Yeasayer (due tonight with Hush, Hush and Smith Westerns at the Ogden Theatre) was started by three guys from Baltimore, who each moved to New York separately before starting the band. During its four-year existence, the trio has developed an experimental pop sound that is more akin to quirky synth-pop…
This week in rap, the beat makers are holding it down. We’ve got Nofrendo, with his KMD drum-and-bass remixed track featuring a Gil Scott Heron sample that’s most appropriate with the poet laureate’s passing. Mass Prod from Food Chain shows a bit of his Donald Byrd/Roy Ayers influence with his…
Joe Triscari’s Moon Light Speed Press screen printing is quickly becoming one of our favorite concert flier makers in town, and Triscari and Josh Everingham’s Il Cattivo CD release flier proves once again they’ve got the screening skills to keep up with the already lovely artwork…
Surely you’ve heard the expression: “That’s a heart attack waiting to happen”? While we’re not inquiring enough to Google its origin, from the sounds of it, that phrase could very well have been coined to describe the Fool’s Gold Loaf from the Colorado Mine Company that Elvis once flew to…
Celldweller (performing tonight at the Marquis Theater with Die Brucke and Kevin Callison) is the moniker of Klayton, a singer, multi-instrumentalist, music programmer and producer based out of Detroit. Bringing his own unique form of industrial music to the masses via movie, video game and television soundtracks, including collaborations with…
Last Monday, Amazon decided to give away Lady Gaga’s new album, Born This Way for just 99 cents. The sale was so popular it brought the site down, and so the site repeated the same promotion on Thursday. That’s all well and good for cheapskate Gaga fans, but it reportedly…
HOOLIGANS IN WONDALAND at 1STBANK | 5/31/11″It would have been easy to snark all over this show, but the babies were dancing to Mayer Hawthorne, and you can’t hate on the babies. Babies are adorable.”…
When starting any new relationship, you generally look for positive traits in a person as a way of gauging compatibility. For the members of Il Cattivo — whose name roughly translates from Italian to “the horrid” — it was the negative qualities they all possessed that brought them together. “I…
In The Horse’s Mouth, Alec Guinness plays an expressionist painter on a quest to find the perfect wall to paint on. Painter Don Callarman refers to that 1958 movie when he says he might have found the perfect canvas: the blank back wall of Quixote’s True Blue (2151 Lawrence Street)…
Ed Marshall has had his hand in music in Denver for the past several years, both as a keen observer of the ebb and flow of music out of this town and as a musician with a penchant for the psychedelic with bands like Stargazer, Into the Ether, Overcasters and…
Two years ago, the Dodos were in the process of smoothing out the more abrasive elements of their sound, cutting back on the clattering drums and frantic strumming in order to better highlight their gift for writing sticky, bittersweet pop songs. But with the recent release of fourth album No…
May the faint of heart stay at home when the Academy-Award-winning, multi-platinum legends in Three 6 Mafia take over Casselman’s this Friday. The crew — now consisting of original members Juicy J and DJ Paul — is known for crass Dirty South bounce rap and inflammatory lyrics. Originally hailing from…
From 2002 to 2006, Evan Patterson and Nick Thieneman were in the renowned post-hardcore band Breather Resist, from Louisville, Kentucky. After a lineup change and a decided move toward evolving its sound, that band morphed into Young Widows. Unlike Breather Resist’s penchant for distilling raw emotion into vectored blasts of…
If you were to make a short list of the greatest bass players of all time, Bootsy Collins would surely be included. After firing his backing band in the late ’60s, James Brown hired Collins and his brother Catfish’s band, the Pacemakers, to back him up. Collins later became a…
When I was a kid, I had a friend whose mom’s name was Hermine — which, admittedly, is an atrocious name. But a weird name can also be kind of endearing, and despite the fact that she was a cold shrew who clearly hated her life, I grew to like…
The first half of the A-side of this cassette conjures a mood of being on an intercontinental flight, a peaceful sense of being out of time and floating on a journey whose destination is half a day ahead. That evolves into the sound of early analog video-game malfunctioning — like…
R&Beast, the latest mixtape release from Wil Guice, finds the R&B crooner essentially taking rap songs and touching them up with his rhythm-and-blues charm. He takes on “H.A.M.,” Kanye West and Jay-Z’s monstrous joint, and, over a stock beat, sings it like nobody’s business with close to perfect pitch, which…
There are quite a few moments on the Owen Kortz Trio’s self-titled five-song EP in which Kortz — who teaches music at the University of Colorado Denver — sounds remarkably similar to James Taylor, both in tone and phrasing. Kortz’s voice blends well with those of singer Rich Sletvold and…
Molly Cottrell’s self-titled EP starts with her singing “Run Me Down” with just a piano — which, as it turns out, is an ideal way to open a tune, since you’re automatically drawn in by her marvelous vocals before the band gradually comes in. A few minutes later, Cottrell tosses…
Besides blessing us with one of the most gorgeous listening experiences of the past year with Queen of Denmark, former Czars frontman and Denverite John Grant subjected us to some of the most unflinchingly honest and poignant lyrics in recent memory on songs like “Jesus Hates Faggots,” whose scathing title…
It probably seems strange to old-school ravers that when Paul Oakenfold last played Denver (in November of last year), he spun his set at the Ogden. A decade ago, Oakenfold might have been playing to a sold-out Fillmore crowd — or at a massive with tens of thousands of party-goers…
DISCO BISCUITS at RED ROCKS, 5/28/11″Comparing Red Rocks to the Ogden shows is like comparing a Mack Truck to a Tonka. Either the Biscuits were holding out, teasing everyone for the first two nights, or they were just spot on last night.”…
