FURTHUR @ RED ROCKS AMPHITHEATRE | 9/22/12 All signs pointed to go before the doors to the venue even opened. It was the first day of fall, a beautiful day, and all four of Red Rocks’ main parking lots were filled up by 5:30 p.m. Deadheads were parked out on…
GZA @ SUMMIT MUSIC HALL | 9/22/12 “I don’t have a hypeman, so you’re my hype man,” Killer Mike tells the crowd two songs into his set. “So get hype, motherfuckers.” The crowd is more than happy to comply. Opening with the first three songs from his new album, the…
AMANDA PALMER @ GOTHIC THEATRE | 2/4/12 Amanda Palmer wants to ask the audience a personal question. It’s halfway through her set, and the crowd is understandably sweaty, aroused, and willing to answer anything she asks. “How many of you, in high school, were described as ‘goth’?” To which the…
DRAGONETTE @ LARIMER LOUNGE | 9/21/12 The Larimer Lounge wore three sizes too small on Dragonette last night. The Canadian band, which stopped at the Larimer Lounge for their first Denver show three years ago, put on a show that rock n’ rolled too hard for the constraints of the…
ATMOSPHERE @ OGDEN THEATRE | 9/21/12 If a journey through the archives of Atmosphere’s extensive music history wasn’t enough to blow the pants off a sold-out Ogden, then a freestyle session to close the night certainly was. What started as a subtle track laid down by the beat-boxing loop master…
Hola, amigo! Welcome to the weekend! A massive amount of musical goodness awaits you this weekend, the first of this fall season. Whatever you feel like getting into, there are a ton of shows to choose from, whether you’re looking for metal, rock, hip-hop or just want to party down…
DEVOTCHKA @ RED ROCKS AMPHITHEATRE | 9/20/12 DeVotchKa played their first show with the Colorado Symphony in February at Boettcher Concert Hall, moving longtime fans and enthusiasts to a state of tearful and awe-inspiring bliss. Last night, the rare and remarkable collaboration played for a larger audience at Red Rocks…
By Leya Lynnette Goldrush Music Festival is the brainchild of Jake Martin, occasional Backbeat contributor Crawford Philleo and Ryan Pjesky. The three friends all knew each other from going to local shows and writing about experimental music on the internet. At some point, they began exchanging e-mails and hashing out…
Dragonette has been hot on the underground pop music scene for years, but only last year did they come charging out of the gate onto mainstream radio with “Hello,” a global party-starter that saw Dragonette collaborate with French DJ-producer Martin Solveig. Almost overnight, Dragonette went from pop’s consistently great, best-kept…
Greetings, weekend warriors! Ready to get your groove on? Good. The Dance Card is stacked again this weekend with Skylab 2012: Mission Blackout at the Denver Coliseum with Gareth Emery, Porter Robinson and more, the Crystal Method hits Beta, Sammy Bananas drops by TheHundred party at Beauty Bar, the mysterious…
Update 9/20/12: Local string quartet Per Vita is slated to back Amanda Palmer this Friday at the Gothic Theater. The group reached out to Palmer immediately when she put out the initial call, knowing full well that it was volunteer only. “We didn’t care at all,” says Laena McDonald. “We…
We all have it — that one song that stopped us in our tracks the first time we ever heard it, that continues to give us pause each and every time it’s played. In our periodic feature, Deep Cuts, we share the personal stories behind our all-time favorite songs and…
Quote/Unquote is our periodic feature in which we hunt down noteworthy lyrics, examine the best lines and then get the story behind the song. This week, we got some insight from Logistixx of the rap-fusion group Drop Switch to find out what he had in mind while he was crafting…
MY LIFE WITH THE THRILL KILL KULT @ BLUEBIRD THEATER | 9/19/12 It comes as a bit of a shock when people slam into you for the first time after a dozen songs. That’s exactly what happened last night when My Life with the Thrill Kill Kult dialed up “After…
TRAIN @ RED ROCKS AMPHITHEATRE| 9/19/12 Train, the San Francisco band that has been the darlings of radio rock for over a decade, played to a capacity crowd at Red Rocks last night, and if the multigenerational audience’s hoots and screams were any indication, the guys will be welcome back…
Update: Congratulations, James Kruger! You are our winner. Thanks for reading Backbeat! Rise Against is returning to Colorado — its veritable home away from home — next week with Gaslight Anthem and Hot Water Music for a two-night stand at the Fillmore Auditorium on Monday, September 24 and Tuesday, September…
Cavem Moetavation knows what it’s like to be hungry. Back when he was a boy still known as Michael Walker III, he endured tough times — and he remembers his dad trying to ease the strain of the situation by making him laugh. “I pull this one on my kids…
StaG (due on Friday, September 21, at Deer Pile) formed when its core members were students in Boulder. Somewhat creatively isolated from other musicians in that town, they became friends with the like-minded Fellow Citizens. During that time, StaG’s sound evolved into spare, catchy melodies that seemed to incandesce to…
Amanda Palmer came to prominence in the early 2000s as one half of the Dresden Dolls. While that band was embraced by goths, its aesthetic was, as Palmer has hinted, more in line with the conceptual musical theater embodied by the work of Bertolt Brecht and Kurt Weill. In May…
First known to hip-hop audiences outside of Georgia thanks to attention-grabbing cameos on OutKast records, Killer Mike has been a steady presence for a decade, mixing Southern street anthems and political consciousness on a handful of records and a laundry list of features. His collaboration with producer El-P, the 2012…
“SWANS ARE NOT DEAD.” That was the post on Michael Gira’s MySpace page in 2010, stating plainly the guitarist/singer/songwriter’s intent to resurrect his old group, which emerged in the early 1980s from the same New York no-wave scene that spawned kindred noise-rock spirits Sonic Youth before disbanding in 1997. Since…
Disgusted with the re-election of George W. Bush, in 2005 Firewater ringleader Tod A left New York — where he’d lived for the previous two decades and where he’d fronted Cop Shoot Cop — and headed out of the country on a three-year journey that took him to the Middle…
