has been a stalwart venue on South Broadway for years, and enjoys a (well deserved) reputation as a haven for local acts — many of the jam, blues and conventional ilk. Its large dance floor also lends itself to the penchant for fans of those genres to engage in groovy dancing.
The venue does host its fair share of punk rock acts, to be fair, but those are still rare enough to be a treat for bands used to playing in dives with booth-sized, low stages (if there are stages at all) that allow eye-level intimacy with a usually small, but still packed-in crowds. That made last Friday nightap show — who, by the way, are one of Denver’s most exciting live acts — just a little unusual, and maybe tinted it with just a smidge of trepidation — at least for the band.
Murder Ranks, for the uninitiated, is King Scratchie’s (A.k.a. Dan Wanush, from the beloved and recently reunited Warlock Pinchers) project that blends the roots of dancehall with a hearty punk rock sensibility — and they do it well.
Joined onstage by drummer Nate Weaver, bassist Ben Williams and guitarist Mike Buckley, Scratchie almost immediately shot into the blended character of an old-school deejay and an alpha-dawg hardcore singer, with the gravelly vocals characteristic of Jamaican superstars like Shabba Ranks. When he wasn’t smashing a reverb pedal to emphasize lines, he was bouncing, stomping, jumping and dancing across the stage — all the while a brilliant calypso-meets-Johnny Rotten rap tumbling from his mouth and spewing across the room.
In contrast to Scratchie’s antics, the rest of the band lived in an almost coy, background space. Williams — recently of Ghost Buffalo — and Weaver collaborated on a hard rhythm that rivaled the brilliant dub that runs through the Clash’s masterpiece “Sandinista,” while Buckley carved riff after perfect riff from a delay-and-distortion-saturated guitar — and all of it came down in perfect timing. The result was a hard-to-resist dance mix that had most of the crowd popping, bouncing, pogo-ing and grooving for over 45 minutes. The brutally antic delivery behind “Broadway,” a tune that lifts its heart from a famous Barrington Levy tune “Here I Come,” inspired a fist-pumping dance on the large dance floor, before the sexy, virulent “Surgeon Technique” had both boys and girls quaking and eyeing one another.
Rock ‘n roll is truly a melting pot of social trends and musical seasonings, and some of the most exciting music in rock over the past five decades has been born from musical geniuses that see a way to blend often disparate genres. These innovative blends often create brand new, exciting genres (think hip-hop), and often they simply don’t.
Murder Ranks seems destined to be one that will be the genesis of a new blended genre. All the band needs is the wave of support to keep it going.
Now is the time to check them out.
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Billy Thieme is a Denver-based writer, an old-school punk and a huge follower of Denver’s vibrant local music scene. Follow Billy’s explorations at , and his giglist at .
