It’s easy to take the Dalhart Imperials for granted. The Denver-based combo has been kicking around for nearly ten years, long enough to perfect its spirited blend of Western swing, Bakersfield-style country and rockabilly. The combo’s played hundreds of shows around town, but one thing it hasn’t done — until…
I’m not one of those people who wants to hear the same thing over and over again,” says alto saxophonist and pioneer of improvised music Wally Shoup. “I always use the metaphor of the roller coaster. When you’re on a roller coaster, it’s exciting. You don’t necessarily know what’s around…
When the members of Denver’s Hilltop Klick get together with their friends in the National Blues Arsenal, they channel the spirit of Robert Johnson as much as they do any spitfire hip-hop MC. The three-piece Arsenal provides a riff-heavy, Delta-blues backbeat to the Klick’s gritty street-smart sound, creating rap music…
Colin Meloy, the singer-songwriter at the heart of the Decemberists, spent his musically formative years in Missoula, Montana, but you couldn’t prove it by Castaways and Cutouts. The first full-length by his band, which is currently based in Portland, Oregon, sounds for all the world like the work of a…
Combining top-shelf acoustic playing with an angling theme, Fishing Music: A Collection of Acoustic Folk, Blues & Swing is a platter that plays well in warm-weather months. Producers Ben Winship and David Thompson assembled some of the masters of Americana to extol the simple delights of grabbing a pole and…
Nothing’s funnier than watching a room full of carefully uncaring, strategically mussed indie rockers trying to dance at a show. That is, trying not to dance, but trying to make it look like they are dancing. But only kind of. The symptoms are universal: the nodding heads, the half-hearted hip…
Today’s mash-up craze — where artists graft the a cappella version of one popular tune to the well-known instrumental backing of another — inspired a “band” like Columbus, Ohio’s Evolution Control Committee to up the ante beyond anything that London’s Freelance Hellraiser introduced to dance floors last year. Simply pasting…
Note to the jam-band contingent: Leftover Salmon is not really one of you, despite appearances to the contrary. The band is sunny and string-heavy, yes, but its music comes out of the bluegrass tradition — a stop-on-a-dime style that’s driven by songs instead of elongated instrumental spaceouts. “The jam-band thing…
Boredom, poverty, loneliness, suicide and heartbreak. Sounds cheerful, doesn’t it? Actually, it is…as long as FM Knives are singing about it. This Sacramento four-piece, playing Thursday, May 22, at the Climax Lounge, has mastered the punk-rock alchemy of turning depression into elation, ennui into energy. On “16 DOA,” a love…
Drowning in oceans of lust, wailing hopeless lovers’ oaths and going toe to toe with oblivion itself can take its toll on a guy — especially one with a Sicilian heart condition. Fortunately Nick Urata of DeVotchKa counteracts such reckless conduct by issuing consistently beguiling sonic tapestries that weave together…
House freaks have been following the career of DJ Garth since 1991, when he caused a minor earthquake in San Francisco’s dance scene with his “feeling over formula” philosophy. The shock waves rippled again in 1994, when Garth acquired a custom-designed Turbo-sound rig from his native U.K., and again in…
From the beginning, Mark Orton, Rob Burger and Carla Kihlstedt, the instrumentalists behind San Francisco’s Tin Hat Trio, understood that some listeners and critics would have difficulty getting their arms around the combo’s wonderfully diverse sound. To assist those struggling with the chore, the musicians came up with their own…
For forty bucks, you can buy a device that emits some of the most irritating and beautiful sounds imaginable; a device that not only presents an international kaleidoscope of opinion, but also receives secret spy transmissions. Best of all, every time you turn it on, the thing behaves completely differently,…
Trace Reddell spends a fair amount of time figuring out ways to make his computer more like a person. A musician and educator who teaches both undergrads and graduate students in the Digital Media Studies program at the University of Denver, he uses computers as tools of art as well…
My Morning Jacket, which appears Tuesday, May 20, at the Fox Theatre, with Detachment Kit, aims to restore dignity to the oft-maligned genre of classic rock, albeit with an entirely modern sensibility that’s both organic and studio-enhanced. Hooky and exultant, with occasionally countrified flourishes, the music suggests what might have…
The band calls it “trailer-park jazz,” while a reviewer once referred to it as “cinematic Americana.” Either way, the experimental music of County Road X is finding an audience, one that’s grown steadily with each performance. Influences as diverse as Afro pop, chamber jazz and Radiohead, among others, swirl together…
What to do when you’re an aspiring artist/musician who wants to make music in a climate in which seemingly everything interesting has already been done? Do you succumb to the demons of musical recycling, or do you take yourself to a desert island of creativity? Jeph Jerman chose the latter…
Dennis Flemion sounds irritable and flabbergasted for close to two hours — a marathon by interview standards, especially since the founder of the Frogs prefers to keep to himself. “Look, Prince never did interviews,” Flemion says flatly. “I don’t want to talk to anybody. I’m not getting anything, so I’m…
Portland, Maine, doesn’t quite carry the street cred of, say, Compton. But Sole, who came of age as a rapper in the beatific Eastern state, isn’t worried about the geographical connotations of his home town. The battle scars he received in this burg, which he describes as “cold and unforgiving,”…
At one point not too long ago, the population of the Front Range expanded. Tech complexes and subdivisions consumed open space, while McMansions replaced ponderosa pines as the tallest species in the foothills. Evergreens and pristine land morphed into what newspapers morbidly dubbed “Sprawlorado.” Mark Merryman is one long-suffering Colorado…
Halden Wofford & the Hi Beams play retro country better than just about anybody in these parts, and their live shows feature covers of old favorites by the likes of Lefty Frizzell, Hank Williams and George Jones. For this debut studio album, however, the band has wisely chosen to focus…
Back in 1984, when Colcannon was formed, the notion that a Celtic group of such high quality could emerge from a part of the world so geographically and culturally distant from the Emerald Isle was legitimately surprising. Today the outfit’s continuing vitality is just as unexpected, but for different reasons…
