Queen City Sounds Podcast – Queen City Sounds and Art

Queen City Sounds Podcast S5E35: The Silver Snails

The Silver Snails, photo by Jasmine Ward

The Silver Snails has been percolating its new album Speed of Light for over a decade since the 2012 release of its debut album The Seven Melodies. The core of the group is husband-and-wife duo Lucas Ward and Elisa Fantini and fashions itself a “glam rock space pop family band.” Even a casual listen to the new album reveals great attention to songwriting detail, performance and production. It has a huge, uplifting, deeply melodic sound and in moments it may remind listeners of something Jeff Lynne and Trevor Horn had their hands in making. In fact, the group covers “Video Killed the Radio Star” by Horn’s New Wave band The Buggles (the video for the original song was the first to be broadcast on MTV) for Speed of Light including a music video made by the members of The Silver Snails. The couple’s three children Jasmine, Celeste and Elias also contribute to the project’s creative efforts including live performances. Long before The Silver Snails became a band Ward was a close friend of singer/songwriter Elliott Smith from whom Ward took some inspiration in his own musical endeavors as someone who writes and records his own songs with keen attention to craft and performance. The album is indeed like a glam rock affair but one that is just as informed by the playful, experimental and imaginative psychedelic rock of Flaming Lips with some sonic resonances with the more space rock end of ELO. Co-produced by Dylan Magierek, mixed by Peter Katis and Adam Selzer and mastered by Greg Calbi and Sterling Sound, its an album that sounds like something from a classic era of pop but with an immediacy that hooks you in with every song. Speed of Light was released on September 5, 2025 on streaming, digital download and CD.

Listen to our interview with Lucas Ward on Bandcamp and follow The Silver Snails at the links below.

thesilversnails.com

The Silver Snails on Facebook

The Silver Snails on Instagram

The Silver Snails on Bandcamp

Queen City Sounds Podcast S5E34: PINES

Josh Hight is a former member of post-punk band The Detachment Kit until the mid-2000s when the group relocated to Brooklyn. He operated for a time as a solo artist under the moniker Irons before relocating to the UK and immersing himself in the world of photography, film and soundtracks. The later came about in part after Hight met Richard Norris at a Stone Club event in London. Norris is perhaps best known for his production work with the likes of Psychic TV, Marc Almond, Sun Ra, Robert Fripp and Joe Strummer but also as a member of influential electronic dance group The Grid. In 2025 Hight released his debut EP from his new solo project PINES with In His Wake, produced by Norris. The record as the name perhaps hints at is a product of grief, disillusionment and the soul searching that happens subsequent to hitting life’s low points. But the music that has come about is made up of gorgeously melodic atmospheres and poignant expressions of loss, the dull reality of much of adult existence and its relative lack of inspiration and leaps of discovery, melancholic reflections on past relationships and a yearning for the collapse of the current mode of human civilization and its capture by oligarchic monetization through digital channels and a more transcendent and vital future once that dissolution is well under way. Musically it’s like a cosmic slowcore, pastoral shoegaze form of psychedelic pop that at times is reminiscent of Hawkwind’s more accessible moments and shades of The Zombies. With guest musicians like Andy Bell (Ride, Oasis), Emmett Kelly (Bonnie “Prince” Billy, The Cairo Gang) and Dottie Cochran (Deary) it’s a richly emotional experience and one that seems more complete than EP often does.

Listen to our interview with Josh Hight on Bandcamp and follow PINES on Instagram.

Queen City Sounds Podcast S5E33: Laveda

Laveda formed as a dream pop band in Albany, New York in 2018. The core duo of Ali Genevich and Jake Brooks released two outstanding albums of deeply introspective, atmospheric and tender records with 2020’s What Happens After and 2023’s A Place You Grew Up In. As though the title of the latter was a prompt to evolve creatively Laveda relocated to New York City the same year and whether it was already happening then or more came together once in the big city the band evolved in a decidedly different sonic direction without losing its instincts for crafting memorable melodies and vivid, emotionally vibrant and immediately relatable lyrics. 2025’s Love, Darla marked a change in style for a more gritty, more angular, almost No Wave sound as though Genevich and Brooks had delved further into the Sonic Youth catalog and found their way to the likes of Live Skull and, perhaps unrelated, The Cleaners From Venus. The new album sounds like the work of people who made the move to pursue their art further and didn’t come out the other side jaded. Instead transformed and challenged to do something to reflect their own development as people and artists.

Listen to our interview with Genevich and Brooks on Bandcamp and follow Laveda at the links below.

Laveda on Instagram

Laveda on Facebook

Laveda LinkTr.ee

Queen City Sounds Podcast S5E32: Broken Record

Broken Record is a Denver-based band that formed after singer/guitarist Lauren Beecher and bassist Corey Fruin moved to the Mile High City from Connecticut in 2017. Both had roots in the underground and DIY scene in and around New Haven and in forming Broken Record around some material Beecher had been working on what emerged was music that reflected the influence of punk and hardcore, certainly in the ethos of the group, as well as the atmospheric melodic qualities of The Cure. If you caught the band early on you might be excused to hearing in the music a touch of Hüsker Dü’s emotionally rich and fierce yet gentle aesthetic. The fledgling outfit found a home in the local hardcore scene and played early shows with the likes of then relatively newly founded bands like Destiny Bond and Ukko’s Hammer. And yet Broken Record never seemed out of place even though the catharsis of its music wasn’t formed from the same set of sounds but the emotional core of the songwriting shared a similar vulnerability and intelligence in expressing emotion with a keen sensitivity in the language of emotionally charged rock music.

The quartet released its debut full-length I Died Laughing on April 24, 2020 and of course could not tour around the record due to the global pandemic. But on that album one hears the knack for melodic jangle and shimmer embedded into earnestly energetic hooks with the expert pacing and Beecher’s warmly thoughtful vocals that strike the perfect emotional coloring for songs that are often poignantly melancholic and always deeply observant. For the 2023 album Nothing Moves Me the songwriting seemed to experiment further with tone and style incorporating delicately minimal guitar leads and triumphant choruses while seeming to be able to mine the more interesting ends of adolescent angst as a lens by which to understand the sometimes disillusioning aspects of adulthood. Like an entire record of what your teenage self might have to say about your current adult self. The 2025 album Routine (via the band’s own imprint Power Goth Recordings) and its cover of suburban American would-be normalcy takes the band’s established themes further to seemingly comment with great insight into the compromises and perils of navigating life in late capitalism and how that can cast a pall over your life if you’re not equipped to find some meaning in a socioeconomic environment seemingly designed to erode your joy and ability to live a full and dignified life. But also on the album the band seems to find the threads of psychic resistance to it all in creative acts and writing songs that feel like a shaking off of the gloom with music that feels like an expression of basic human solidarity.

Listen to our interview with Lauren Beecher and Corey Fruin on Bandcamp and follow Broken Record at the links below. The band is celebrating the release of Routine with a show at The Skylark Lounge Bobcat Room on Saturday, November 15, 2025 with Precocious Neophyte and Safekeeper, doors 8 p.m., show 9 p.m.

brokenrecordisaband.com

Broken Record on Bandcamp

Broken Record on Instagram

Broken Record on Bluesky

Power Goth Recordings on Instagram

Queen City Sounds Podcast S5E31: Ches Smith

Ches Smith’s Clone Row, photo courtesy the artists

Ches Smith is a drummer, percussionist and composer originally from California and now based out of New York. His career as a musician has been varied and acclaimed including playing on albums with and playing with the likes of John Zorn, Mr. Bungle, Xiu Xiu, Fred Frith, Pauline Oliveros Terry Riley, Marc Ribot (as a member of Ceramic Dog), Secret Chiefs 3, Nels Cline and Dave Holland. Smith’s mastery of technique is not divorced from a creativity in crafting rhythms to whatever musical style and mode or mood he finds himself contributing to or writing himself with his various collaborators. In 2025 Ches Smith offered his latest opus, Clone Row which includes performances from avant-garde guitar legend Mary Halvorson, jazz luminary Liberty Ellman and multidisciplinary sound artist Nick Dunston. It’s an album of music that moves with imaginative flow of layered rhythms and tones like if one of those more gifted 2000s math rock bands like Hella and Battles were more into fusion and free jazz. Although instrumental the songs speak musically with a cinematic quality.

Ches Smith’s quartet for Clone Row is currently touring the USA with a stop at The Federal Theatre in Denver on Wednesday, October 15. Listen to our interview with Smith on Bandcamp and follow the musician and composer at the links below.

chessmith.com

Queen City Sounds Podcast S5E30: Shonen Knife

Shonen Knife is a pioneering Japanese punk band that started out in Osaka in 1981 inspired by the kind of music that influenced the Ramones like 60s girl groups and by the Ramones themselves. The trio were a rarity in Japan in the early days as an all-female group and its lyrics about food, animals and pop culture paired with infectiously upbeat melodies were all but a precursor to pop-punk and a focus on everyday joys over the horrible things we often face in the world we experience. After all, if you only focus on the negative it’s harder to get through tough times. Shonen Knife embraced by American artists and labels like K Records in Olympia, Washington and Sub Pop out of Seattle and Sonic Youth, Red Kross and Nirvana who were instrumental in getting the band a record deal with Capitol Records in 1992 for the release of its 1993 album Let’s Knife. Shonen Knife has remained a bit of a cult band since and its reliably fun music and charming and energetic live shows has justified its legendary status. The outfit’s latest album Our Best Place got a 2025 vinyl reissue available on the tour and afterward through the Good Charamel website. The album is vintage Shonen Knife with fun and sometimes surreal songs about good times, beloved food and personal empowerment.

Listen to our interview with Shonen Knife co-founder, vocalist and guitarist Naoko Yamano on Bandcamp and follow Shonen Knife at the links below. The band performs at HQ in Denver, Colorado on October 9, 2025 with The Pack A.D..

Shonen Knife on Facebook

shonenknife.net

Queen City Sounds Podcast S5E29: In the Company of Serpents

In the Company of Serpents, photo by Tom Murphy

In the Company of Serpents began as a kind of doom band in early 2011 and its first few releases were crushing, heavy affairs that set the group apart from other doom acts of the time partly because the core of the songwriting was always a little different. The lyrics seemed informed by a more than passing familiarity with esoteric knowledge well beyond knowing who Aleister Crowley was or that the Ride-Waite Tarot deck had art illustrated by Pamela Colman Smith. The band has also benefited from having immediately recognizable artwork including its double cross icon with the serpent in a crossed over Ouroboros image. Around the mid-2010s or so, singer Grant Netzorg, formerly of dark Americana band Bone Orchard, realized that trying to be the heaviest band in a world where many other artists were already in that league wasn’t where he wanted to be creatively. His deep interest in cinema and the cinematic possibilities in songwriting lead him to exploring more atmospheric guitar ideas in the vein of Ennio Morricone and Angelo Badalamenti with shades of Daniel Lanois. The 2017 album Ain-Soph Aur reflected this shift most fully and the next two albums Lux (2020) and A Crack in Everything (2025) expanded upon these instincts for crafting deep sonic narratives. The new record, though, is a new frontier for the trio now comprised of Netzorg (vocals, guitar), Ben Pitts (bass, lap steel) and Andy Thomas (drums) as it is Netzorg’s most personal album to date in terms of the lyrics that all but openly discuss his struggle with addiction and confronting his now former mentality with creativity and radical self-honesty. It’s easily the band’s finest and most emotionally stirring record and the first to feature the new line-up on a recording.

Listen to our interview with In the Company of Serpents on Bandcamp and follow the group at the links below.

In the Company of Serpents on Facebook

In the Company of Serpents on Instagram

In the Company of Serpents on Twitter

Queen City Sounds Podcast S5E28: Melodies Never Lie

Melodies Never Lie is the solo project of Isaac Rivera. The musician/songwriter grew up in Denver and in the 2000s Rivera was part of the more left field end of the Denver indie scene as a member of chamber pop group Mehko and The Ocean Birds. He went on to more experimental musical projects before attending graduate school for Geography in Seattle, Washington for a handful of years. Shortly after the early COVID-19 pandemic Rivera returned to Colorado to take up a teaching position and reconnected with the musical community that has welcomed him in the 2000s and 2010s in the underground and DIY circles he had most been a part previously. In 2023 he started writing music for what would be his next project Melodies Never Lie. In November 2024 the debut album from the project When We Fall & Rise Together released digitally and on cassette and revealed Rivera having fused his more experimental leanings with his instinct for crafting melodies for a style that was both ambient and the kind of experimental indiepop and rock that had inspired him earlier in life. Less than a year later in June 2025 Rivera issued There’s Not Such Thing As Too Many Flowers. The new album built upon his experiments in synth, guitar, loops, percussion, electronic production and vocals for an album that delves deep into grief and the subversive and revolutionary possibilities of finding hope within oneself and one’s genuine connections with others and encouraging and cultivating the inherent dignity and unique gifts of each other. It’s an album that draws on more conventional and traditional melodic structures while stretching those beyond the usual boundaries and challenges the scarcity and conformist ideology of capitalism in the title of the album and the organic sprawl and informal structure of the songs.

Listen to our interview with Isaac Rivera on Bandcamp and follow Melodies Never Lie at the links below.

Melodies Never Lie on Bandcamp

Queen City Sounds Podcast S5E27: Rebecca Pidgeon

Rebecca Pidgeon is songwriter, guitarist, singer and actress who released her twelfth album Unillusion on August 29, 2025 via Toy Canteen Records. Pidgeon’s most recent albums have been layered and lushly produced With the new record she took a different approach to the composition and recording for a more intimate feel and minimal sound sources, mostly acoustic guitar and her typically expressive and finely inflected vocals. When discussing the material for the forthcoming album with longtime producer Fernando Perdomo he encouraged her to watch episodes of the MTV Unplugged series and the spontaneous energy and eminently human scale of those performances seemed to suit her vision for the album. Working with a group of musicians including Perdomo, Andy Struder on violin and viola, Eszter Balint also on violin and Matt Tecu on drums, Pidgeon naturally on guitar, the songs came together with stories and poetic themes from the mythical to the poignantly personal. The music has a raw quality but that is inviting and embraces you with the songwriter’s unique narratives and emotional nuance.

Listen to our interview with Rebecca Pidgeon on Bandcamp and follow the artist at the links below.

rebeccapidgeonmusic.com

Rebecca Pidgeon on Instagram

Rebecca Pidgeon on YouTube

Rebecca Pidgeon on Facebook

Rebecca Pidgeon on Twitter

Queen City Sounds Podcast S5E26: Janet Feder

Fred Frith and Janet Feder, photo courtesy the artists

Janet Feder is considered one of the world’s most inventive and innovative guitarists and she has been a fixture of Denver’s local avant-garde/experimental music scene for decades as a musician, songwriter and educator. Her prepared guitar technique has yielded a sound like a miniature orchestra of sounds, textures and rhythms. Feder grew up playing music in a more traditional style as a guitarist including folk and rock styles but discovered a new world of technique and creative outlet upon witnessing a Thinking Plague show and seeing Mike Johnson and the band going beyond mere progressive rock to something that challenged even what that could sound like. From there Feder became part of the Denver avant-garde as a respected artist in her own right. The guitarist has several albums to her name going back to the mid-90s including collaborative albums with the likes of Mighty Fine Productions head and sound engineer/multi-instrumentalist Colin Bricker, composer Paul Fowler and the legendary Fred Frith. The latter was a founding member of Henry Cow, one of the leading lights of the “Rock in opposition” movement turning convention on its head. His list of collaborations are lengthy and include working with and/or contributing to the works of The Residents, Jad Fair, John Zorn, Brian Eno, Bill Laswell, Robert Wyatt and Mike Patton. In 2006 Feder and Frith released an album called Ironic universe that showcased their chemistry as high level practitioners of improvisation and imaginative musicianship.

In 2017 Frith and Feder performed at show at the studio space for Mighty Fine Productions and recreated the magic of that collaborative album while hinting at further refinements in their technique developed during the intervening years. On September 16, 2025 the two guitarists perform live again at The Bug Theater in Denver for another display of left field musical creativity and practice courtesy Creative Music Works.

Listen to our interview with Janet Feder on Bandcamp and follow her and Creative Music Works (where you can purchase tickets for the show and future events of interest in the realm of avant-garde music) at the link below.

janetfeder.com

Janet Feder on Bandcamp

creativemusicworks.org