Death Cab for Cutie, playing its first tour without founding guitarist Chris Walla, stopped at Red Rocks earlier this week. After an opening set by tUnE-yArDs, the legendary band proved it still had plenty of power. Photographer Miles Chrisinger was there to capture the scene — check out a few of…
After graduating from the Berklee College of Music in the late ‘90s, Pat Bianchi moved to Denver and started a decade-long run playing organ and piano at local clubs like El Chapultepec and Herb’s. But in 2008, Bianchi, a Rochester native, moved back east to New York City. Instead of…
The inaugural Bluebird District Music Festival hit East Colfax last weekend, and if you weren’t there, you missed three days of insane local talent. We were there, wandering the wickedest street and taking in all the music. Here’s what we thought of BDMF, volume one: 1. Lost Lake is the…
The Colorado installment of Riot Fest is a month and a half away. We told you about this year’s lineup earlier — it includes Ice Cube (and special guests), Iggy Pop, Modest Mouse and more. Yesterday, Riot Fest announced its single-day lineups, tickets for which go on sale Thursday at…
Mark Sundermeier was driving home late one night in September 2011 from the Toad Tavern, where he was serving as talent buyer, when a semi ran his car off the highway. He can’t remember the accident at all — nor can he remember the two days before it. He slipped…
The Smashing Pumpkins and Marilyn Manson co-headlined a show last night at Red Rocks as part of the End Times Tour. One of those bands drew a ton of fans. We’ll give you a hint: It’s the one who played at the enormous Fillmore Auditorium in February. The other one…
Jim White is a music legend — if you don’t know him, you probably still know his work. As the drummer in Dirty Three, White came to prominence in the ’90s alternative rock world. He became known as a gifted and intuitive percussionist and regularly worked with the likes of…
The drive to Conifer for the Living Spaces showcase offered a preview of the spirit and quality of the event. To get there, you took I-70 to highway 285, into a neighborhood without pavement called Aspen Park, a small town next to Conifer. While they weren’t quite log cabins, the…
The death of Amy Winehouse, in July 2011, at age 27, was the first great tragedy of 21st-century pop music, an event — like the deaths of Tupac Shakur and Kurt Cobain in the last decade of the 20th — that emphasized the jarring contrast between the fragility of human…
Festival Season is in full swing, and with the summer of 2015 comes a new, scrappy, homegrown festival called the Bluebird District Music Festival. If you bought a 3-day wristband, (which you can do here) you’ll be spending this hopefully rain-free weekend traversing the five venues and half mile of…
Boulder’s iconic Trident Cafe, which opened in 1980, is a good place to go if you want to feel bad about your fashion sense. Tom Abraham, one of the cafe’s numerous baristas, can generally be found behind the counter in the daytime sporting his trademark fuzzy black hair and glasses,…
A fan of both Riot Fest and Denver punk band SPELLS created a petition this week to get his favorite local band to play his favorite punk-themed music festival. Bradley Ambrose, an apprentice at Boulder design studio AngryBovine, made it his personal project of the year to get SPELLS to…
“Before this, we were renting a glorified storage unit in Globeville with no heat, no bathroom and no running water,” says artist and musician Zach Reini. “After a winter there, we were done.” As he lounges on a couch in the sun-drenched front room of his multi-use venue Leisure, Reini…
The last time Steely Dan played in Colorado, in 2013, a flash flood struck parts of the Denver metropolitan area and it rained like mad on and off. Much of the crowd bailed on the show and the relatively small group remaining moved forward as it could to, as someone…
Steely Dan and Elvis Costello & the Imposters will perform together tonight at Red Rocks. Perhaps today, the pair share a status as FM radio rock legends from another era, making them reasonable playlist companions. But they still seem to occupy very different musical worlds. Steely Dan has come to…
Rubedo means the fourth and final stage of alchemy. It signals alchemical success, creation of the philosopher’s stone or gold or both, even. As a band name, it’s a pretty bold one. And while Denver group Rubedo did not create literal gold with notes and melodies on stage at the…
In Bill Pohlad’s new film, Love & Mercy, the director explores two different eras of Brian Wilson. One is the mid-’60s Wilson (portrayed by Paul Dano), who had stopped touring with the Beach Boys to work on songs that would eventually end up on Pet Sounds. The other is the…
Winning a Best New Artist Grammy is often the kiss of death for a group that aspires toward commercial success. But that was not the fate of the Zac Brown Band, which won the prestigious award in 2010. The group has only continued to raise its profile since then, not…
The Babysitters are playing their final show this Friday, July 3, at the Walnut Room, with …and the Black Feathers and Super Phoenixes. The latter is Babysitters’ singer and primary songwriter Greg Hill’s new band. Hill has a real gift for a good bad joke and deadpan-humor observations — all of…
DC and Hooks (Dylan Mamid and Zach Rapp-Rovan), the duo known as Zed’s Dead, first became friends because DC needed someone to paint a wall in his garage. “He had a garage that people would hang out in and listen to music, and he wanted his wall painted,” says Rapp-Rovan…
Instant Empire (scheduled to release a new album with a show this Thursday at the Marquis) played one of the first slots at the Westword Music Showcase last weekend. Most rock bands play at night, and most people experience music that they actively seek out after the sun has already…
