Like that friend who is always cheerful without being annoying — or, God forbid, perky — Dressy Bessy does pop with enough edge and subversiveness to infect even the most cynical among us. And while a cynic might say it’s a little soon for a greatest-hits disc from this Denver-based…
Among the coalition nations engaged in Operation Iraqi Freedom, England is obviously second among equals. When it comes to contemporary music, though, Tony Blair and company have definitely earned bragging rights. Simply put, the UK is producing smarter, more interesting, higher-caliber pop stars than anything the self-declared greatest country on…
Nineteenth-century colonialists spoke patronizingly of the Noble Savage. Today we have the Enlightened Redneck: Mike Damron, singer/ guitarist of the Oregon quintet I Can Lick Any Sonofabitch in the House. Scrapping the sad-sack sensitivity of the Gram Parsons/Townes Van Zandt school of country-rock, Damron and his boys rip out a…
White boys have had the blues for a long time now, too. Elvis, the Rolling Stones and the White Stripes have made far more money by imitating the wails of dirt-poor Mississippi sharecroppers than the hard-scrabble, fistfighting black men who created this uniquely American genre of music ever did. Though…
Evan Nelson answers his phone at nine o’clock on a Tuesday morning. This act may not seem all that unusual — until you consider his occupation. For the past seven years, Nelson has presided as host and innkeeper of Skunk Motel, a weekly fete as notorious for its longevity as…
The members of Deerhoof, who drop by Monkey Mania (2126 Arapahoe Street) on Wednesday, April 30, understand the difference between “childlike” and “childish.” Apple O’, the San Francisco-based combo’s latest disc on the Kill Rock Stars imprint, is an undiluted blast of sheer exuberance, and thanks to the guitar jousting…
Crisp and crunchy, Aggressive Persuasion is easily the most exciting thing to come out of Pueblo since….well, since anything. Raw, hungry, and young enough for half the band to be graduating from high school, the force of AP has moved like a wrecking ball through Denver’s heavy music scene and…
He bleats at you with foghorn-like forlornness, a bedwetter yelping in his sleep while dreaming about tsunamis. In a downpour of snot and spit, Hutch Harris of the Thermals sings, “Eyes so deep/You’d never see through/I can’t fucking stop/Thinking about you!” His voice, extinguished, then sinks like an anchor, drums…
I like the fact that I’m not a frontman but I’m doing it anyway,” says Paul Fonfara of his current musical project, Painted Saints. “I got sick of being in all these bands and being the forgotten guy on the side and not getting any credit. I think that’s one…
There’s a self-conscious import to Uphollow’s Ten Fingers, the unabashedly arty band’s first release since Soundtrack to an Imaginary Life, a rock opera released in 1998. Guided by bandleader and multi-instrumentalist Ian O’Dougherty, the recording is a meta-musical that chronicles three characters in ten songs and clocks in at a…
A Denverite by way of Vermont, singer- songwriter Bourgault, who appears at the Lion’s Lair on Friday, April 18, with Local 33, could easily have placed his best handful of tunes on a full-length disc alongside a dozen or so lesser ones and left listeners to find the good stuff…
Any jazz pianist with the courage to record solo deserves our respect. Sans bassist and drummer, he stands naked, as vulnerable as a stand-up comic or a wire-walker who’s thrown aside his net. If the soloist also happens to be an elegant classicist who combines the dazzle of Chick Corea…
Taking blues, reggae, country and avant-garde down a back alley of alternate guitar tunings might seem a fool’s errand to most folks, on par with Zig-Zag rolling papers sponsoring a NASCAR event. Yet for Neil Haverstick, who’s spent the last fifteen years trying to subvert the Western Hemisphere’s over-reliance on…
Sacrifice’s second full-length, Slangin’ Keyz, is a potent dose of gritty rap that profiles the struggles of fatherless children and incarcerated scarfaces. A Montbello native also known as Shawn Brown, Sacrifice pushes pure lyrical dope on tracks like “Mo Jail & No Bail,” in which he describes the tribulations of…
In almost every filmic biography of a successful recording artist — from Loretta Lynn in Coal Miner’s Daughter to Richie Valens in La Bamba – there’s a pivotal scene in which the protagonist first hears his or her song on the radio and knows, in that instant, that life has…
So many daring jazz musicians who hit the scene in the late ’60s wound up pissing away their talent throughout the following decades — either yapping at the heels of trends like fusion and “lite jazz” or regressing to some bland, archaic rehash of bebop. Not Dave Holland. After making…
Melissa London lists the ability to cast siren spells among her talents as the frontwoman of Project 12:01, an electronically enhanced combo that she co-founded with keyboardist Noel Johannes. And just one listen to her voice, whether live or recorded, supports that claim. Situated somewhere on the dark side of…
The Polyphonic Spree is goofily earnest. Its members love life, and they love to sing about the sun. But they have a difficult time fitting on a stage together. A 24-member choral symphonic pop band whose on-stage couture is more Baptist church choir than rock star, the Spree resembles a…
There are a lot of things you want to ask the members of a band called Thank God for Astronauts. What they think of the Space Shuttle blowing up. How they feel about the recent disturbing trend in full sentences as band names. Whether or not they even believe in…
In every musical movement, there are innovators — the acts that introduce stylistic breakthroughs — and there are popularizers, who co-opt the new genre’s freshest elements, homogenize them and feed them back to the public in an accessible, easy-to-digest form. As a result of this process, popularizers often outsell the…
It’s hard not to giggle a little bit at the end of “Ay Distress,” the opening track from the Baptist Generals’ No Silver/No Gold. After a perfectly haunting performance of the slow, spare tune, someone’s cell phone rings in the garage-studio. With the spell broken and a perfect take of…
Elegant though not pretentious, inviting but not desperate, this beguiling pair of discs from Jessica Williams and Bruce Barth make for fine listening. While offering multiple-track releases of mostly piano-driven fare might constitute a potentially disastrous goal from a financial point of view, both Barth and Williams carry their respective…
