Colourmusic hail from Oklahoma and is the brainchild of British resident Nick Turner and US Citizen Okie Ryan Hendrix. Along with on again off again members, Nicholas Ley, Colin Fleishacker and Cry Suter, ColourMusic launched their energetic music and fun live shows across the nation wearing muted clothing as to not reveal the sheer power and energy they are hiding. Not to brag about the band, but they are something of SXSW favorites playing the last few years and being asked to come again this upcoming festival. In fact, SXSW is where I first saw this band. Albeit the whole festival was a little hazy, I do remember an energetic live band that blew my mind.They also have toured with the likes of Silversun Pickups, Postmarks and Nada Surf and have been mentioned in multiple journals as one of the best bands of SXSW.

Taking a detour from their tour with Dressy Bessy, Colourmusic came to Fort Collins and played the intimate Road 34 Venue. This was my first show at Road 34 and let me say real quick that this is going to be the next big thing for Fort Collins. It is a small venue that has impeccable sound and has a great atmosphere that makes the band and audience comfortable creating a creative and rocking atmosphere.

Their set was loud and vibrant. The songs were full of punk reverb and had great harmony between all of the singing parts. The guitar parts were good, but there was a lot of focus placed on the bass lines which were very catchy and pry my favorite part of the show. The show was a hodgepodge of musical styles stealing from early punk bands, garage distortion, and pop music. There is no real way to define their sound nor is their a band that can be compared to them. This is good because it gives them the ability to tour with anyone or have fun at any show because there are no preconceived notions. My two favorite songs that they played were “Put in a Little Gas” and “You Can Call Me By My Name.” These songs had catchy sing along choruses, simple beats, not to mention boys sounding vaguely like girls. One could not help but want to dance along. The songs did not feel too long, nor did the show feel like it dragged at any point. The band was thoroughly enjoying themselves and the audience was enjoying the band.

Since this was my first “Bar” show ever, I did not know what to expect. The crowd was a little sparse and I was worried that was going to affect the sound and energyof the show. Many of the people there did not seem to be there for the band, but rather were there for the drink specials. My worries were laid to rest when the show started. All of the people in the bar stopped and listened enthralled by the sound on stage. Which was very impressive. Smaller venues sometimes have a problem of having sound muffled because the levels are way off but everything was perfect. Even when the band tried to blow out the speakers, it sounded fantastic.

Overall, Colourmusic did a superb job during their show and were really nice guys afterwords. We sat and talked about SXSW, Touring, their stint with British Sea Power (Who by the way are PARTY ANIMALS!), and of course touring with local favorites Dressy Bessy. These guys really set the bar for good indie music. Their sound is refreshing because it is abrasive when it needs to be and comforting when it should be. They are humble guys and when you talk to them, you feel like you are talking to good friends. These guys are one of few bands that I hope to see them break big. A show well worth any night of the week.

There full length record, “F, Monday, Orange, February, Venus, lunatic, 1 or 13″ is out now on Great Society Records.

Here is a sample of their fun

Review By James Lopez

Over winter break, KCSU will still be playing all the best KCSU artists.  Our automation will be running strong and we will have DJs drop in occasionally.  There will be a minimal staff to operate the station and they will be able to help anybody with their radio needs. 

We will be back with a completely new schedule and new content for the web site on January 20th.  Thank you listeners for a great semester!

Monday: 1 o’clock:   Dear Science by TV on the Radio
Monday: 2 o’clock:   OK Computer by Radiohead

Wednesday: 1 o’clock:  Yankee Hotel Foxtrot by Wilco
Wednesday: 2 o’clock:  Abbey Road by The Beatles.

As a music listener, I’m still a major fan of listening to full albums — you get this huge experience, discover themes, and it unravels like a good collection of short stories (or a novel in the case of concept albums), so I’m excited to play these tracks for the season finale of the Magical Mystery Show.

–Macondo

I’m posting the entire text of the article here because not everyone has a registrated account with the NYT, but there’s always the clickable link.

College Radio Maintains Its Mojo

By BEN SISARIO

 

A PIZZA box and half a dozen laptops lay open in the poster-lined basement lounge of WRPI, the radio station of Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in Troy, N.Y. As a soda machine hummed, students prepared to record a local metal band and debated whether reggae is fundamentally a 1970s style or “transcends the boundaries of time.”

It was the kind of scene that has played out countless times at campus radio stations, which for generations have served as a clubhouse for connoisseurs and a training ground for the music industry. But when WRPI’s student D.J.’s leave the studio, they said, they are unlikely to listen to the radio at all.

“Even when I’m in the car, I’m usually listening to my iPod and not that much to the station,” said Blair Neal, the music director.

In the age of blogs and MySpace, college radio might seem an anachronism, an analog remnant in a digital world. With young people listening to the radio less, student stations no longer enjoy the influence they had when they gave bands like R.E.M. and Nirvana an early boost to stardom.

But instead of clashing with the Internet, the 700 or so college stations around North America have persevered alongside it, settling into a role as the slower but more loyal foil to the fickle blogosphere. And thanks to the continued passion of their personnel, the stations remain surprisingly successful at promotion, according to many in the music industry, playing a bigger part in breaking new acts than is usually acknowledged.

“College radio is still tremendously important,” said Kris Chen, an executive at XL Recordings, whose artists include Vampire Weekend and Devendra Banhart. “And as college radio reaches farther now because of the Internet, its usefulness has increased and adapted.”

In many cases, the D.J.’s are bloggers themselves. Mr. Neal, a laconic 23-year-old studying for a graduate degree in electronic arts, contributes to a WRPI blog.

“I love being the first person to hear about something and toss the album to a bunch of friends to see what they think,” he said in the station’s bare auxiliary studio, where local bands are recorded weekly.

For decades the lifeblood of college radio has been programming that veers between anarchic and insightful, as young D.J.’s indulge their whims free from the narrow formats of commercial stations. (Most campus stations are financed by their colleges.) At their peak in the 1980s and ’90s the stations served as a crucial cheering section for new bands and were courted attentively by the major record labels.

With record companies’ promotional budgets now slashed, and a wide gulf between mainstream and collegiate tastes, few expect college stations to be catalysts for large-scale pop crossovers anymore. And for many students captivated by doing radio — and getting a call from a listener at 3 a.m. — that’s just fine.

“I think the station is less about the people who listen to it and more about the people who are involved in it,” said Lyzi Diamond, the music director of KWVA at the University of Oregon at Eugene, where each week she proudly hangs up a copy of the Billboard pop chart with an X drawn through it.

She has two blogs: one for her playlists and one for her poetry.

In New York in October for the CMJ Music Marathon, which exists at the nexus of college radio’s past and present, Ms. Diamond, 19, was determined to raise her station’s profile. Between cigarettes outside Lower East Side clubs, she handed out ballpoint pens with KWVA’s slogan (“You can’t get your bachelor’s without it”) and put faces to the phone voices and e-mail handles of promoters and fellow D.J.’s from around the country.

That close-knit group is as valuable a grass-roots promotion network as the most influential blogs are, many in the music industry say. But some worry that few people are still listening.

Hard numbers about ratings for campus radio are scarce, but trends show that the college-age audience pays less attention to radio every year. From 1998 to 2007 the amount of time 18- to 24-year-olds spend listening dropped 18 percent, while for people 35 to 64 it slipped 9 percent, according to the Arbitron ratings service.

“For today’s college students radio listenership is down considerably,” said Norman Prusslin, a media professor at the State University of New York at Stony Brook who is president of the Intercollegiate Broadcasting System, an advocacy organization.

At WRPI students operate and maintain all the equipment, from the elaborate 1970s phone system — its bizarre tangle of wires takes up a wall in an electrical closet — to the Power Mac G5 and the sleek 24-track mixing board. Dan Weeks, 20, the chief engineer, said that he is too busy with the equipment to do a show, but that the station’s stature on campus was what attracted him.

“My parents went to school here,” Mr. Weeks said, “and when they were here the radio station was awesome. Everybody listened to it. I came back hoping that it would be the same thing.”

Is it? Does the station have the same influence?

“Maybe not as far reaching,” he answered, “because radio was probably a lot more popular then. But we definitely still have an impact.”

To reach new audiences, college and other noncommercial stations have taken the lead in Internet broadcasting: 60 percent have Web streams, compared with 36 percent for all stations, according to RadioTime, an online service.

KALX at the University of California, Berkeley, one of the most influential college stations, averages about 60 listeners at a time for its stream, and often has more than 100, said Sandra Wasson, its general manager. But most stations have seen only a trickle.

“We can see in our logs that we’re being listened to in Sri Lanka and Australia,” said Joel Willer, director of broadcasting at the University of Louisiana at Monroe. “But we’re still looking at an average worldwide of less than two dozen people.”

In response to the erosion of audiences for terrestrial stations, labels and artist managers have looked to the Internet to promote their music. Tom Gates, a manager of indie-rock bands like Brand New and the Format, said that for many of his acts — especially the younger ones — college radio is an unnecessary expense.

“That’s $1,500 I could use to film a show and service it to five different blogs, which may get us a few hundred thousand eyeballs,” Mr. Gates said. “As opposed to college radio, which might reach a few hundred.”

Some think those few hundred might be worth the money to reach. Two of the most successful independent rock bands in recent years, Vampire Weekend and Arcade Fire, are often called emblematic of the quick-moving blog era. But their record companies say college radio played a far greater role in their good fortune than Web sites. “The Internet has gotten too much credit for the success of Arcade Fire,” said Mac McCaughan, an owner of the band’s label, Merge. “College radio is more of a real barometer of what people like and what people are listening to than blogs.”

Promotion aside, the stations have long served another important function: providing a link to jobs in the recording industry, which at every level is peopled with campus radio alumni. Bobby Haber, the chief executive of CMJ Network — and a former music director of WBRS at Brandeis University — created a trade magazine, College Media Journal (now CMJ New Music Report), in 1978 after failing to secure a promotion job at CBS Records. “I was devastated,” he said.

Many of those positions at the major labels have disappeared. But in their place is a large and decentralized job market for promoters, publicists, managers and merchandising specialists, mostly at small, nimble independent companies.

Ms. Diamond of the University of Oregon station said she was first stung by the radio bug while in high school in Oakland, Calif. For no apparent reason a local commercial rock station interrupted its programming, and she was stunned by the sense of mischief and power. “All of a sudden the radio cut out and they started playing cartoon noises for the day, just cartoon noises,” she recalled. “And I was like: ‘Wow, they can do that. That could totally happen.’ ”

But Ms. Diamond, who is studying planning and public policy, said during a packed afternoon show at Cake Shop, a tiny club on the Lower East Side, that she was not considering a career in radio, or in the music business at all; she wouldn’t want to work at a station where she couldn’t play anything she wanted.

As the crowds pushed forward and another band began playing, she said that for now her life was consumed by KWVA.

 

“At the end of the day your friends might not be there, your job might not be there,” Ms. Diamond said, “but radio will always be there. And it’s really cool to have something you can depend on.”

–Macondo

Should the Rams win their first-round matchup, they would likely play the Florida Gators who will be heavily favored to beat Florida A&M.  This would be an intriguing matchup, since the Rams swept the Gators out of Moby Arena back in September, and Florida would likely be seeking some revenge in front of their home crowd.  If the Rams win today, their match against Florida/Florida A&M can also be heard here on KCSU on Saturday at 5:30pm local time.