More than 90 minutes after Pretty Girls Make Graves launched into its set at Boulder’s Fox Theatre on Wednesday, it smacked the audience upside the head with “Speakers Push the Air,” bringing their energetic lovefest of a set to a close. The 2002 hit off “Good Health” – alongside other recognizable college radio favorites such as “All Medicated Geniuses” and “This Is Our Emergency” – proved the worth of the young band’s catalog. But it also showed the band has undergone some serious growth.
“We just got done making a new record, and it’s gonna come out sometime in the winter,” bassist Derek Fudesco said early in the set after a vicious take on “Chemical, Chemical.” And then the Seattle band tore into a good-sized sample of its new material, showing that it has grown and matured and applied a good dose of smart pop music to its angular, shouted post-punk. It’s exciting, and it will easily make them a bigger player in the indie music scene – a deserved accolade.
-Ricardo Baca
Glass Candy
Ida No was standing over the modest all-ages crowd at the Hi-Dive on Thursday, her makeup sparkling and her voice commanding the respect of a shrill, possessed Deborah Harry. The waif-hot Glass Candy singer wove a simple quilt of ’80s revisionism that rocked the dance-happy crowd.
There’s nothing special about the music of Glass Candy. It’s the rock ‘n’ roll soundtrack for getting down, which makes for a fun show. Tastes great, yes, but it’s also less filling. The kids from Portland, Ore., make for a terrific party band – ideal for a debauched high school graduation bash – but that’s about it.
-Ricardo Baca
The Bloody Hollies
It’s not often you see a band like The Bloody Hollies play for as long as it did Sunday night at Bender’s. The band from San Diego, which alternates between high-energy garage and lunatic tuneful punk, played for more than an hour with the energy of a group that plays 25-minute sets. Singer-guitarist Wesley Doyle shouts with a growl that is much larger than his diminutive size, and bassist Phillip Freedenberg was all over the stage.
The Bloody Hollies nu-garage mix is hot and almost original – think Grafton but with an unforgettable stage show – but the band almost played too long Sunday night. The music draws heavily from the proto-garage world of Roky Erickson, and as the band crossed the hour mark, the show – including the admirable passion the band held onto as the crowd thinned – was growing tiresome.
– Ricardo Baca
Tori Amos
A Tori Amos concert, like the pianist’s music, is a lush, vivid, otherworldly jaunt. Amos’ world, as she proved at a Monday night show at Red Rocks, is one of managed conflict. From the new “Original Sinsuality,” which opened the show, to “Pretty Good Year,” which stole the show as usual, Amos created an intensely quiet microcosm of seduction and strength.
The new “Goodbye Pisces” took on a new life on a windy Red Rocks night, but the creative centerpiece of her new record “The Beekeeper” – the chill “Ireland” – was left out. But she more than made up for it with her covers: Cat Stevens’ “Wild World” and The Beatles’ “Let It Be.”
-Ricardo Baca
