Music

DJ Swamp’s showmanship sets him apart from his peers, to say the very least. Known as the Sid Vicious of hip-hop DJs, when the L.A.-based turntablist isn’t breathing fire or setting his hands ablaze while mixing, he’s breaking his own records and carving up his chest with the shards ’til…

“I must confess that over my career, I’ve actually downplayed the importance of DJs,” says Peter Hook. “It’s such a different art form. Then all of a sudden you try it, and you think, ‘Good God, these guys do work.’ I used to be very cynical and very blasé about…

When they’re making music together under the Tegan and Sara banner, identical twins Tegan and Sara Quin are halves of a whole. But they’re also individuals — and according to Tegan, plenty of people have difficulty reconciling this apparent contradiction. “A lot of times, they treat you as one entity,”…

Dave Wakeling speaks in a soft British accent. He uses words like “magpie” and compares getting compliments to scoring a goal in football (that’s soccer to us Yanks). Even in a tiff, the English Beat alum is as cordial as afternoon tea. Take, for example, the clash that currently divides…

“You know the rose girl that goes around selling roses in bars and restaurants?” asks French-born, Arizona-based songwriter Marianne Dissard. “That’s what I used to do in downtown Tucson. Tucson is not like Paris. There aren’t a lot of people on the sidewalk. You’re isolated. So that job was a…

The Strokes are the Chipotle of modern rock. Sure, there’s better, more authentic stuff out there, but when it comes down to it, all the basic ingredients are done just right and delivered in one tight, delicious package. Likewise, there are bands that are less affected in their posturing and…

Throughout her career, Mary J. Blige has transformed her misery into listeners’ bliss. But even though her life is happier than it was during the bad old days, her current work benefits from sorrowful experience. On The Breakthrough, her triumphs mean more because they were so hard won. Celebrities have…

Once you get past the sophomoric band name and the junior-high-level double entendres, Morningwood is pretty darned irresistible. The New York group’s oft-delayed full-length debut whirls in a hormone-charged haze of fizzy new-wave cheerleading chants, punkish dance beats and vocalist Chantal Claret’s little-girl-lost coos and snarls. Gil Norton’s production touch…

Mark my words: In the coming year, no fewer than three independent-label punk bands — at least one Nordic — will record sloppy versions of “Automatic,” Resolve’s amazing closing track. Moreover, the pressing substance of Resolve will inspire approximately 163 kids to clear boxes of wrapping paper out of the…

It doesn’t matter if Be Mine, Valentine is described as emo, screamo or even Zima, for that matter. By any name, this six-track, twelve-minute-long EP is an assault on the senses — the kind of disc that packs a wallop and leaves a mark. Drop Dead, Gorgeous’s size partly accounts…

Some of the best music ever made came from hardcore kids who woke up one day with an itch to twist punk rock into something weird. Granted, the four men of Big Timber — members of groups such as Bailer, Pariah Caste, Murder Scene Clean Up Team and Call Sign…

Dabrye, Additional Productions Vol. 1 (Ghostly International). Glitch-hop darling Dabrye remixes obscure tracks from Trans Am, Nomo and Ill Suono, slathering on his signature touch of fluttering, saw-toothed synth tones. While the remixes are fresh, the original “Nite Eats Day” (money mix featuring Beans) brings world-music flavor with a crazy…

Urban Folk Scarf Rock: That’s how Margot & the Nuclear So & So’s were billed at last fall’s South Park Music Festival. Someone was being cheeky — there’s no way that anyone who’d heard this Indianapolis-based act could genuinely claim that it had crafted a new, wholly unique sound that…

It’s not a stretch to imagine Robert Earl Keen as a wannabe journalist. With an eye for detail and an ear for a great story, he writes songs that almost betray the fact that he studied journalism at Texas A&M before hooking up with a young nobody in the early…

Unlike many of the jam-banders who play Boulder, Hampton isn’t a poseur whose look and sound hark back to an era he didn’t experience firsthand. He spent much of the ’60s working the Southern club circuit before helping to form the Hampton Grease Band, whose double-LP debut for Columbia Records,…

A dozen years back, when North Dakota native Celeste Krenz arrived on the Denver music scene, she was categorized as a country artist, and rightly so. But even though she now makes her home in Nashville, her latest music has relatively little in common with the twangy genre so closely…

Great music is birthed when a collective of people get together and believe in the silly idea that banging on instruments can somehow change the world. It won’t, of course, but when a band like the North Atlantic comes along, it doesn’t really matter. Drummer Cullen Hendrix and bassist Jason…

Metal-core must be a harsh mistress; otherwise, you’d think that more bands in the genre would at least try to inject a shred of originality or imagination into their music. If Orange County’s Scars of Tomorrow don’t necessarily succeed in escaping from the thud-chunk-growl straitjacket, at least they try –…

“Bro Hymn,” from Pennywise’s self-titled, full-length 1992 debut, ranks among the most singular songs in punk history. None of the group’s peers could pull off such a staggeringly earnest ode to friendship: Bad Religion is too brainy, Green Day too wimpy, and Rancid too proudly purist. Like most powerful shmaltz,…

Listening to New Orleans’s Soilent Green is like being dragged along the bottom of the Mississippi by a speedboat driven by a chain-smoking, velvet-clad demon. At almost inconceivable velocity, the sludge of Scott Crochet’s furious bass and Brian Patton’s detuned guitars gushes into your nostrils, ears and mouth, while the…

Three years ago, Aubrey Collins appeared to be on the fast track to superstardom. On Back to Me, her 2002 debut, she displayed a talent and maturity far beyond her fourteen years, turning the heads of many Nashville execs and filling them with visions of LeAnn Rimes. But then Collins…