Concerts

This just in… 3OH!3 has officially reached ubiquity, as evidenced by its appearance in the October 3 edition of Entertainment Weekly (the one with Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert on the cover re-creating the controversial New Yorker illustration). As if there was any doubt, Boulder’s most unlikely superstars clearly continue…

Photo: Tom Murphy James Monday, September 29th, 2008 The Ogden, Denver Better Than: A lot of the atmospheric pop rock that has come since. Emerging from an impressive field of expressive guitar bands in Manchester, England, James made a name for itself with a larger body of work than many…

Photo: Allison Smith The New Year, Houses, Fell Monday, September 29, 2008 Larimer Lounge Better than: Most bands playing today. Playing together since before who knows when, the Brothers Kadane (Matt & Bubba) have made music that is both intelligent and intensely moving. Whether it was in mid-‘90s slow-core band…

Summit Jazz Weekend Friday, September 22 – Sunday, September. 24 Four Points Sheraton Hotel Better than: Crashing a smooth jazz party. Walking into the ballroom at the Four Points Sheraton on the first night of this year’s Summit Jazz Foundation festival, I felt a bit like an interloper at some…

Photo: Tom Murphy Final Frontier Smaug, the Final Formula, Devil Got Five and Black Maria Friday, September 26, 2008 PT’s Club Inferno, Denver Better Than: Being an indie rock snob. PT’s Club Inferno is not my first choice of venues to attend for a show because strip clubs give me…

Photo: Jon Solomon Nick Cave & The Bad Seeds Friday, September 26, 2008 Ogden Theatre Better than: Anything that has ever come out of Australia. Nick Cave handily disproved the notion that rock and roll is a young man’s game this past Friday night at the Ogden Theatre. Taking the…

Looks like big ups are due Breathe Carolina, whose debut disc, It’s Classy, Not Classic, released in mid-September on the Rise Records imprint, claimed the sixth spot on Billboard’s Heat Seeker chart and #186 on the magazine’s Top 200 chart. Not a bad first outing for a band that many…

LOCALS ONLY Scribble Jam is an annual hip-hop festival hosted in Cincinnati, Ohio. So why are so many Colorado hip-hop artists excited about it? Well, on October 1 at the Fox Theatre in Boulder, a Scribble Jam preliminary event is being held to determine the best rapper and best producer…

Photo: David Barber Update: Sharon Rawles has passed away. Click here for details of her memorial service or to share your thoughts on Sharon’s defacto memorial page, where we’ve centralized all the comments. ———-Original Post———- Man, this has been an absolutely brutal year for the local music community. Just received…

Brian Wilson, That Lucky Old Sun (EMI Records). Ever since Brian Wilson terminated his self-imposed hermitage and started performing again, the residual effects have shown. Here Wilson confronts his arrested development by creating an optimistic love letter to California filled with newfound confidence, beautiful harmonies and the same innocent, boyish…

If you hate trance, you can place a fair amount of the blame on BT (Brian Transeau to his parents, wife and friends). The superstar producer helped push the form to its lushest, most symphonic and bombastic heights, and his tracks are among the most recognizable and iconic in the…

Nick Cave may be one of the more disciplined songwriters in the business (he usually spends six days a week working in his office), but he’s been especially prolific over the past four years, finding time to pen the remarkable two-disc Abattoir Blues/Lyre of Orpheus set, score two films with…

Unleashed bassist/vocalist Johnny Hedlund is a cheerful, friendly guy who happens to play in one of the most ferocious and consistently powerful death-metal bands ever to emerge from Sweden. Since 1991, the act has released nine studio albums full of pummeling drums, grinding guitar riffs and lyrics that excoriate Christianity…

Ponytail didn’t come together like most bands. The original five members were randomly chosen by poet Jeremy Sigler to collaborate on music. Since that time, the act has become one of the stars of the burgeoning new American indie underground, spiritual kin to sublimely noisy, neo-tribal acts like High Places,…

Since the dawn of time — or at least the 1960s — a particular breed of music has been consistently popular in these parts: relaxed, groove-oriented, quasi-rock jams that cause true believers to twist like overcooked vermicelli. Hippie music, many call it, and Frogs Gone Fishin’ has the subgenre down…

Runway Estates refuses to wallow in any particular musical genre, which may throw some folks. As the group moves effortlessly from sun-dappled, impressionistic, hushed minimalist psych folk to deeply layered dream pop, it leaves behind a rich array of textures that shimmer and drift. On No Good Horse Thieves, singer-songwriter…

Brass Knuckles is Nelly’s Thriller. No kidding. It’s not perfect, but neither was MJ’s magnum opus; it jumped styles and was not particularly cohesive. Likewise, Knuckles skips haphazardly from Dirty South jams to G-funk throwbacks to would-be empowerment anthems. It’s more of a collection of singles than an actual album…

Although the Radio crew’s talent is well established, the band’s music has always raised user-friendliness questions: Sure, 2006’s Return to Cookie Mountain was excellent, but did anyone other than rock critics listen to it? Dear Science tackles this conundrum head on, upping the accessibility quotient without smacking of sell-out desperation…

Read anything about Darker My Love and the word “psychedelic” is likely to pop up by the second paragraph — much to the irritation of Rob Barbato, the band’s bassist and vocalist. “I can understand why people do that,” he concedes. “We’re from Los Angeles and San Francisco, and so…

Dave Bartz and I are best friends. We grew up in the same ‘hood, went to the same high school (Bartz a few years behind me), share the same values. In the mid-’90s, we even played together in a band. We spent six months in a drafty Eastlake garage —…

Santi White, who goes by Santogold, is red, white and blue through and through, having come of age in Philadelphia before relocating to Brooklyn — but much of her work bristles with foreign-sounding intrigue. “Shove It,” from her self-titled 2008 debut, is built upon reggae and dub influences, while “Creator”…