Various

Busy at work, plus back-to-back shows in Denver last week make me want to crawl under my desk and stay there until the weekend, and then I got sick over the weekend, and so Monday I think I really did crawl under my desk in a cold medicine haze. My point being that the blog has really been down for the count as a result.

Various notes:

Lucero at the Bluebird - good as always.
Spent too much money, as always.
Didn't feel so hot the next day, as always.

Shooter Jennings as opener for Lucero - hmm, how can I say this nicely? Ok, I can't. Not good. Just not good. Conceptually, I respect that he is trying to do something completely different than his dad's kind of music, but musically, what he is doing sucks. I could have handled 30 minutes of it, but his 90 minute set was horrible overkill.

See a review of the show and photo slideshow of this show here.


No rest for the weary though, as Wednesday night brought Thrift Store Cowboys, Mount Righteous, Amanda Shires & Barton Carroll to the Hi-Dive.

Barton started out the show with his solo acoustic set. He is an interesting guy, and his songwriting has a very literary feel to it (which I mean in a good way), and he deals with some quite heavy subjects. He could probably teach a world history class just by playing his songs.

Amanda Shires continues to come into her own as a songwriter. She played both new songs as well as some off of her most recent record, all with the accompaniment of Colt Miller on guitar.

Mount Righteous brought their 9-piece marching band to the Hi-Dive, and somehow they fit on the stage, and more importantly, the stage did not collapse. It's a super high energy show, and is almost so unclassifiable I am at a loss for describing it further.

Thrift Store Cowboys played a set of mostly new songs, off of the album they have just finished recording at Wavelab Studios in Tucson. Definitely extremely excited for this record, which is tentatively scheduled for a September release.

See photos from Denver Post Reverb blog here.


In other news, Denver's mini-SXSW, The Underground Music Showcase (or The UMS) has just made their first lineup announcement. I'm sure more bands will be announced in coming months, but the lineup already looks great. It's a bit like I imagine SXSW was at the very beginning, i.e. long before showcases were sponsored by energy drinks.

Also, pretty good new What's So Funny? column out today.

I have to admit, I didn't get that excited about Record Store Day this year, largely because there just weren't a ton of releases I was that interested in. This year seemed to have a lot more labels just trying to cash in on the event with boring releases rather than actually putting out something quality. I did get the one thing I most wanted, which was the Bon Iver/Peter Gabriel 7" split. Best find wasn't even associated with RSD, but there was no question I had to get it. Found a copy of Vic Chesnutt's first album Little on vinyl for a really reasonable price. Apparently the record store found a number of copies in the back that had basically gotten buried soon after the album was released, so needless to say, they are worth a good bit more than they were in 1990.