Compilation features local music worthy of pride

This is going to sound really cheesy, but I felt one thing while listening to the new compilation album "Sounds of the Pikes Peak Region": pride.

That's right. This collection of songs made me proud of the music coming out of Colorado Springs.

With 13 original songs spread over 49 minutes, this compilation is a clear step forward for the local music scene.

Put together by the Cultural Office of the Pikes Peak Region from more than 100 entries, it brings together some of the folks who local music aficionados have been listening to for years - Joe Uveges, George Whitesell, Mango fan Django - with newer voices such as Lindsay Weidmann and Cahalen David Morrison.

An easygoing singer-songwriter vibe permeates the album, but that doesn't mean it all sounds the same. There are several genres represented: blues, gypsy jazz, Latin jazz, indie rock and even rap.

Morrison's "Chip o' Silicon" starts it off with a clever rumination on the price of modernity: "trade my children for a drop of gasoline, trade my tractor for a chip o' silicon."

Then Ashley Raines kicks it into a higher gear with "St. Bernard Perished," a driving blues tune fueled by slide guitar and lyrics that reach back to the classic song "Strange Fruit" to draw a bold line connecting Southern lynchings and those left to drown during Hurricane Katrina. Raines draws his conclusions with so few words that it feels nothing like a sermon; it is an apocalyptic vision, with a beat you can dance to.

That song has its echo (musically, not lyrically) in John-Alex Mason's "Locomotive," another driving blues tune.

Mason is a local treasure, and on this tune you'll feel the pulse and rhythm of racing that big coal train as it heads south alongside I-25.

Yet another high point is Andy Tanner's "It's On." Tanner was the frontman and songwriter for Laymen Terms, one of the Springs' most promising indie rock outfits for a long time.

On this solo effort, he reminds me a bit of Damien Rice, as he stuffs a rock 'n' roll urgency into an acoustic vessel until it nearly explodes.

It is followed by the restrained, haunting sound of Poesis' "A Thousand Miles," imbued with the slo-mo tempo and searing sensuality of a Cowboy Junkies song.

Find somebody to slow dance with, pronto.

The compilation is a pleasant trip through many other soundscapes, too: Me and Julio deliver Latin jazz that will make you wiggle; Mango fan Django put a peppy edge on Gypsy jazz in "Jive Jive Jive"; Grass It Up adds a rootsy twist with "Eleanor's Song"; Black Pegasus (the Springs' top exporter of rap) lends a bouncy, slick tune that sounds suspiciously palatable to old white people; and George Whitesell closes the album with his jazzy blues on the love song "Mine All the Way."

The singer-songwriter vibe is reinforced not only by Morrison, but the thoughtful "It Just Takes a Minute," by folk trio Rissman-Uveges-Braithwaite; the slightly overwrought breakup song "There's a Boat," by Kelly Feeley; and the sexy "By the Fire," by Weidmann.

If Colorado Springs is a cultural backwater, it sure doesn't sound like it.

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CONTACT THE WRITER: 636-0226 or bill.reed@gazette.com