You probably haven’t heard of Chance’s End, unless you listen to Boulder’s pirate radio station, KBFR, and caught him “in the van” on Monday, June 16. Here’s your chance to get a good seat on the bandwagon. The Boulder-based producer, also known as Ryan Avery, began the End in 2000…
MURS, a card-carrying member of the Cali-centric rap crew Living Legends, just released his third record, titled The End of the Beginning. Meanwhile, a recent bacchanalian binge in the city Bugsy Siegel built almost spelled the beginning of the end of his still-burgeoning career. “I had a wild night in…
Ester Drang defies the innate human need to categorize and define everything. Each new direction the enigmatic four-piece has taken breeds a new comparison. To slap a label on the group is to invite an almost rebellious metamorphosis. The challenge is to stay one step ahead of the pundits and…
On Saturday afternoons in a dark bar on Colfax, a group of boys in baseball caps convenes to drink cheap beer, smoke cigarettes they’ve given up on giving up, and argue their particular philosophies of Music Thus Far. Hunched over Budweisers, they weigh the relative merits of Bowie, Bruce, Bob,…
There’s a scrappy two-piece from the Rust Belt that works from a minimal palette of drums and guitar, bashing them into an unpretentious cacophony of masterful rock, culling elements from Delta blues and classic soul, and overlaying the whole with the guitarist’s wailing, manic vocals. And, just for the record,…
Gravelly vocals and grinding guitars copulate with a rhythm section that sounds like a cheap motel’s headboard banging against a wall, as Reno Divorce delivers the kind of music you’ll need to have a cigarette after. The outfit, formed by singer/guitarist and Florida transplant Brent Loveday, in his native Orlando,…
NME calls it “schizoid pop.” The bandmembers prefer “electro-pop rockers.” Neither term quite captures the essence of Scotland’s Serial P.O.P. The four-piece unit, made up of brothers George and Tom McFall, Dave Simandi and Stu Bastiman have chemically fused ’80s rhythms, techno beats and indie-rock riffs into a mélange that…
If European television ever produces a show called Scandinavian Idol, Sondre Lerche could fill the Clay Aiken slot perfectly. The twenty-year-old singer-songwriter from Bergen, Norway, exudes the sort of fresh-faced allure that invites declarations like, “What a nice young man!” and he frequently pays tribute to influences such as Burt…
Where does a trio of venerable indie-rock icons go when OD’ing isn’t an option but the world is simply too annoying to tolerate any longer? Somewhere quiet, perhaps, a place to escape the often tiresome adulation of the hipster-cool, record-store-clerk, high-fidelity types. On their two most recent recordings, the oldsters…
Mike Mitchell learned to be adaptable at an early age. When he was in the seventh grade, his schoolteacher mom pulled up the family tree in Gloucester, Massachusetts, and replanted it in the Wind River Indian reservation in central Wyoming. “She saw one too many episodes of Little House on…
Someone at Merge must have had a screw loose to okay the release of a sprawling retrospective spotlighting an obscure New Zealand act that means less than nothing to most Americanos. But please leave that screw untightened, because Anthology is capable of making the average listener nostalgic for a group…
Which lucky lady gets to be wined and dined by Mr. Biggs? Mack Daddy is large. Mack Daddy aims to take you shopping, girl. Buy you everything. Take you away in a convertible under cherry rain. After a glass of Beaujoulais and a Tic Tac, he’ll draw your bath. There…
The city of Denver wet its collective baggy pants at last week’s announcement that Def Jam founder Russell Simmons would bring his Hip-Hip Summit to Denver sometime this year. In town to launch a new credit card designed for low-income and debt-scarred individuals, Simmons made the spontaneous decree while sharing…
Pretty Girls Make Graves, appearing Sunday, June 8, at Tulagi, with Last Chance Diaries and Against Tomorrow’s Sky, is at once menacing and seductive. When the gravitational pull of the rhythm section combines with the guitar lines of hardcore’s past, then converges with the muscular, vitriolic vocals of Andrea Zollo…
Originally a three-piece, Pure Drama has evolved into a sextet, with new members Gabriel Ratliffe, David Ferguson, Chris Cardone and Tim Trower rounding out the lush musical landscape founding members Ryan Policky and Becca Gomez established in 1997. The expansion of its lineup isn’t the only sign of progress: From…
Rabbit in the Moon’s David Christophere (aka Monk), Steve McClure (aka Confucious) and Bunny (above) have got their live shows and production techniques down to an art. Possibly the only thing that hasn’t propelled the group over the top is its reluctance to use the media: In over a decade,…
Juan Atkins headlines the “NewFoundSound” event at Maximillian’s this week, which is a bit paradoxical: Considered the Godfather of Techno and a pioneer of today’s Detroit sound, he’s been producing records for nearly twenty years. Under his real name or one of his aliases (such as Modal500, Infiniti or Cybotron),…
Allan Vest is from Oklahoma City, but he doesn’t want to talk about Wayne Coyne, thank you very much. His band, the Starlight Mints, emerged from the same dusty landscape that birthed the Flaming Lips and, eventually, a nation of Yoshimi-battling fans — and the connection has been difficult to…
The building blocks of rock music — a guitar or two, a bass, some drums — haven’t changed much in the half-century or so since the genre emerged and drew its first independent breath. The difference in the case of 34 Satellite’s recent turn at the Larimer Lounge was that…
Open up the May/June 2003 issue of Adbusters and you’ll find a cardboard-sleeved CD glued to the inside of one of the pages. Its presence isn’t blazoned across the cover as an incentive to buy the magazine; it’s not tagged with a magnetic strip to prevent sticky-fingered browsers from lifting…
Last fall, Sean Kelly was ready to pump gas for a living; he felt like things had gotten that bad. The list of creditors to whom he and his band, the Samples, owed money had sprawled like Southern moss. And in November, three of his bandmates — longtime drummer Sam…
The phrase “Feel-Good Summer Hit” doesn’t make any sense at all. Summer doesn’t feel good — in fact, it’s downright shitty, what with all the pit sweat and foot fungus and boiling garbage juice and blinding Caucasian leg meat. Spring is way better. Every beam of bright, warm sun is…
