The crowd that gathered on April 22 for the Decemberists’ gig at the Fillmore Auditorium was dominated by college agers who looked as if they’d decided to take a break from writing a paper for their semiotics class or post-grad couples looking for a little intellectual stimulation in advance of…
Andrew Whiteman of Apostle of Hustle, the subject of this profile in the April 19 Westword, is among the brighter singer-songwriters on the current scene, as the complete text of his interview indicates. Below, read about his first musical influences, a little-known poetry album that didn’t exactly fly off the…
The profile of Sean Lennon in the April 19 edition of Westword offers a glimpse into the life of a talented singer-songwriter still figuring out how to engage a public that prefers to view him in the context of his famous parents, John Lennon and Yoko Ono, rather than as…
They say the heart of rock and roll is still beating/And from what I’ve seen I believe ’em/Now the old boy may be barely breathing/But the heart of rock and roll is still beating. When Huey Lewis sang these words in the mid-’80s — around the time that dinosaurs still…
There’s a funny thing about the traditional music of Appalachia: The songs almost always tell tales of some poor soul crossing paths with Death in some ghastly fashion. If they’re not murdered over love, they’re murdered over jealousy, or they commit suicide because of unrequited love, or they fall down…
Folkloric Feel, the 2004 debut by Canada’s Apostle of Hustle, drew critical praise for its use of Cuban musical elements. So naturally, the outfit’s captivating new disc, National Anthem of Nowhere, is being discussed in similar terms, even though its influences are quite different. As a result, head Hustler Andrew…
Earlier this month, NME quoted 63-year-old Rolling Stones guitarist Keith Richards as saying, “The strangest thing I’ve tried to snort? My father…. He was cremated, and I couldn’t resist grinding him up with a little bit of blow.” Within days, Richards issued an explanation, insisting that his comments were just…
Eight years separated the release of singer-songwriter Sean Lennon’s first CD from his second. Why such a long gap? “I think it had more to do with finding the part of myself that was ready to deal with the sort of public fiasco of releasing music and less to do…
Leave it to Trent Reznor — a musician who probably doesn’t even need to hype his art at this point — to trump every other viral marketer with the Internet-heavy promotional campaign for Year Zero. (It’s a concept record; think the Big Brother mentality of George Orwell’s 1984 combined with…
On the surface, Grinderman, which teams Nick Cave with three current Bad Seeds, seems merely an excuse for Cave to release another new album; after all, The Abattoir Blues Tour, an elaborate (and absorbing) double-CD/double-DVD live set, just hit stores two weeks ago. Nevertheless, the quartet more than earns its…
Bring Us Meat, Thank God for Astronauts’ latest effort, is, to be precise, impressively bland. The album (due for release this Saturday, April 21, at the hi-dive) is a mostly mediocre attempt at cutesy-yet-earnestly-indie pop music, and despite sincere comparisons to acts such as the Shins or even Sunny Day…
Bassist Chris Pearson has been a key component in two strong Denver bands, Jux County and the Czars. Now he’s a member of the Inconsolable, and if his new group’s not yet on the level of these predecessors, it’s on the right road. The liner notes emphasize that “this album…
The Four Level, Stars From Aircraft (Breakbeat Science). Veteran drum-and-bass producer Pieter K and singer/songwriter/psychotherapist Amy Jacob team up to produce a pumped-up, chilled-out full-length. K creates darkly dynamic electronic backdrops for Jacob’s soulful rock tunes, which range from Dido-esque electro-folk to female-fronted Nine Inch Nails aggression. The duo’s mysterious…
U.K. scenesters understand that it’s easier to come up with a new descriptor for a musical subgenre than it is to actually invent a fresh sound. Hence “new rave,” which cleverly combines two tried-and-true handles in a manner that means everything and nothing at exactly the same time. Klaxons members…
Ari Hoenig may be an explosive, heavy-handed madman on a drum kit, but he’s equally at home swinging lightly on a ballad or plunging into the outer extremes of an avant-jazz excursion. Hoenig is one of the more innovative drummers to come along since Joey Baron — hell, the guy…
Say Anything’s …Is a Real Boy is the absolute zenith of MySpace-era pop punk. Deranged and volatile, with psychotically catchy choruses and anthemic chants and million-dollar hooks bursting in every direction, it’s ten pounds of psycho in a five-pound bag. Fueled by Max Bemis’s very public emotional struggles — he’s…
For members of the original hardcore generation, the concept of polite punk is oxymoronic in the extreme — on par with family-friendly heavy metal and hip-hop done the Aaron Carter way. For listeners young enough to be free of historical hangups, however, the stuff offered by Relient K, currently touring…
On his latest effort, Hip-Hop Is Dead, Nas performs an autopsy on rap’s corpse, and the results are ugly: Toothless rap pioneers-turned-crackheads and one-hit wonders who have no sense of history populate hip-hop’s wasteland. By contemplating the demise of an art form that he fell in love with as a…
It’s funny how the most trivial things can get a guy pumped up. For a dude who spends a lot of time in dives, a Thursday night in a country bar seemed like a nice diversion. Driving west down highway 36 toward the newly opened Electric Cowboy (8811 Harlan Street),…
Okay, pretend Nirvana never forced hair bands into early retirement — it can be pretty bleak to think about. But if you listen to the recorded output of Steve Vai and Joe Satriani, you might hear something a little different. Not just soloing for the sake of showing off their…
I like narrow bars. The rectangular kind, with a long stretch of booths on one side and bar stools lined up on the other. Architectural slivers of space with claustrophobic pathways about three feet wide and thirty feet deep. The more cramped the quarters, the stronger my affection for the…
When proto-punk and original-era punk acts were in their prime, I was either too young or too far from the various scenes to catch them in action. As a result, my only chance to see such groups perform has been in reunion formats — and my experiences at such shows…
