A little too experimental to be straight-out country and too countrified and honky-tonk to rightfully be considered alt-country, this latest release from Weird Turn Prose is nevertheless a sonically consistent and rewarding listen. It’s obvious the songwriters didn’t bother with genre considerations, and nowhere is this clearer than on the…
Too often, the term “pop” rightfully conjures images of hackneyed premises about love and longing and music too lacking in an individual sound to be more than cultural wallpaper. White Rabbits (from Brooklyn via Missouri) clearly dispensed with such refinements and forged songs that are thematically far-ranging and rich in…
Steely Dan sounds like the 1970s incarnate — not because its music makes you think of earth tones, discotheques, quaaludes or the Eagles, but because its classic oeuvre was so non-threatening that it hid the lurid tales and subversive content of its seemingly innocuous songs, written in a decade that…
Less a band than a loose agglomeration of musicians engaging in a performance-art piece, Spellcaster’s Rock ‘n’ Roll Time Travel Committee (due at Rhinoceropolis on Friday, October 30) brings the danger back to an indie-rock show like few have since the Kindercide last performed. Spellcaster puts aside his usual noise…
Few, if any, living guitarists can match Adrian Belew’s impressive resumé in terms of depth and range of accomplishment over the course of his four-decades-long career. Belew first came to prominence as a player on Frank Zappa’s 1979 album Sheik Yerbouti, which led to his long-term role in King Crimson…
Mirror Universe isn’t a subsidiary of Siltbreeze, but the ultra-lo-fi production on this album’s nine tracks makes it sound like it is. From the beginning, it’s a bit like what you might get using an old reel-to-reel machine you picked up at a garage sale to listen to some unmarked…
Eric Paul and Craig Kureck both inspired and confounded audiences as members of the influential noise-rock combo Arab on Radar. After that act disbanded in 2002, Paul and Kureck formed the Chinese Stars and continued in a similar vein, still making deranged, outré music but incorporating danceable rhythms that would…
Formed in 1980, Youth Brigade played shows with hardcore bands, but its music didn’t focus on speed or brutality. Instead, the Stern brothers wrote songs that addressed the concerns of conscious young men of the day, like existential angst and criticizing a power-mad government vastly streamlining society in favor of…
After launching the anticon. label with Pedestrian in 1998, Sole (due at the hi-dive on Sunday, October 25) has become one of the world’s most influential underground hip-hop artists. With a dense stream-of-consciousness lyrical delivery and emotionally charged beats and music to accompany the weighty content, Sole established himself early…
Adrian Belew has lead something of a charmed existence as a musician for the last thirty years, from his first high-profile gig as a guitarist for Frank Zappa in 1979 to his later work with Talking Heads, Trent Reznor, David Bowie and King Crimson. Though possessed of preternaturally able technical…
Mumiy Troll from Vladivostok, Russia is one of that country’s most popular bands. The act’s combination of energetic rock and moodily atmospheric pop, for which lead singer Ilya Lagutenko coined the term “rockapops,” has been gaining popularity in America despite the fact that, up to the release of the new…
A Hawk and a Hacksaw, The Hand That Rocks the Dreidel and Damon and Naomi Friday, October 16, 2009hi-dive Better Than: Having to see the out of town bands at a bigger venue. The Hand That Rocks the Dreidel, a four-piece this time out including two drummers — one with…
This debut album from Devil Got Five reveals that there’s more to the band’s songwriting than being couched in the realm of metal. The tastefully rapid changes of pace and melodic breakdowns in “This Is Now” sound like a melding of speed metal and a more progressive aesthetic. “Can’t Abide”…
Hailing from Olympia, Washington, LAKE has a refreshingly un-ironic and musically solid take on mixing together indie pop with R&B for a sound that is essentially blue-eyed soul. The delicate harmonies and infectious melodies present in most of the band’s material are reminiscent of popular songs of the ’70s, without…
Damon Krukowski and Naomi Yang first burst onto the international underground rock scene as two-thirds of influential dream-pop band Galaxie 500. When Galaxie split in 1991, on the verge of stardom, Damon and Naomi released their first EP as a duo. Ever since, Krukowski and Yang have produced a string…
With a broad sonic brush, Johnny Wohlfahrt creates music that blurs the line between pop and the avant-garde with a rare daring and openness of spirit. Writing and performing under the moniker nervesandgel (due on Tuesday, October 20, at Rhinoceropolis), Wohlfahrt has been a prolific songwriter whose work, while clearly…
Butthole Surfers, Psychic Ills, Circle Number DotFriday, October 9, 2009Ogden Theater, DenverBetter Than: The flash freezing going on outside.Circle Number Dot, who opened this show, didn’t sound like they got much more than a mere line check before hitting the stage. It was initially hard to tell if it was…
Time, A Clock, Damon JeVon, Agent Strange and Doctype Thursday, October 8, 2009 hi-dive Better Than: That Alex Jones documentary on Bohemian Grove.A Clock from Fort Collins kicked off Thursday’s night show at the hi-dive, with his skilled sidekick, a DJ named Deadbeat, spinning jazz and R&B. Throughout his set,…
Few artists have explored the theme of paranoia as thoroughly as Time does on this latest release. In “Naked Brunch,” conspiracy-theory icon William Cooper is woven into that story about Paul McCartney being dead and Billy Shears acting as his stand-in for one of the most deft lyrical and conceptual…
After his noise-rock band Calvin Krime broke up in the late ’90s, Sean Tillman performed as Sean Na Na before that project ultimately transformed into his current persona. Before it became something of a trend, Tillman performed profane and sexually oriented R&B as a solo act called Har Mar Superstar…
Plenty of bands have overmined the new wave of British heavy metal and mixed it with a bit of glam rock and thrash. Sonically, Gritt Hitter (due at the hi-dive on Thursday, October 8) comes from that milieu, but instead of limiting itself to creating music in the shadow of…
Insane Clown Posse, The Dayton Family, (həd) p.e.Friday, October 2, 2009Fillmore AuditoriumBetter Than: The spectacle of a white trash cult on parade that many expect.Standing in a line around the block for this show with people randomly chanting things like, “Magic, magic ninjas whut!” and “Faygo! Send yo’ momma straight…
