Music: Edward Almost coming up at Larimer Lounge

Local musician, Edward Almost, recently performed at Hi-Dive with Themes and the Build-Up. The experimental folk songster is also in the English department of graduate studies at the University of Denver so it's no surprise (or really, unexpectedly fitting) that much of his music has a strong (though innovative) narrative component. Elegies for bears, a sun that stumbles into the sky with a hangover, and that-favorite-trope-of-all-balladeers-that-is-the-heart (but viscerally and stunningly, of the "blackberry" variety) are all figures winding through his first two albums, "Blackberry Heart" and "Art Entartete." This combination of the larger-than-life-mythologic with the gritty and banal, gives Almost's work an incredible sincerity, as equally hilarious as it is tragic. Almost is heroic and boyish, a dreamer and a bit of a miscreant. His work is intellectual and anti-intellectual in the same stroke, influenced by pop-culture and underground-culture, Ginsberg and his girlfriend, post-modernism and his southern literature anthologies. His songs are melancholy and restless, absurd and simple. He's the kind of guy who invents his own art movement, spouts an oral manifesto complete with destructionist paradoxes, declares it all void then has a drink in the space of five minutes. He's the sort of quirky poet to take a walk in the woods and notice a gravestone marked, "Velox." His music is the kind that your ears can sip. And, because it's hard to resist, it's (almost) time for his next Denver-area show.

Edward Almost performs at Larimer Lounge, 2721 Larimer St, May 21st, 8pm. He's also available on iTunes.

To befriend him yourself: http://profile.myspace.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=user.viewprofile&friendI...