It happens once every couple of years. You wake up in the middle of the night and can’t get back to sleep. Your memory’s stuck in shuffle mode, so you roll out of bed and start digging around in the closet for some musty knickknack or photo album. Then suddenly,…
Moving is hard on any kid. You’ve got to leave your friends behind and start over in a strange place, where you don’t know anyone, and everyone has their own stories and memories that don’t include you. But take a twelve-year-old who grew up somewhat provincially — on a fifty-acre…
Long removed from his reputation-establishing work fronting the Pixies, Frank Black has watched his stature diminish terribly over the past ten years. While ex-bandmate Kim Deal went on to great success with her Breeders, the onetime indie-rock hero has bounced around a few labels, recording lackluster albums of varying quality…
Anthology of American Folk Music, originally released in 1952 and reissued in boxed-set form in 1997, is among the most influential recorded collections of the past century. Musical anthropologist Harry Smith’s assemblage of raw, heartfelt acoustic obscurities such as Chubby Parker’s “King Kong Kitchie Kitchie Ki-Me-O” became the sonic bible…
The futuro-punk metal and lyrical free-association of At the Drive-In was tuned for big arenas and seemingly destined for greatness. But in 2001, a rift formed, and the band split in two, with three-fifths becoming Sparta, and the rest — Cedric Bixler and Omar Rodriguez — launching the Mars Volta…
Wildwood Flower’s liner notes are reason enough to recommend the final recording by June Carter Cash, who died unexpectedly from complications of heart surgery in April. Penned by stepdaughter and songwriter Rosanne Cash, they eulogize Carter Cash as a uniquely talented and loving mother and musician who for nearly forty…
Baggs Patrick, longtime host of the Sunday-night open stage at Cricket on the Hill, is calling it a day. “After twelve years, it was getting past my bedtime,” he says. “I quit a little sooner than I thought I would, but basically the stage had slowed down, and the fact…
Ovulations? Clowns with knives? Suns that don’t want to be photographed? With subjects like these, you might figure that why? isn’t your typical, gold-grilled hip-hop MC. Born Jonathan Wolf, the Oakland-based vocalist and producer grew up as the son of a rabbi in suburban Cincinnati. It was there that he…
The peculiar practice of strapping eight wheels to your feet and attempting to shakily circle a rink that’s dimly lit by a dingy disco ball is no longer a ritual strictly relegated to the Clearasil set. That’s right: You can flash back to the post-primary-school pleasures of gorging on nachos,…
Pueblo native Jim Chandler has been on a serious winning streak for the past six months. A couple of years before that, he was living in Denver and was just another frustrated musician on the verge of calling it quits. After spending ten years playing in bands like Social Joke…
The collective lyrical output of rock and roll reads like a shopping list of things that are hard to do. Breaking up. Making up. And, inevitably, just plain old growing up. Through cracked vocal cords and hormone-scalded nerves, the Jealous Sound’s Blair Shehan came of age in Knapsack, a small…
As darkness fell on the KROQ 106.7 Weenie Roast and Blink-182 finished its goof-rock set, I waded through 50,000 drunk and disorderly concert-goers toward the dozens of bonfires dotting the lawn area of the Glen Helen Blockbuster Pavilion, about an hour’s drive from Los Angeles. Plumes of toxic black smoke…
Details magazine proclaimed I’ll Take It “the best album by a New York band since Remain in Light” — such hyperbolic gushing has been commonplace for Brooklyn’s Mink Lungs. Unlikely candidates for anti-scenester royalty — Talking Heads be hanged — the band is infinitely more adventurous than the one-note gutter…
Making terrific music is its own reward. In a way, though, it’s also the gift that keeps on taking. Excellence creates expectations of greatness every time out, and no one this side of the river Styx (not to mention the band Styx) can pull that off. As a result, good…
There’s a reason Dwight Yoakam’s recordings are the lone country albums in many a rocker’s collection. For nearly twenty years, he’s been the lone country artist making intelligent, rebellious twang that appeals to rock-and-roll sensibilities. He takes the dumb completely out of country, with music that bleeds the heart and…
Drummer Don Ogilvie has taken a pretty bumpy path through the music scenes of Denver and Chicago over the past twenty years. He started out in numerous noise bands in suburban Illinois in the mid-’80s, including a short-lived combo with Todd Rittman — later of U.S. Maple fame — called…
Long before the Butthole Surfers discovered the aural-application possibilities of orange sunshine or windowpane, a San Francisco-based blotter veteran and guitar phenom named Helios Creed co-founded Chrome in 1977, with the late Damon Edge. After launching underground-style, Stooges-inspired music that was referred to at the time (and much maligned) as…
Wanna get “Defleshed”? Enjoy being “Covered in Maggots”? If you’re in the mood for music that’s raw and wriggling, Brutal Infliction has just the thing. Debuting new songs, including the two mentioned, the Brutes will also be showing off newest member MC Trip Crazy. Recruited to “add some extra groove…
The Rasta always try to live a life within the system, at the same time living around the system,” declares Winston Rodney, the international reggae superstar better known as Burning Spear. “So he’s preventin’ himself from feedin’ the system and preventin’ the system from taking all of him. So regardless…
It’s no wonder that roots-music traditionalists don’t quite know how to take Chris Thile. Still in his early twenties, Thile is a mandolin maestro fully capable of limning acoustic classics note for note — yet he wants his group, Nickel Creek, to be known for more than gifted mimicry. Over…
There was a time not too long ago, before the plague of Good Charlotte and Sum 41, when it was still viable — even respectable — to be an underground pop-punk band. Instead of appearing on slick, big-label, CD-only releases, groups sacrificed months worth of beer money and practice-space rent…
Concept albums can be a dicey proposition for a young group. But once an act has established itself as a top-of-the-heap bluegrass-influenced jam band and has already released a few true-to-its-roots platters — not to mention live shows that draw a gaggle of free-spirited, granola-munching souls — well, what the…
