Abney Park, strange brews and acrobats

by Chris Aaland

Yay! It’s Drunk Week in Durango. Snowdown is here, in all of its Steampunk glory. Durango Craft Spirits is finally open and has bottles of vodka and signature cocktails for sale. Team Vodka every day! We have six breweries slinging suds this year! It’s the greatest Snowdown. Ever!!!

(Author’s note: One of my radio coworkers hates exclamation points and I’m a real bastard!)

So let’s focus on booze and boogie highlights to the greatest week ever.

Steampunk band Abney Park plays the ACT tonight (Thurs., Jan. 29) at 9:30 p.m.

The Animas City Theatre hosts Abney Park at 9:30 p.m. tonight (Thurs., Jan. 29) at the Steampunk Masquerade. These guys live and breathe Steampunk, from their attire to hybridized instruments to riotous, dervish-like performances. Expect clockwork guitars, flintlock bassists, Middle Eastern percussion, violent violin and Tesla-powered keyboards blazing post-apocalyptic, swashbuckling musical mayhem. Carute Roma opens and the Troupe Verde Belly Dancers are also on the bill.

Get your beer goggles on! Carver Brewing Co. hosts Snowdown Beer Trivia at 8 p.m. Saturday. Test your knowledge and sensory skills in teams of up to four in Carvers’ back pub. The event includes three rounds of blind tasting and munchies to sober you up. Cost is $15 per person, with prizes for the top three teams – including four tickets to next month’s beer dinner.

If you haven’t picked up your souvenir bomber of Ska’s Aviatrix OPA or tried a pint at the World Headquarters or other local watering hole, I strongly suggest you do. I bought some last weekend and found it refreshing and ever-so-slightly odd. Saturday marked the first time I’d ever sipped an oatmeal pale ale. I found it slightly bitter, somewhat earthy and surprisingly crisp. I’ve sampled all 20 Ska Snowdown beers through the years and they usually give the brewers a chance to craft something outside the box. Consider Aviatrix a success.

Get a jump on Steamworks’ Firkin Friday with the release of S’more Firkin at 3 p.m. Friday at Purgy’s up at DMR. So how do roasted marshmallows, chocolate and graham crackers translate into beer? The S’more Firkin has a base of Steamworks’ award-winning Backside Stout. “For the graham cracker component, I used milk sugar, pure vanilla extract, cinnamon, honey and molasses,” said brewmaster Ken Martin. “Then added a little cocoa powder for some additional chocolate character, plus a large quantity of marshmallow crème.” If you don’t make it up to the mountain, there’s always the Fri., Feb. 6 tapping at the brewery.

Moe’s finds time in its busy Snowdown schedule (limbo contest, thumb wars and speed quarters at 10:30 p.m. tonight, Twister at 5:30 p.m. Friday and Nintendo 64 Mario Kart at 6 p.m. Saturday) for a little bit o’ music. DJs Baby Bell and CK spin from 10 ‘til close on Funked Up Fridays, while there’s a DJ and MC battle at 7:30 p.m. Saturday.

The Balcony Backstage hosts Interstate Stash Express, a Front Range power rock trio that unleashes all its mighty power following the Snowdown Parade on Friday.

The Golden Dragon Acrobats return to the Community Concert hall at 7 p.m. Wednesday, presenting a new show, “Cirque Ziva.” This one almost always sells out and it’s spectacular.

Get cultured with “The Met: Live in HD” in the Vallecito Room of the Student Union at 10:55 a.m. Saturday. The latest installment is “Les Contes d’Hoffmann.” Run time is approximately 3 hours, 45 minutes, so I suggest chomping a couple of chocolate edibles rather than pounding 40s of OE 800. Opera aficionados hate sitting next to drunks with small bladders.

This week’s Top Shelf list is provided by Jason Ragsdale, the handsome half of “The Velvet Rut,” which airs from 9 ‘til noon on KDUR each Saturday morning. It’s the best radio around … “the dark and hilarious side of country music,” as Kynan and Rags promise. It’s guaranteed to kill your hangover and jump-start your next binge. Here are Rags’ Top 10 alt-country albums of the past decade:

1. Possum Jenkins, “Carolinacana,” 2011. Not because they rotate vocalists within their band. Not because they rotate songwriters within their band. It’s because they’re just good.

2. Slim Cessna’s Auto Club, “Cipher,” 2008. “Cipher” captures everything that makes SCAC great. Jello Biafra described them as “the band that plays in the bar at the end of the world.” He might be right. Prepare your souls.

3. Sturgill Simpson, “High Top Mountain,” 2013. Named after a cemetery where some of his family is buried, this surpasses his sophomore attempt by a long shot. It’s great from beginning to end and it was independently released. If you want something done right, do it yourself.

4. Turnpike Troubadours, “Goodbye Normal Street,” 2012. This is proof a band can be both erudite and crowd-pleasing. Even though it did “peak” at 57 on the Billboard 200, it is nowhere close to being Top 40 music.

5. Lydia Loveless, “Indestructible Machine,” 2012. True talent is immediately apparent. You don’t have to like country music or any music really, to appreciate how talented she is. Every song here is solid.

6. The Defibulators, “Corn Money,” 2009. It sounds like half of them aren’t paying attention, but it sounds great. Every song consists of a busy mix of music that makes me feel like dancing and I hate dancing.

7. The Habit, “Lincoln Has Won,” 2011. Lead vocalist Siobhan Glennon makes me want to march all of the furniture out the door and set it on fire in a fit of drunken revelry during “War is Done.” She also makes me want to fall in love in “Not Brooklyn,” so, well done, madam.

8. Chris Knight, “Enough Rope,” 2006. Country music should be genuine. Chris Knight grew up in Slaughters, Ky., population 238. That, friends, is country, and it comes through in every song on this release.

9. Kevin Devine, “Put Your Ghost to Rest,” 2006. “Burning City Smoking” accurately describes most people’s frustration with the last decade, going beyond the theme of, “war is bad.” The whole thing is good, if you’re in the right mood. It can’t all be whiskey and fist-fights, all of the time.

10. Marah, “If You Didn’t Laugh, You’d Cry,” 2005. Songs like “Walt Whitman Bridge” and “Dishwasher’s Dream” are a balance of good music and clever poetry that anyone can relate to regardless of their level of experience.

You get a graham cracker and you break it in two? Email me at chrisa@gobrainstorm.net.