Great Big Sea founder and lead vocalist Bob Hallett was still shaking off the airline rattles when we caught him earlier this week, back in the Maritimes after a victory-celebration gig in Vancouver, the Friday before the Olympics went off the air. Y’know, you can be one of the biggest bands in Canada and get invited to do a show in front of a zillion-strong TV audience at the Olympics, but slim chance getting a ticket for the hockey finals.

To hear Vince Herman tell it, Great American Taxi’s second CD, that ever-dreaded sophomore effort thing, found itself looped out in the exhausted vagaries of a dysfunctional post-millennial record business. Just when people are getting back into actually making records, no one can figure out to sell them.

There’s an almost sinister grace that pervades Octopus Nebula and their limber, unforced sleepwalk through deep groove electronica. OK, it’s not rocket science; a quartet of live players, all more or less graduates from groove scenes of varying success and commitment quotients, more or less plugged into samples/efx/laptops/loops, what have you, coaxing that uncertain consummation between the wire and the neuron. They’re not the first.

Maybe it’s an occupational hazard, but it can be a little unsettling listening to Damon Guerrasio talk about the real Pink Floyd, the subject of his Denver-based band’s letter-perfect tribute project Wish We Were Floyd. He keeps referring to them in the present tense. (“ ... they have three women up there handling backup vocals”, “ ... they do all this layering with their keyboards ... ”, etc.)

Finding the way is a daily struggle for most of us. But it may be easy to conclude that for Erik Deutsch, former Boulderite and founding member of the mid-’90s fusion/jam militia Fat Mama, as well as the transcendent folk-jazz experiment County Road X, the way might just be finding him.

Long since graduated from the anti-heroism of mid-90s, grunge-skeptical, alt-folkie status, Todd Snider has quietly grown into a songwriter of unique vintage, capable of uncorking rickety masterpieces of unsung contenders, sardonic social commentary and offbeat counter-narcissism. He can describe a working man’s dive like Tom Waits, the calluses wrapped around a bar glass like John Prine, the exhausted glory of surviving the chase like Willie Nelson, and still make it sound like something he wrote while waiting for a bus downtown.

There was probably mud on their boots when they were marched out to the Katyn Forest that day in 1940. Cool and thick, the kind of mud that wraps a fretful land tight in its comforting and abundant embrace, and the kind that soldiers of many different uniforms learn to curse in their native language on their way to glory.

There was a time not long ago when Trace Bundy, former CU engineering professor turned full-time acoustic guitar instrumentalist, was affectionately known around here as the “acoustic ninja,” a moniker applied informally by an early and enthusiastic fan. And not altogether inappropriately, as Bundy’s playing technique, replete with slapping percussives, flying capos, shimmering harmonics and dazzling, multi-voiced picking, could pass for a sort of dreadnaught martial art form. His sound is part cerebral discipline, part crazed instrumental assault, unleashed feral instinct joined to restless harmonic exploration.

Nothin’ honors those ever-soworthy kith and kin on your shopping list each holiday season like gadgets — handheld, hi-def, mobile-on-the-go, ergonomic, rechargeable, solarpowered, or just plain noisy and cool. Green shoots are for suckers — the economy is still in the tank, and there’s no better way to keep us all distracted from that unfortunate reality than plug ’n’ play gizmo swag.

Seven years seems like the mere blink of an eye or a small eternity. Founding member of Leftover Salmon and banjoist for the ages, Mark Vann, passed into history in March 2002 at age 39, after a couple of decades of practically redefining the banjo along with a half-year counterpunching the indifferent cruelties of melanoma.