“Gris-Gris is sometimes referred to as the iron fist of Voodoo due to its hammer-like quality of relentless pounding until the spell takes effect,” says the highly esteemed California Astrology Association. With a setup like that, it would take a band with serious moxie to live up to that name…
Even folks who love “Detroit City” and other hits by Bobby Bare Sr. would be thoroughly bored by Bobby Jr. if he were only interested in aping his famous father. Fortunately, the younger Bare is no country-outlaw manqué. Rather, he’s a musical synthesist who mixes rock and roots music with…
As the curtain falls on a certain Vermont phoursome, few would argue against the notion that things just ain’t what they used to be. Only a decade ago, the Dead was still truckin’ down the road with Jerry at the wheel, and Phish was still just the right size for…
Anita and Kevin Robinson constitute the entire membership of Viva Voce, and because they’re an item off-stage as well as on, their band is sometimes likened to the White Stripes. It’s a relief, then, when The Heat Can Melt Your Brain, the duo’s new disc for the Minty Fresh imprint,…
Christopher Watkins sings that “everyone here can be repaired with a bottle of wine.” But to truly invigorate the battered human spirit, the bitter disappointments, the never-ending compromise with cruel fate and her seven disfigured sea hags, a little wine goes much further when it’s accompanied by the Delta blues…
Depending on which voting poll you buy into, Colorado is a battleground state worth nine measly electoral votes — winner take all. Still undecided? East L.A.’s Richard Lopez, a barrio-bred showman turned rhinestoned candidate (minus his running mate, Eddie Vedder), stumps through the Queen City mid-week with a ridiculously patriotic…
In the early ’80s, the new British band Silmarillion put out an instrumental demo echoing the introspection and epic themes of the band’s namesake novel. The act had changed lineups — adding multi-talented frontman Fish — and shortened its name to Marillion by the time it released the full-length Script…
Not too many 22-year-old indie kids cite Tom Petty as their creative catalyst. But after Denverite Gann Matthews was dragged by his dad to a Petty concert a decade ago, he learned a few chords on the guitar and started penning tunes of his own. One hundred and fifty songs…
In recent years, trance has been riddled with cheesy predictable vocals, endless drum rolls and buildups — not to mention an overall painful lack of originality. Holland’s Armin Van Buuren (due Thursday, September 30, at the Church) started playing trance before it became a dirty word, when it was primarily…
Our approach is to find a new instrument and figure out what new things it can do,” says Sleepytime Gorilla Museum’s Dan Rathbun. “And then we write songs around those abilities of the new instruments.” When Rathbun speaks of finding new instruments, however, what he really means is hammering, welding…
We play what we’re into, and what we’re into is loud, heavy rock,” says singer-guitarist Scott Hill, the leader of California’s Fu Manchu. “We’re not going to change something just to change something. If we put out four heavy albums in a row, we’re not going to do an acoustic…
Remember that euphoric morning after Chris Cornell left the garden of sound? During this brief interval, it seemed that Jeff Buckley, before he waved goodbye, had helped his new friend Cornell discover that being Louder Than Love was fine, but it’s okay to be quiet every now and then, too…
Regardless of what the codpiece-metal marauders in Manowar taught you, rock and medieval weaponry do not mix. Apparently, this lesson never penetrated the thick skull of Wolf Eyes leader Nathan Young, who incurred a concussion and a scalp full of staples recently after clocking himself upside the head with a…
A moment of silence, please, to mark the breakup of the most attractive young twosome of at least the last month and a half, Ashlee Simpson and Ryan Cabrera. The pairing seemed to have been inspired by the good Lord above, or at least the casting director of The O.C…
Hip-hop’s flavor-of-the-minute aesthetic keeps the music perpetually exciting, even as it makes successful long-term careers as unlikely as Al Franken endorsing Bush. Contrarians inevitably point to LL Cool J — the lone old-school rapper with a flag still planted near the chart summit — as proof that the odds can…
When French post-modernist Gilles Deleuze wrote “The abstract does not explain, but must itself be explained,” he had no clue his ideas would inspire a German avant-electronic duo named Mouse on Mars. The group’s penchant for Deleuze has already been documented by its contributions to Folds and Rhizomes and In…
As the leader of The Jonez and Judge Roughneck, Byron Shaw has been a headliner on the Denver music scene for longer than some of its younger members have been alive — but that doesn’t mean he’s stopped evolving as an artist. Feed Your Soul, which is being celebrated at…
Write this down so you don’t forget it: My Calculus Beats Your Algebra is the least pretentious band in Denver. True pretension, after all, lies in trying to be something you’re not. And with its self-titled CD, the duo of Bryan Danknich and Thorin Klosowski proves that its uncompromising blitz…
“Even the truth sometimes is subjective,” says Sean Kelly. “I mean, it’s so tainted with emotions. It’s all about people’s feelings.” Speaking via cell phone before a Friday-night performance at the Marquee Theatre in Tempe, Arizona, Kelly, the Samples’ frontman, listens calmly to the opinions of his former bandmate, Jeep…
Brooklyn-based collective Antibalas (Spanish for “bulletproof”) is the proud musical descendant of Fela Anikulapo-Kuti. The Nigerian-born singer/activist is known as Africa’s Bob Marley and credited as the creator of Afrobeat, an amalgam of West African horn-heavy highlife, funk and jazz. Working within the framework established by Kuti and enhancing it…
It’s hard to jam econo with a catheter. Ask Mike Watt. In 2000, after an abscess in his perineum burst, the legendary Minutemen and fIREHOSE bassist found himself bedridden with a raging fever, pounding Percodan, hallucinating, peeing orange and contemplating death more than the engine room. Fittingly enough, Watt used…
Politics is a hot topic in the music realm right now, from the superstar stratosphere of Bruce Springsteen and R.E.M. all the way down to your everyday struggling punk-rock band. Virginia’s Strike Anywhere may not be filling stadiums, but its searing melodic hardcore and fierce commitment to social issues has…
