13 minute read
single reviews
BY VALERIE VAMPOLA
Eufórquestra
Eufórquestra’s recent single, “Arizona to Georgia,” leans into groovy funk-rock, with jammy vibes and a big sound, reminiscent of early Steely Dan or Steve Miller’s “Fly Like an Eagle.” The song maintains a basic lyrical message about listening louder than speaking. The modal structure pulls the focus to the percussion and atmospheric textures provided by the band, like the ethereal e-piano and organ, or the horns swelling in and out of the jam breaks. While coming in at just under 4 minutes, this song has a lot of potential to extend to a full jam, pushing audiences to have a “little less talk, a little more listen” as the lyrics demand. The band also just dropped another single - “Show Me the Way,” both for the upcoming LP While We Still Got Time, due out this summer.
Catch Eufórquestra live at City Park in
Denver on Saturday, July 10 at noon. More at euforquestra.com
Hutty
Hutty (or Hutty the Kid) released his newest single, “Broke Bank,” a rap and hip-hop track reminiscent of trap artists like Jack Harlow and 21 Savage. The Boulder artist coupled this release with a music video featuring clichés like dancing strippers, ski-masks and raining dollar bills. Still, it's a good look. Since making his mark with his 2021 album and over 1.5 million streams on Spotify for his hit “Body Low,” Hutty has been exploring different genres and influences, using hip-hop as his foundation. “Broke Bank” incorporates less fusion of other styles like his 2021 album had, staying within strict hip-hop, incorporating some old school vibes emphasized by a sax riff. The song is dancy, to the point that listeners could imagine themselves bopping along to it on TikTok.
“Broke Bank” was released June 2. Links to Hutty’s content at beacons.ai/hutty
Connor Terrones
Guitarist Connor Terrones debuts his solo project with his first single, “What Can I Do?” giving listeners a peek into the lofi tastes of the long-time Colorado soul and R&B sideman. Featuring previous Denver residents Julian Cary and Roy Matz, the track is immersed in jazz-harmony practices heard in artists like Thundercat and Michael Mayo. Cary’s cool vocals complement the spacy synth, creating some exciting moments when he breaks into harmony. The track leans heavily into the hiphop aesthetic, complete with a rap verse by Matz. Terrones leads with a strong foot and establishes a clear aesthetic to get listeners excited for the rest of his upcoming album.
“What Can I Do” is out July 1. Catch Terrones’ Album release show at Lost Lake in Denver on
September 2nd with Ghost Tapes, Dead Eye
Dojo and The White Moms. Visit instagram. com/connorterrones for more.
THE BONES OF J.R. JONES
DESERT RHYTHMS & DANCING THROUGH THE BLUES
BY GABE ALLEN
To Jonathon Robert Linaberry, AKA The Bones of J.R. Jones, “Dance Yrself Clean” is more than the cryptic title of an LCD Soundsystem hit. It is an instruction. One that he followed, with both excitement and some trepidation, while filming the music video for “Stay Wild,” the lead song on his 2021 EP A Celebration. In the video, JR skids his truck to a halt on the side of a country road. Leaving a bottle of whiskey behind on the dash, J.R. basks in the glow of headlights and dances like no one is watching.
“The movement that I was trying to capture is, like, having a knot in your stomach that needs to be released,” J.R. tells BandWagon. “I love to dance, even though I’m not any good at it. To me, it’s the purest form of expression because it’s just your body and you can let everything out.”
The song comes even further to life at J.R.’s live shows. He hits play on a hooky drum machine and bass loop, jangles a lazy slide guitar riff over top and starts singing. His shoulders heave forward and back as the melody slips between his lips like a branch in a river.
In June, J.R. will traverse Colorado from South to North starting with a July 19 show in Telluride and ending with shows at the Moxi in Greeley on July 22 and Schmiggity’s in Steamboat on the 23. Though the bluesman has spent nearly his entire life in New York state, he has a soulful connection to the West. He wrote A Celebration (his latest release) during his honeymoon. Eschewing an archetypal tropical vacation, J.R. and his wife, writer Lisa Przystup, embarked on an unhurried romp through the desert.
The opening loop of “Stay Wild” is both the first thing a listener hears on A Celebration and the first fragment of music that J.R. created for the album. One night, in a lone house in the desert near Joshua Tree National Park, the riff bubbled up from J.R.’s subconscious.
The rest of the album followed suit. When J.R. returned home from his honeymoon, he set about organizing a collection of half-written songs, synthetic drum and bass loops and acoustic riffs into a cohesive collection. The result is an album that mixes programmed downtempo beats with soulful acoustic blues compositions. It’s just the right blend of tradition and the unexpected.
J.R.’s life as a touring bluesman came later than some. In his late 20’s, he was living in Brooklyn, bartending and teaching at a pre-school. He had a masters degree in printmaking, but the medium was quickly being usurped by
digital alternatives. Still, he needed a creative outlet.
A few years before, J.R.’s college roommate had introduced him to a song that made him fall in love with the blues. It was Blind Lemon Jefferson, a 1920’s singer and guitarist who is sometimes credited as the “Father of the Texas Blues.”
From then on, J.R. spent his in-between-time — in between work, school, relationships and everything else — playing the blues. By the early 2010’s, he was a regular at Brooklyn open mics and bar gigs.
“There were a lot of DIY venues that popped up in loft spaces or garages. They were perfect for the type of music I was playing,” he explained. “All you needed was a condenser microphone, a picnic table and a cooler of PBR.”
Music as a career felt like a far off dream, but a local recording engineer took an interest in the backroom troubadour and produced his first album. Word began to spread, and soon he was touring all over the country.
A decade later, J.R.’s career in music still feels precarious at times. His lead songs may have millions of streams on Spotify, but gone is the album era when artists could make good money off of records. For now, J.R. is thankful to have enough financial backing to tour with a drummer this summer.
“You never know when the bottom is gonna drop out. I could be back to bartending or teaching at any moment,” he said. “Sometimes I struggle to accept it, but this is what I love. It’s going to make me happy even though it’s going to be 1,000 times harder and may not even work out in the end.”
Penniless or prosperous, J.R. will play the blues. And he’ll keep dancing too. That’s what “Stay Wild” is really about. It’s easy to dance when you’re happy, but just as important to dance when you’re struggling with life’s most irksome questions.
BANDWAGON PRESENTS THE BONES OF J.R. JONES WEDNESDAY, JULY 20 AT LULU’S DOWNSTAIRS IN MANITOU SPRINGS, THURSDAY JULY 21 AT THE BLACK BUZZARD IN DENVER AND FRIDAY, JULY 22 AT THE MOXI THEATER IN GREELEY. TICKETS ON SALE NOW AT BANDWAGONPRESENTS.COM
MICHAL MENERT
THINGS BURN DOWN
BY GABE ALLEN
Michal Menert has been thinking about fire.
The fires that have burned vast tracts of land near his childhood home in Colorado and not far from his former home in California. The fire that burned a warehouse full of his merch in Detroit last December. A fire that burned down the house in Fort Collins where he used to live with his bandmates in 2004. And all of the other metaphorical fires that have raged through his life over the years.
“Things burn down and then you watch the flowers grow back out of the cracks,” Menert reflected in an interview with BandWagon.
The theme has permeated the Pretty Lights cofounder’s music in recent months. While Menert’s last release was a chilledout downtempo salve for the loneliness and dread of pandemic lockdowns, his upcoming album is energetic, chaotic and regenerative.
It’s a return to form. And, fittingly, Menert has also returned home. In 2016, he left Colorado to work as a producer and sound engineer for Mickey Hart of the Grateful Dead. He and his wife settled into the small, coastal town of Gualala, California. But the couple returned to the front range in October of last year in order to take care of his mother, who is confronting health issues. The return was bittersweet, but Menert is glad to be back.
“We lived on the coast in a remote and very beautiful place. But, especially during COVID, it was hard to see the people that we cared about,” Menert said. “I missed having a scene of friends and musicians and feeling like I was a part of something.”
After a five-year hiatus, Menert is once again a mainstay of the Northern Colorado music scene. He now lives in Denver and hosts a Vinyl DJ night at Rosetta Hall in Boulder every Monday. He has also begun to host a “quarterly” show at the Lyric in Fort
Collins where he collaborates with visual effects wizard Baxter Long. On July 16, he will be joined by a cast of danceable Colorado acts for his third show at the Lyric entitled phasingfade:summer.
In keeping with the theme, Menert’s set will trace a narrative of fire and regrowth. “It’s about watching things burn, but realizing that they’re just things,” he said. “And realizing that the pain of losing them actually creates space.”
This is a lesson that Menert has had to learn more than once. The most catastrophic fire, figuratively, happened early on in his music career. In 2006, Menert and Pretty Lights cofounder Derek Vincent Smith regularly hosted DIY parties, played shows and toured with a rotating cast of friends and collaborators. They were playing enough shows that they couldn’t work regular jobs. Still Menert wasn’t yet making quite enough money to live, in part because of a worsening opiate addiction.
So, like many entrepreneurial aspiring artists before and after him, he got a side hustle: growing and selling weed. One day, while sitting in the studio with Smith, Menert got a call from a customer that he hadn’t heard from in a while.
“This kid used to regularly buy weed from me, but he had disappeared for a few months,” Menert remembered.
The customer told him that a few of his friends wanted to buy a half pound. The customers were also in a rap group. Menert should bring his laptop to the meetup so that he could show them some beats.
“It turned out he was buying meth from these guys and probably owed them money,” Menert said. “So, he brought in someone who was worth the money.”
When Menert got to the deal in Loveland, the three phony buyers pulled out knives. But they were spooked by his six-foot-three hulking frame. Before Menert could fully process what was happening, he was laying on the ground with lacerations on his hands and a deep stab wound in his chest. He was rushed to McKee Medical Center, where doctors saved his life.
The ensuing months planted the seeds for flowers to grow. But, at the time, Menert still felt like he was in the fire. Once he could walk again, he started tinkering. But playing music like he had been was off the table — he could barely move his right hand. Then his father, a librarian at the same detention facility that Menert’s assailants were locked in, fell ill. Menert became his caretaker as he battled cancer.
Meanwhile Menert and Smith’s pet project, Pretty Lights, was taking off online. Smith left Menert behind and began touring the international festival circuit.
“At the time I couldn’t understand why this had happened to me and why I wasn’t a part of a group that I had started,” Menert said.
Now he looks back on that time fondly. He spent lots of time with his father during his last years of life, kicked opiates for good and developed a wicked crush on a Walmart coworker who was putting herself through nursing school. Fifteen years later, they’re still married.
When Menert was finally able to return to music fully, he immersed himself. Over the past 12 years, he has released 12 albums — thirteen if you include the one that he produced for Mickey Hart. His passion for music is so great that he regularly juggles a multitude of projects with different collaborators. In late July, he will release his next album. For now, Menert embodies the flowers growing from charred earth. One day the flames might come for him again. “I don’t think I’m ready for my happy ending yet. I’m still rising out of the ashes and I still might burn down a few times,” he told BandWagon. “But I’m ready for it.”
MICHAEL MENERT WILL PERFORM SATURDAY, JULY 16 AT THE LYRIC IN FORT COLLINS ALONGSIDE SEVERAL OTHER ACTS FOR THE PHASINGFADE:SUMMER EVENT. HIS NEW ALBUM IS DUE OUT LATER THIS MONTH. FOR MORE, VISIT MENERTMUSIC.COM
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POLYRHYTHMICS | LIVE ON THE LANES | PHOTO: SHELBY TAYLOR-THORN
BANDWAGON PHOTO OF THE MONTH | RED SHAHAN
