Album Review: Amaya Arevalo – Love Wears Many Faces

February 12, 2020

Amaya Arevalo is starting to make her mark in the Northern Colorado and Denver jazz scene. She frequents the stages at Dazzle and Nocturne, supporting various bandleaders and groups with her expressive saxophone playing or on accompanying piano. But jazz isn’t her only language. Her debut solo album Love Wears Many Faces shows her audience everything she can do as she looks for her voice as a solo artist.

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Cover Story: Kyle Emerson – Coming Down and Into His Own

February 7, 2020

At the end of every show on his first tour as a solo artist, Kyle Emerson found himself exhausted. Emerson supported his first solo record, 2017’s Dorothy Alice, which he named for his late grandmother, with a lengthy tour.

Now, with his release Only Coming Down, Emerson focuses on the energy and connection with the crowd, bringing his more upbeat band shows to The Moxi Theater in Greeley on Thursday, February 20, presented by The Colorado Sound.

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Album Review: Satellite Pilot – Toad Tone and His Symphonic Swamp Creatures – Deluxe

February 6, 2020

As far as local bands go, Loveland, Colorado-based Satellite Pilot can be a lot. Identifying as something like Dr. Dog meets Polyphonic Spree, Flaming Lips, and The Kinks, Satellite Pilot push all their weirdness to the front. Yet that weirdness feels as natural as sliding on an old pair of shoes. This is the case with their fourth full length album titled Toad Tone and His Symphonic Swamp Creatures – Deluxe: on the surface, it’s the psychedelic mess you might imagine it being, but underneath it is so much more.

Satellite Pilot release Toad Tone and His Symphonic Swamp Creatures – Deluxe on February 14, at Pinball Jones Campus West in Fort Collins, accompanied by a children’s book co-written by the band and illustrated by Bailey Corimer.

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Sultans of Shred: Greeley Teen’s World-Class Guitar Chops Run In La Familia

February 5, 2020

Greeley’s Liam Garcia is 17, a junior at Greeley West High School, and by all accounts plays guitar better than just about anyone else in the world his age (and honestly, most people twice his age).

He traveled to London in September for the Young Guitarist of the Year competition as the only American selected for the finals.

He plans to study at the Berklee College of Music, but the biggest exhilaration is playing with his dad Socrates on stage.

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Ani DiFranco: Still Righteous After All These Years

February 4, 2020

Since the 90’s, Ani DiFranco has been steadily creating a legacy for herself. She released 20 albums under her own record label Righteous Babe, and inspired an entire movement of women artists. Now the year is 2020, and the industry has changed once again. But Ani’s message hasn’t.

“I think there’s many people who think feminism doesn’t seem urgent,’ but you can’t prevent imbalance without addressing it,” DiFranco said.

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Album Review: Cold Reading – ZYT

February 3, 2020

Precision has long been one of the favorite descriptors the world uses when talking about the Swiss, and Lucerne, Switzerland-based indie rock quintet Cold Reading certainly don’t break the mold set-forth by the neatly ticking clocks their ancestors meticulously crafted.

Their newest concept album, a three-part guitar-drum-bass-keys opus called ZYT is literally an homage to the concept of time in it’s lyrics and musical composition (and the title if you speak Swiss German). But the long-running Swiss ideology Cold Reading also exemplify on is that of staunch autonomy and independence.

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