Music

Depending on your perspective, Rocket Ajax guitarist Todd Schlafer harbors a musical dream that is either of the loftiest or the lowest sort. “I wanna be Korn,” he says. “We’re writing singles,” adds vocalist Dan Miller. “We wanna be on the radio; we wanna be, you know, big!” Whatever your…

On its 2000 debut, Coldplay sounded like a band that took Radiohead’s “Knives Out” a bit too literally, slicing and dicing that group’s sound to bits, trimming away all the ambition in favor of sheer digestibility. Ironically, it only made Coldplay that much harder to swallow — especially with a…

Ask anyone, of any age, to name the first album she or he purchased, and you can bet that the disc mentioned will be cool: a brilliant recording that’s truly stood the test of time. And do you know why? Because people lie. Okay, maybe some of them are telling…

There’s something admirable about Darius Rucker’s mission to prove he’s more than the Dylan of the frat-boy generation. After years as the darker-skinned front man of the otherwise vanilla party band Hootie and the Blowfish, Rucker is branching out. With the release of his solo debut, Back to Then, he’s…

Even though the weather indicates otherwise, the calendar and our post-Labor Day doldrums tell us that the summer of 2002 is fading fast. And while this is always a sad annual development for the sunshine junkies and mountain-ranger types among us, concertgoers might well find reason to celebrate the turning…

Forget everything you’ve heard about nu-metal and go see High on Fire, which appears Thursday, September 12, and Friday, September 13, at the 15th Street Tavern, with Jucifer. This Oakland group, created two years ago from the ashes of Sleep, is the most vital force in the new wave of…

The annual Kinfolk Celebration is showing signs of growth, as is the increasingly popular Yonder Mountain String Band, which founded it. Named for the group’s rabidly wiggly fans, the camping-and-jamming event has moved from its old Boulder locale to the larger setting of Planet Bluegrass’s event site in Lyons, where…

Reggae fans probably know the Jamaican-born, London-based Linton Kwesi Johnson best for his protest albums, classics such as Dread Beat An’ Blood (1978), Making History (1984) and the more recent More Time (1998). But Johnson is as well-known for his poetry as he is for his contributions to reggae music…

Jason Ringenberg has lived in or near Nashville since 1981, but he’s hardly a member of the city’s country-music establishment. “I feel like an outsider in that circle,” he says from his farm west of town. “But I feel like the consummate insider in the left-of-center crowd.” Now in his…

It’s always good to put yourself in new situations,” says Scott McCloud, singer, guitarist and svelte frontman of New York City’s Girls Against Boys. He speaks from experience. Since the band’s previous incarnation, Soulside, formed in 1986, McCloud and his bandmates have perpetually reconfigured, revamped and recast themselves — first…

Just outside Denver’s city limits, before the parched, sparsely populated plains swallow the last of the suburbs, there is a basement that regularly reverberates with a certain primeval intensity. Remarkably, the water heater still functions, even after its cumulative absorption of innumerable decibels. This small, underground room — nicknamed Helm’s…

I sometimes wonder why so many hardworking bands, in Denver and everywhere else in the world, continue to regard the acquisition of a major-label contract as the singular goal of their musical careers. Especially after all we’ve heard: the consequences of a once-sprawling universe of imprints consolidated into only five;…

To fully prepare for a performance from the Brothers of the Baladi, who appear Friday, September 13, at Swallow Hill, you’d need to study a daunting number of phrase books: The Portland-based quintet performs in Turkish, Persian, Arabic, English and whatever other languages best serve the festive, eclectic feel of…

Leave it to Pete Wernick, aka “Dr. Banjo,” to come up with a musical hybrid that combines bluegrass with early jazz. After all, as a member of Hot Rize, he was fond of running his banjo through an electronic device called a “phase shifter.” “That got a surprisingly favorable reaction,”…

It’s like a wacked-out comedy sketch from an All That episode. The four hot young hunks of the R&B boy-band sensation B2K are hanging out backstage after their set, clowning around, exchanging high fives, playfully dousing each other’s rock-hard abs with a shaken celebratory bottle of orange soda (but being…

Amid all the weird and predictable frivolity of Elvis Week 2002, a curious seminar was held at the Fogelman Executive Center at the University of Memphis on August 15. The panelists of “Is Elvis History? 2002 and Beyond” included famed music critic and keynote speaker Greil Marcus; Presley’s most celebrated…

For the youth of America, rebellion becomes trickier every year. The radical is the norm, tattoos and piercings are more mainstream than not, and the parents of today’s kids might well be rebel kids themselves. “My mom’s favorite band is U2,” says Eddie Clendening, the barely 21 frontman for the…

Reggae is a musical approach with a captivating history — one whose less-publicized precursors and tangents are often as interesting as its more widely known achievements. But in this country, most folks know little about reggae’s rich past other than that Bob Marley put out some good records. This narrow…

Otep raised a prosthetic pig’s head high in the air and commanded the crowd to worship her. “Soldiers, you have entered the church of Otep,” she said, flipping her multi-hued hair around and grunting not so girlishly. The solitary female performer on the Ozzfest tour, Otep had exactly twenty minutes…

It’s not easy being a Morrissey fan. He’s been without a label since shortly after his last proper album, 1997’s Maladjusted, failed to impress record buyers, and a shakeup at Mercury records left him without a contract. So when he takes the stage at the Colorado Springs Music Hall on…