Tag: Best new music

105.5 The Colorado Sound's Featured Artists, Print

Alysia Kraft: 105.5 The Colorado Sound’s Featured Artist

May 25, 2022

Alysia Kraft can keenly use nature as a metaphor in her music. But in the case of “Little River,” a song with rich layers of meaning and potential interpretations, the inspiration was frighteningly literal.

“I almost drowned in the river by my parent’s ranch in the summer of 2020,” Kraft tells BandWagon. “It was a freak accident. The railing snapped on a bridge I was standing on and I was instantly tossed into a very high, very debris-choked river raging with freshly thawed spring snow.”

She lived to tell the tale. And in turn, make some of this year’s most resonant music.

A Wyoming native, Kraft’s is known in Colorado as one third of folk-rock favorites Whippoorwill and the voice of The Patti Fiasco. With therapeutic guidance, she came to an epiphany following the river trauma.

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Blast N’ Scrap is Back on Track

May 17, 2022

Blast N’ Scrap has become the de facto community hub for underground music in Fort Collins, but the organization does far more than event production. Its projects include a 6-week theater program for school kids, weekly screen printing classes using sustainable and recycled materials and Band Blast Off, a music education program teaching professional skills to aspiring musicians ages 7 to 17.

The prolific volume of Blast N’ Scrap initiatives is due, in large part, to the scruffy 38-year old at the helm. Michael Gormley is bursting with ideas.

And though Blast N’ Scrap events now include established local bands, Gormley adamantly says they will always be there for local bands to play their first show.

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Cloud Catcher: Carry the Heavy Torch

May 3, 2022

Some kids grow up listening to Barney, Elmo or Little Einsteins. Rory Rummings listened to Dio, Judas Priest and Iron Maiden. 
“My Dad raised me on the classics,” Rummings tells BandWagon, and you can hear it in Cloud Catcher, the Denver band he formed nine years ago. Rummings is the frontman and main songwriter, and he loves paying homage to the classic metal of the 1980s as well as the bands that started it all, such as Black Sabbath and Led Zeppelin. 
But Rummings insists that Cloud Catcher isn’t just another replica.

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Album Review: Anthony Ruptak – Backrooms

April 26, 2022

Like Ruptak’s earlier work, Backrooms is emotionally charged, but themes of anger, regret and despair are balanced by love and connection.

“The overall arc is one of evolution and healing,” Ruptak explained.

Scenes that play out over fragile, haunting melodies include a funeral for a well-loved dog, an ambulance ride to a hospice center and a white-knuckle drive to the house of a suicidal family member. On “Angie,” Ruptak proposes to his wife. Literally.

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Joshua Ray Walker: King Of The Honky-Tonk Misfits

April 8, 2022

Joshua Ray Walker’s role model for his hit “Sexy After Dark” was not Tim McGraw, Billy Ray Cyrus or Keith Urban. It was Conway Twitty.
Twitty, Walker said in a phone interview with BandWagon, was sort of a goofy guy who managed to sing some of the most romantic songs in country music. It’s not like Twitty belonged on the cast of Hee Haw, but he wasn’t Elvis. One of the intentions of “Sexy After Dark,” Walker said, was to pay a backhanded but lighthearted tribute to all the people like Twitty.

“There’s a history of country crooners who aren’t sexy – putting out sexy songs,” Walker said. “‘Slow Hand’ is one of my favorites. Twitty is so goofy-looking, but he sold it. He really sold it.”

The other intent, Walker said, was to poke fun at himself. He knows he’s also not Elvis.

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Album Review: Holdfast. – Movies

April 6, 2022

Holdfast.’s new album Movies brings their expected electro dark-pop and rock aesthetic but leans into other styles that open their doors to new fans.

Singer Charlie Maddocks demonstrates a dramatic contrast in dynamics, one that MUSE’s lead Matt Bellamy is well known for, though Maddocks’ tone is undoubtedly his own, becoming one of Colorado’s most recognizable lead vocals. Holdfast. continues to deliver strong songs while experimenting with new sounds and textures.

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Album Review: Young Habitat – In First Person Perspective

April 5, 2022

Music seldom tells you what to imagine in a concrete, absolute way. It requires you to fill in the gaps — sometimes thin, sometimes wide. Young Habitat’s debut EP In First Person Perspective, is a meditation on this idea.

Riley Sbarna and saxophonist Hayden Farr (Trash Cat, The Burroughs) have long riffed about a potential musical collaboration, but the inspiration to finally follow through came from an unlikely source: the pandemic.

Though In First Person Perspective retains the emotional vulnerability of Sbrana’s previous work, the sonic landscape is a left turn. Understated vocals often devolve into heavily affected opacity. The instrumentation is reminiscent of lo-fi hip hop with frequent saxophone odysseys provided by Farr. It’s one part contemporary Bon Iver and one part Porches with a sprinkle of neo soul. It’s both melancholic and beautiful. 

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Album Review: Thom LaFond – The Moon Leans In

March 8, 2022

Nederland, Colorado’s Thom LaFond is most well known as the guitarist and singer in Denver’s four-piece gypsy jam rock outfit Banshee Tree. But on this, his debut full-length, he lets his inner voice shine.

Close, acoustic and intimate speckles of piano, pizzicato violin and nimble upright bass frame his hushed, masculine baritone with gorgeous minimalism; a composition on par with a Kandinsky.

“Did they take the moon you were after and give it back piece by piece?” the record’s first lyric asks, initiating a song and an album dense with gorgeous prose, artful arrangements and beautiful music.

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