Concerts

Of Mice & Men (playing this evening at the Marquis Theater with I Set My Friends on Fire, Sleeping With Sirens and Woe Is Me) has had a tumultuous three-year run as a band. The group’s backstory reads like a daytime drama. Vocalist and founder Austin Carlile was kicked out…

COLD CAVE With Force Publique 04.11.11 | Larimer Lounge My companion’s flowery dress was almost comically out of place amid all the black at the Larimer last night, as local and national representatives of the darkwave revival took the stage for some synth-heavy brooding. It’d be hard to think of…

Kate Lesta and Matthew Krall are crazy-busy trying to juggle their day jobs while ensuring that their labor of love, the Communikey Festival of Electronic Arts, goes off without a hitch. “It’s a challenge to continue doing something you love so much on a volunteer level,” says Krall, the festival’s…

Traveling from bar to bar on a fifteen-seat, pedal-powered vehicle with a sober driver steering sounds like a concept that could go far in Denver, a city where both the beer and bicycling scenes are in high gear. That’s what Nick Vannucci will be counting on when his Denver Pedal…

If you grew up in the Midwest during the ’80s and ’90s and you were a little different, chances are you had a brush with all that groundbreaking electronic and experimental music that came out on Wax Trax Records. Mingo — due at Art Network (878 Santa Fe Drive) on…

At first listen, Cave Singers doesn’t sound like a band that came out of the ashes of Pretty Girls Make Graves, Hint Hint or Cobra High. But considering that it features Derek Fudesco, who made a name for himself in the whiskey-swigging garage-rock band Murder City Devils before doing time…

Chamber pop is one of those rare musical forms that doesn’t seem like it should work in the indie scene. After all, it takes a small army just to get the sound right, but Dark Dark Dark is up to the challenge. The Minneapolis sextet hasn’t been shy about putting…

The main man behind the highly influential German techno act Monolake, Robert Henke is one of electronic music’s greatest innovators. Emerging from the Basic Channel/Chain Reaction label group in the mid-1990s, Monolake’s minimal, dub-inspired techno helped provide the blueprint for the Berlin sound that remains dominant today. Henke co-founded the…

From bedroom recordings to Target commercials, Portlandian quartet Starfucker has had an interesting trip up the pop-culture ladder. In a perfect world, the group’s catchy hook-producing capabilities would make it a Top 40 shoo-in. But perhaps there’s something too deliberate in the act’s chosen moniker. A handful of earlier name…

Even for Bob Dylan’s taste, America has always put a little too much faith in Bob Dylan. A generational spokesman? A civil-rights leader? A prophet? Those are some high expectations of fucking Mahatma Gandhi, let alone an old folksinger. So it’s no surprise that people have been freaking out about…

Headed up by singer Heather Larrabee and Flobots producer Kyle Jones, the Love Royale whips up some of the finest electro-soul in these parts. On Love Letters, the first of three long-form EPs, the group lays down a number of tracks that provide an ideal soundtrack for getting to, er,…

Contrary to popular belief, marijuana was not discovered in the 1960s by hippies. Back in the ’20s and ’30s, vipers were getting mellow by smoking jive — and if none of that terminology sounds familiar, you clearly missed BurlyCute’s Reefer Mania show last year. But never fear: Burlesque emcee/madam Cora…

This record hurts. It hurts because just when it seems like the Microdots realize the power in their dub-like rhythmic variations, Orkid turns on itself. Going from the attractive and dirty basement shakiness of “Crazy Maraca” to a tawdry slow drip like “Tangerine” seems unfair — safe, even. The quartet…

It should come as no surprise that this band did a cover of Uriah Heep’s classic “Easy Livin'” from, appropriately enough, 1972’s Demons and Wizards. What is surprising is that Space in Time’s version is superior to W.A.S.P.’s 1986 take on the same song. Sure, this collection of tunes might…

Styles Davis (aka Noah Parman) has been an integral part of the musical and cultural landscapes of this city for several years, so it’s no wonder that his DJ sets get so many asses shaking on the dance floor. Davis began his career behind the decks in the late ’90s,…

Not since the emergence of the Game on the national hip-hop scene has Los Angeles had such a promising new rapper as Nipsey Hussle. The onetime member of the notorious Rolling Sixty Crips from the Crenshaw and Slauson neighborhood of L.A. has steadily gained attention over the past couple of…

Sonic Bloom has had several homes since its inception in 2006. Now, just in time for its sixth-year anniversary, the Cervantes’-sponsored electronic music festival has found a dream location in Georgetown, at a place called Shadows Ranch. We talked with festival organizers Jami Janover and Scott Morrill to get the…

Just one of the many acts birthed in the last half-decade thanks to YouTube, thirteen-year-old Greyson Chance — due at the Gothic Theatre tonight with Cody Simpson and Camryn — could still be considered a bit of an anomaly in his own right. Unlike his pop contemporaries, the ‘tween’s adoration…

MY CHEMICAL ROMANCE The Architects • Neon Trees 04.09.11 | Fillmore Auditorium Walking into the Fillmore, I was greeted by a writhing sea of wildly dressed teenagers and hundreds of their parents awkwardly trying to fit in while performing chaperone duty. Seeing scads of girls holding up homemade ‘Happy Birthday”…

METHOD MAN & REDMAN With Dj Cavem and MTHDS City Hall | 4/9/11 City Hall’s amphitheater stood under a cloud of smoke last night for the finale of a three-night stay in Colorado for Method Man and Redman. Openers Dj Cavem and the MTHDS were given the opportunity to prime…