Looks like props are due Rachel James & the Kings (due at this weekend’s Westword Music Showcase), who have been named as the winner of Ford’s second annual Gimme the Gig competition. The outfit, which recently added Tickle Me Pink vets Joey Barba and Stefan Runstrom to the fold, and…
Ceremony (due tonight at the Marquis Theater) started out in Rohnert Park, California, as a straight-ahead hardcore outfit. The band’s fast, hard-hitting songs put it in good company with like-minded bands influenced by that era of punk where a song could be less than a minute long, so long as…
Carly Rae Jepsen’s “Call Me Maybe” remains number one for another week on the Billboard Hot 100. However, on the Billboard 200 albums chart, somewhat unexpectedly, Usher overtakes Adele for the number-one album in the country with Looking 4 Myself — even without a strong lead single to drive sales…
Update, June 20: Congrats to Antonia Rivas, winner of the final round of this year’s VIP upgrade contest. We’ll see you at Westword Music Showcase this Saturday — if you haven’t bought your ticket, yet can you do so here: Buy Westword Music Showcase tickets. Welcome to the ninth and…
In honor of our annual Westword Music Showcase this weekend, we tapped Backbeat’s resident genius, cartoonist Noah Van Sciver, to consult the vast empirical recesses of his memory banks to assemble this helpful taxonomy. Prepare to be enlightened, astounded and perhaps, if you’re a little sensitive, even a little miffed…
“It started as a total joke,” says Sarah Anderson of Harpoontang (due tomorrow night at the Larimer Lounge), the outfit which also includes the trio of Paper Bird vocalists, Laura Goldhamer and M & the Gems singer Maria Kohler (also known as Kitty Crimes). “But every time we practiced, something…
This Saturday, some of the hottest local talent will be getting busy on fifteen stages throughout the Golden Triangle for the annual Westword Music Showcase. After the Showcase wraps, Q-Tip, hip-hop’s premier rapping, producing and trendsetting superstar will rock a rare DJ set at City Hall Amphitheatre for the official…
Each and every Thursday, DJ Tower (aka Tim Alexander) and his friends turn The Church into a haven for electro and retro music for Electrobot Thursdays. DJ Tower has been cultivating the night for quite some time and has been working with other like-minded electronic minds like boyhollow (aka Michael…
Røsenkøpf (due tonight at Rhinoceropolis) is a trio whose membership came out of punk but didn’t bother with trying to shed the ideas or trappings of punk. Even sonically, there is a bit of punk’s edge to the band’s darker moods and atmosphere. But the dark to be found here…
Katy Perry’s teenage dream is finally over. “Wide Awake,” the eighth and final single off Teenage Dream sees Perry sing about completion, realization and “falling from Cloud 9” — and takes a few jabs at her failed marriage to Russell Brand, too. The music video, which was just released, however,…
The Swayback has been together for a decade, but you’d hardly know it from speaking with the guys. The way they talk and the way they interact with one another, they genuinely sound like members of a freshly minted high-school band getting ready to play their first gig. “I have…
Game time! Are you ready for the hottest party of the summer? We are! Of course, we’ve been planning, laboring and looking forward to the 2012 Westword Music Showcase since the final strains of Chromeo’s set faded last year. Maybe you have, too. If so, well, let’s just say your…
Welcome to the eighteenth annual Westword Music Showcase! Our baby is finally old enough to vote and buy cigarettes and porn — though who really buys that anymore? How things have changed since the Showcase was born way back in 1995. Bill Clinton was in his first term as president,…
This past Friday night at Red Rocks Amphitheatre, West Metro Fire Rescue was called to the venue’s upper north parking lot during a show featuring Ghostland Observatory to aid a woman who reportedly fell from the rocks. The woman, 27-year-old Alicia Brauer, later died from the injuries she sustained from…
Girl Talk (due this Saturday, June 23, on the Westword Music Showcase main stage) started when Gregg Gillis was earning his degree in biomedical engineering. Eventually, Girl Talk took up enough of Gillis’s time to become a full-time endeavor. Although influenced in part by early mash-ups, Gillis was more inspired…
Denver’s summer concert season is proving to be every bit as hot as anticipated, and the fall is shaping up to be just as heated with new dates from Ice Cube, Snoop Dogg and E-40, who are due back in town at the end of August, followed by Rascal Flatts…
Japandroids (due tonight at Larimer Lounge) started out with their own reinterpretation of angular, splintery punk and post-punk. But instead of sounding like another band that just discovered the Stooges or Joy Division, Japandroids plays their songs with a certain conviction you normally hear in blue-collar rock with a hint…
BREATHE CAROLINA @ SPORTS AUTHORITY AT MILE HIGH | 6/17/12 It was fun to watch the crowd go nuts for Breathe Carolina on the Kia stage just after 4 p.m. As soon as the first few notes of “Hello Fascination” hit, everyone was in synch and knew all the words…
The Vans Warped Tour made its stop in Denver on Sunday, June 17, 2012 at Sports Authority Field at Mile High. Aaron Thackeray brings back these photos for Westword. See also: – People of Warped Tour 2012 – People of Warped Tour 2011 – Day in the Life: Andrew W.K.’s…
Over the course of the next few weeks, Backbeat will be counting down the twenty most fabled moments in Denver music history. Today, a look back at when Nirvana came back to town for a show at the Gothic Theatre with Dinosaur Jr., fresh off of recording Nevermind. When the…
Some of the stereotypes are true: Pretty much everyone is in all black, many are wearing dark and heavy eye make-up and every now and then, the DJ stops a tune with a vertebrae-shattering guitar riff for chants of, “Kill! Kill! Kill!” But it’s not some cartoon-like parody like you…
Karl Denson (due on the main stage at this weekend’s Westword Music Showcase) is hard to pin down. The saxophonist and bandleader may have strong roots in the traditional jazz of giants like John Coltrane and Wayne Shorter, but that hasn’t stopped him from exploring funk, R&B, hip-hop and myriad…
