For the past four years, the Boulder record label Adventure Records has released a vibrant collection of local music.  This year's release marks the label's fifth year, and they've assembled another eclectic roster of bands and singer-songwriters.  The CD will be released August 15th at the release party at the Hi-Dive featuring the Swayback, , Three Cheers Faraday, John Common, Goodbye Champion and Kissing Party.

By way of introduction, we're profiling all the bands on this year's volume.  Some of the names may be familiar to you, but if they are't, be prepared for a big boost in your indie cred (which, unfortunately, might not be as cool as actual street cred).  Welcome to Part II of Get To Know Your Local Band.

Also visit our Clog to read about Adventure Records' CD release party.

Name: Dan Craig
When formed: His first album came out in 2005, but he’s been playing most of his life
Genre: Folk
Discography: New Every Morning (2005), Wirebird (2006), Skin Grows Thin (2008), Many Sparrows  EP (2008)
Website: www.dcraigmusic.com
Band Members: Dan Craig (guitar, vocals, piano, etc)

        Lineups vary, but  can include:
        Geoff Burghardt (mandolin)
        Erin Donovan (background vocals)
        Seth Donovan (cello)
        Lee Ellison / Dave Wetherby (bass)
        Mike Hall (drums)
       
        Guests on Skin Grows Thin:
        Jack Wylie (drums)
        Justin Croft (B3, Rhodes)
        Carrie Beeder (violin)
        Mackenzie Roberts (viola)
        Phil Donovan (trumpet)

Dan Craig writes music for snowy days spent under bed covers, drinking a mug of hot chocolate and watching the soft snow fall outside. The tunes are soothing, intimate, and comforting, creating a warm blanket of sound that just feels good. Often sounding like something from Ryan Adams’ Gold, Craig’s songwriting differs in that it feels like it distinctly belongs in Colorado, bringing in nature themes entwined with emotional ones. Craig, who is a native of the Centennial State, moved away to go to medical school in Pennsylvania, but was drawn back to write songs in his hometown. The quiet beauty of “Breaking Hearts Tonight,” off of Skin Grows Thin, released this year, features Craig’s earthy, smooth voice with an unassuming, but powerful violin, and meticulously arranged guitars and keyboards as Craig reminds an insecure girl that she is beautiful. Using metaphors as pretty as “someone took the stars and set them softly in your eyes” to tell her that she’s “breaking hearts tonight,” is enough to make anyone swoon.  On the equally heart-pitter-patter-inducing “Skin Grown Thin,” Craig softly promises “you could be my heart when I can’t start/turn this fist into a kiss/my mind when I am blind with my own fear.” The tunes are warming and eloquent—Craig is the songwriter who sings us what we need to hear when feeling out of sorts, cold, or just plain lonely.

Name: Lint
When formed: 2005
Genre: New Wave
Discography:  Sexy Harassment  (2005), Julie Newmar Single (2006)
Website: myspace.com/lintworld
Band Members: Jason McDaniel & Arlo White
   

While at first the thought of a new wave band from Boulder, land of hippie dippy rock, is a tad disconcerting, Lint owns the label with fun, flashy pop songs that provide a welcome relief from dreadlocked jam bands. With electronic blips and fanfare all around, Jason McDaniel and Arlo White of Lint create music that sounds decidedly poppy and sweet. The duo take tragic subjects like being broke and even hinting at turning to prostitution to make money, and transform them into a catchy, optimistic song about a girl who does it because she “had to have that shirt of her favorite band.” Somehow, it works. On the wonderfully bouncy “Julie Newmar,” Lint does similar things thematically. While usually, a love song to a girl who doesn’t know your name would turn into a weepy, somber drudge of unrequited love, Lint captures the high of having a crush, and relishing more in the intense infatuation than actually caring or knowing if it’s requited. With innocent statements like “she may not know I exist but I will love her for eternity,” Lint captures teenage stomach butterflies, backed by soaring guitars, synthesizers, and a killer drumbeat. Way flashier than the dryer fuzz they’re named after, Lint will make you want to go roller-skating and buy your crush a cherry slushie. And really, what could be better than that?

Name: Blue Million Miles
When Formed: November 2006
Genre: Indie rock
Discography: self-titled EP ( 2007),  Of Building Walls  (2008)
Website: http://www.myspace.com/bluemillionmiles
Band Members: Jeff Shapiro, Mike Picchetti, Sam McNitt, Johnny Lundock
 
Wedding rock and roll rhythmic backbone with expansive guitar sounds and thought-provoking lyrics, Denver’s Blue Million Miles write songs possessed of an exhilarating immediacy.  With stirring atmospheres and dreamy quiet passages, it might come as a surprise that the foundation for much of the band’s material comes from Sam McNitt’s background in folk music and his acoustic collaborations with guitarist Jeff Shapiro before the formation of this band.  This most assuredly accounts for the well-crafted melodies that make their material so compelling.
 
Three of the band’s members started out in Small Objects in the fall of 2005 but in the fall of 2006 they lost their original drummer replaced by Johnny Lundock whose background in more traditional rock music pushed their sound into greater dynamic territory and it matched even better with the rhythmic instincts of bassist Mike Picchetti than had previously been the case.  Taking a new name from the Captain Beefheart song “Her Eyes Are a Blue Million Miles,” the reenergized outfit began playing gigs and writing songs in earnest.  Their debut, self-titled EP, released in the summer of 2007, was a beautifully screen-printed CDR filled with their best material up to that point recorded by the band in the dining room of Shapiro’s south central Denver home. 
 
For their full-length album, Of Building Walls, the guys secured time in Bryan Feuchtinger’s well-known Uneven Studios, re-recording a few of their older songs in an environment where they would benefit from greater fidelity.  They recorded all the tracks in March of 2008 and spent the next two months mixing and mastering.  The result is an album of surprising sonic depth, exploring themes of growth against the limitations imposed on us or which we impose upon ourselves and the basic human instinct to construct stability in a dynamic and everchanging world so that we can make meaning out of what can seem like the arbitrariness of the universe.
 
Live, these guys create a climate of harrowing and electrifying intensity and they never have a show where they don’t sound like they’re breaking down walls and shattering expectations of what a band is supposed to sound like in an age of restrictive genre straightjackets.   A refreshingly fierce but compassionate voice in the realm of atmospheric rock, Blue Million Miles’ auspicious beginnings surely herald great things ahead.

Name: The Swayback
When Formed: October 2001
Genre: Rock
Discography: self-titled  ( 2004),  Forewarned  (2006), Long Gone Lads ( 2008)
Website: www.theswayback.com
Band Members: Eric Halborg, Bill Murphy, Martijn Bolster, Shawn Astrom 
 
From the beginning, The Swayback haven’t been what maybe some of their fans wanted them to be.  Early on they played a kind of jittery punk rock akin to The Misfits and Dead Kennedys and this sound can be heard on some of the material from their debut album.  In subsequent years they evolved a more atmospheric post-punk aesthetic that informs much of the material that would comprise the Forewarned EP and their latest full-length, Long Gone Lads.  That having been said, Long Gone Lads, once you get past what you may have expected from the band, is surprisingly sonically diverse incorporating elements of dub reggae, go go beats, blues rock and dizzying atmospheric turns, often provided by a collusion of singer-bassist Eric Halborg’s forcefully crooning vocals and low end dynamics.
 
Having grown up in the Chicago area, Halborg was at the right place at the right time to be exposed to the most exciting music of the day during his teen years, catching early tours by Swervedriver, Ride, My Bloody Valentine, Lush and other shoegaze bands.  Not to mention the thriving Chicago scene of the late 80s and early 90s that included Urge Overkill, Liz Phair and Smashing Pumpkins.  He ended up going to CU Boulder to get a photography degree and met L.A. native Bill Murphy while living in the mountains.  The two struck up a friendship and started the band, playing their first show at the Lion’s Lair in Denver in 2001.  The current line-up of the band began to crystallize with the addition of Dutch transplant, and world-renowned civil engineer, Martijn Bolster in 2004 on drums.  In 2007, electronic music pioneer Shawn Astrom joined the band with soundscapes and samples (live and otherwise) serving as sort of a Martin Swope figure of Mission of Burma fame.
 
Many would consider The Swayback to be one of the more high profile bands in Denver but that wouldn’t mean much had the band not performed energetic live shows and written innovative, dynamic, hard-hitting music.  Their willingness to musically go beyond where they’ve already been ensures that this band will never stay stuck in that rut that plagues acts that have seen any sort of success.  Never ones to rest on their laurels, The Swayback is already at work on the follow up to Long Gone Lads.

Name: Dead Bubbles
When Formed: January 2006
Genre: Rock and Roll
Discography: reclamation forklift provider (2007), Frienemies (2008)
Website: www.deadbubbles.com
Band Members: Arlo White, Dave Rosset, Matt Martinez, Paul Humphrey

Mixing opposite ends of the ridiculous in band names, Deadbubbles combined death and happiness for their name. Which suits their music just fine since it is an increasingly vital mélange of glam, power pop and flashy guitar rock. Because this band’s approach is so alien in a climate where a perverse earnestness and being “real” seems to be the order of the day, they’re easily misunderstood. According to frontman Arlo White, “I’m tired of bands who get up and play wearing the same thing that they were wearing when they were painting the fence that day; and their set is like an in-joke between the band members. I’m a lifelong live music fan, and I’m addicted to the flow, the spectacle, the energy, the creating-a-moment-that-can-never-be-duplicated feel of live shows.” Indeed, whether that be an over the top performance and taking risks even if they don’t always work, a Deadbubbles show stays with you because you can tell they’re actually trying to put on a show and not getting up and faking it.

As a frontman, White has the spastic energy of Kevin DuBrow in his heyday with a backing band that is able to transform that energy into something more akin to Tanx-era T-Rex. Their latest record, Frienemies, has certainly confounded a critic or two with its appropriation of hints of Roxy Music, but it introduces new layers to the band’s sound and shows that it doesn’t just rock, but it also has the imagination to go beyond mere rocking to creating an interesting collection of music that doesn’t merely aim to strip things down to the basics and keep grinding away at the same tired formula that makes many of their peers so boring. This is one act that continues to push its own boundaries and that’s always what has made for any band with any chance of making an impact.

Lint and Dan Craig profiles by Robin Edwards 
Blue Million Miles, The Swayback and deadbubbles profiles by Tom Murphy

Photos Courtesy of: Sarah Burghardt, Lint,  Blue Million Miles, Sarah Cass, and deadbubbles

More Profiles

Part 1 - Adventure Records Volume 5 Compilation Band Profiles

Part 3 - Adventure Records Volume 5 Compilation Band Profiles

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