apparently bypassed the holiday genre, since nearly forty new or reissued yuletide releases arrived at our door this year. We were happy to receive some of the discs reviewed below. The rest should have been returned to sender. A slew of CDs…
In one of my favorite Charles Bukowski poems, “The Insane Always Loved Me,” he wrote about how the unwanted, cowards and misanthropes would often attach themselves to him. I can relate. I’ve had many a nut sit down next to me at a bar, like the guy who made bird…
When most bands leave their home town to pursue their fortunes, they generally seek out a place that’s more financially and professionally viable. The members of Light Travels Faster, however, who originally hail from Amarillo, Texas, chose to come to Denver — not an especially astute career move on their…
DJ Garth is one of the most distinctive and exciting dance-music artists in the U.S. As a pioneer in the San Francisco house scene, Garth has been a driving force behind the famous Wicked parties and the stellar Grayhound label. His work ranges from shimmering, spaced-out excursions into druggy tribal…
Richie Havens first rose to prominence in the same Greenwich Village folk scene that produced Bob Dylan and Joan Baez, and he’s had a lengthy and distinguished career. The first performer at Woodstock, Havens is immortalized in the documentary of the same name, in which he closes his set with…
The phrase “It’s all good” has never been less true when it comes to hip-hop. The genre’s mainstream branch is mighty uninteresting these days, with superstars regularly coming up short and intriguing new artists getting bypassed in favor of lowest-common-denominator one-shots — or am I premature in assuming that Meech…
Were Andy Warhol still aboveground, he could tweak his prescient bon mot about fame for the British music scene — something like “Every rock group in England will be called a brilliant, once-in-a-generation standard-setter at least once by New Musical Express.” Unfortunately for the Kooks, a Luke Pritchard-fronted combo that…
