Never ceasing to till the soil in search of roots, Otis Taylor rolls up his sleeves and digs down to the origins of the banjo on his latest effort, Recapturing the Banjo. Not one to recycle popularly accepted notions of a genre or instrument (previous outings include a critically acclaimed re-examination of the blues), Taylor burrows past the more recognized bluegrass variety of banjo playing…
Simon Posford is the undisputed master of psychedelic dance music. His work under the names Shpongle, Hallucinogen and more has consistently set a high bar in a niche genre. His meticulous touch in the studio is the key to his deep, intricate, beautiful tracks. Incorporating world-music influences, live instrumentation and…
Brian Blade Fellowship, Season of Changes (Verve). In the eight years since Brian Blade released his last Fellowship album, he’s laid down drum tracks on more than sixty albums, including ones by Joni Mitchell, Norah Jones and Wayne Shorter. He’s grown tremendously as a musician and composer, and these new…
American Music Club should have self-destructed long ago. Formed in 1982, the band released its first album in 1985 and has since seen more than its share of personality conflicts and personnel changes, to say nothing of the very public and much-publicized alcohol-induced tantrums of frontman and songwriter Mark Eitzel…
We’re knee-deep into Depression 2.0. We’re running out of jobs, and we’re overwhelmed with the amount of people looking for them. You’re unemployed — or if you aren’t, then there’s a good chance that you will be, because your job can be combined with the guy in accounting and the…
Since at least 1976, when the Ramones’ first album championed beating on brats with baseball bats, major record labels have regularly allowed punk-rockers to caterwaul about anti-social behavior. But those days have apparently passed, as Be Your Own Pet lead singer Jemina Pearl Abegg knows from personal experience. Universal recently…
Rebecca Folsom has been kicking around the local scene for a decade-plus, and her experience shows throughout Water on Stone. The disc, which she’ll introduce on Friday, May 9, at Lannie’s Clocktower Cabaret, with Rob Drabkin opening, is thoroughly professional and consistently pleasant. It could have been more, though, given…
Dan Craig found time between commitments to medical school and indie-pop juggernauts Hearts of Palm to realize his third full-length album (due to be unveiled at the Oriental Theater this Friday, May 9). Craig makes mellow, innocuous acoustic music that moms just love, with nods to other sweet, sensitive types…
Narrow Stairs sounds just like Plans, right down to the obvious production, weepy lyrics and inoffensive guitar, continuing Death Cab’s tradition of aping Morrissey lyrics without Moz’s counterintuitive turns of phrase or dark jokes. Songs like “Long Division” seem the product of some sort of indie-rock nerd-crafted lyric generator: “And…
Back in 1997, when Portishead’s self-titled second album arrived, the group’s sound was routinely described as trip-hop. Eleven years later, that term is as dead as Fatty Arbuckle, but Portishead is alive again, and more captivatingly obtuse than ever. “I never had the chance/To explain exactly what I meant,” lead…
“Oh Canada,” a song from Anything for Flowers, the new CD by Kathleen Edwards (joined live by the Last Town Chorus), won’t be mistaken for the national anthem of the singer-songwriter’s native country. The track is a gritty attack on a society whose media shifts into overdrive when a white…
If the Art Institute of Colorado is looking for a house band, it might want to think about doing some recruiting at the Bluebird this Friday. As art rock as art rock gets, Murder by Death has often been compared to Johnny Cash and Tom Waits. Really, though, the act…
Rolling Stone recently reduced New Zealand-based singer-songwriter Liam Finn to a simple formula: He equals Elliott Smith minus the despair plus a leprechaun. The Smith thing might have some validity, and Finn does have a beard, but there’s a whole lot more to the guy. The son of Neil Finn,…
The growing number of television series that employ mid-tempo rock songs and plaintive ballads to pump up the emotion in major scenes has resulted in a proliferation of bands eager to provide the same — and San Diego’s Augustana, which appears on this date with Wild Sweet Orange, couldn’t be…
With a name adopted from a character out of the movie Barbarella, Duran Duran is often dismissed as a disposable pop band from the ’80s — and with its slick, ridiculous videos featuring half-dressed exotic women and phallic imagery, it’s easy to understand why. Since that era, the act has…
We’re knee-deep into Depression 2.0. We’re running out of jobs, and we’re overwhelmed with the amount of people looking for them. You’re unemployed — or if you aren’t, then there’s a good chance that you will be, because your job can be combined with the guy in accounting and the…
Before Margaret Cho arrived in town for the May 3 performance of her one-woman show, Beautiful, her manager contacted once-and-future masseuse Mike Jones, who’s back in Denver after putting his one-man play, Naked B4 God: Exposing the Hypocrisy of Ted Haggard, on hiatus. Cho wanted to meet Jones, the manager…
Photo by Stephanie Berger from laurieanderson.com Before Laurie Anderson came to perform at the Boulder Theatre last month, she chatted at length with Michael Roberts about her new project, Homeland. But as it turns out, she was about to make a change in her own homeland’s status, by marrying long-time…
“Hey, you guys like magic?” It was Saturday night, and I was standing outside Scruffy Murphy’s, 2030 Larimer Street, with Chris Shelby, Dave Lamoth, Braden Rauen and Andy McQueen of sixtysixdays, a local Irish-rebel-music band taking a smoke break before starting their first set of the evening. We were catching…
Fresh off of an overheated performance at Coachella launching its latest tour, DeVotchKa continues to garner great national exposure. Next Friday, May 16, NPR will be broadcasting the act’s Washington DC show at 9:30 Club live for its All Songs Considered program. Then, three nights later, the eve before its…
In a recent Playlist review, I complained about the frequency with which music-scene observers equated the Nine Inch Nails set Ghosts I-IV with Radiohead’s In Rainbows during discussions about major artists releasing material for free or at radically reduced rates online — my point being that Ghosts constitutes a series…
Here’s a selection of the best of last week’s music blogging from around the Village Voice chain: Learn the history of Seattle music as seen by John Roderick of The Long Winters in a special two-for-one show of love, because I somehow missed part one last week. Here are the…
