Oh, those Canadians are so clever. Toronto artist Brian Joseph Davis’ latest creation, Greatest Hit, is a literal mashup of six greatest-hits albums - by Whitney Houston, Kenny G., the Carpenters, the Police, the Rolling Stones and Metallica - each compressed down to a single four-or-five-minute track. No fancy digital editing and arranging […]
I was trying to convince a friend to check out Belle and Sebastian’s If You’re Feeling Sinister recently. He tried several times to make it through the album, but couldn’t handle Stuart Murdoch’s vocals. I remembered a similar response the first time I heard them, so for the past couple months I’ve carried […]
Brian Wilson’s Smile was the best album of last year. Hands-down. The performance of Smile, accompanied by his 18-piece band, at Denver’s Paramount Theater last October was absolutely fantastic. So it pains me a little bit to portray Brian in anything but a genius light. But his interviews are such a […]
I don’t know what to make of this. Today, Billy Corgan (Smashing Pumpkins, Zwan) took out a full-page ad in the Chicago Tribune with the title “A Message to Chicago from Billy Corgan.”
For over 17 years I have been proud to represent Chicago as an artist through my words and music, and […]
With all the talk about “indie rock” in the past year, Michael Azerrad’s excellent book Our Band Could Be Your Life should be required reading. Over the course of 500+ pages, Azerrad covers the birth of the American indie underground of the 1980s - a time when “indie” meant Do-It-Yourself independence rather than the […]
It’s hard to know whether the debut CD from The Go! Team is good music, or if we’ve just been nurtured our entire lives to love this CD. The London buzz-band’s music is a combination of retro-hip hop, 80s dance floor vamps, and soundtracks to A-Team chase scenes. It’s a retro vein that […]
Sitting high atop MetaCritic’s All-Time High Scores list is Brian Wilson’s brilliant Smile. (Metacritic’s numerical ratings in this case may be slightly inflated, but the sentiment is correct.) Smile seems to have ushered in an overly-dense-symphonic-pop renaissance: last year’s Blueberry Boat and now this year’s sophomore release from Architecture in Helsinki, In Case […]
Denver is lucky to claim avante/jazz/Americana guitarist Bill Frisell as a native. While he makes his current residence in Seattle, he usually returns to the Denver area several times a year to play shows. Last winter he played the tiny Old Main on the CU campus with a quintet including local hero Ron […]
A couple weeks ago, I played a guest DJ set with my friend Damon Haley on Boulder’s KGNU. The recording of the show didn’t come out, so here’s all that remains, the playlist:
Fiery Furnaces - “My Dog Was Lost But Now He’s Found” (Blueberry Boat)
Super […]