A lot of big concert news this week. Really big. Emphasis on big, both in stature and some literally in name: Leonard Cohen is coming back to Colorado this fall for a date at the 1STBANK Center. Before that, though, Big Gigantic is slated to make its Red Rocks debut…
So by now you’ve probably heard the news: The tenth annual US Air Guitar competition is about to get under way, and the national finals are slated to take place in Denver on Saturday, July 21, at the Bluebird Theater. The culmination of a dozen separate regional events, which kick…
“One of my favorite things to do is look at the line of the people going into the show. It’s totally diverse. And even back in the day, in the early days, I didn’t want to play just for punk rockers. I felt that we had something more to offer. Maybe we didn’t have quite the global message that the Clash had, but the Clash wanted to reach the world. And that’s what I wanted to do. I didn’t want to just play…that would be as narrow-minded as the people who said that punks suck.”
Flashbulb Fires (due this Saturday, May 12, at the hi-dive, with Princess Music and Shirley) has endured some changes and been rather active in the past year. Now a trio — the act parted ways with its bassist last summer and opted not to replace him — the act split…
BRIAN JONESTOWN MASSACRE @ BLUEBIRD THEATER | 05.08.12 If you decide to put all of your eggs in Anton Newcombe’s basket, they’re going to end up scrambled. The lead singer of early-’90s psychedelica group Brian Jonestown Massacre might be the group’s longest-running member, but he also seems to be the…
Since its earliest days as an appealing garage-surf two-piece, School Knights (due at the hi-dive on Friday, May 11) has doubled its membership. Founded by former Weed Diamond guitarist Michael Stein and drummer Zack Roif, the band added Ben Donehower on bass and Morris Kolontyrsky on guitar to help fill…
The ladies love Drake — and it’s not hard to see why. The Frank Sinatra of hip-hop, as he’s been called, Drake is classy, elegant and can rap his face off to almost any melody. The Toronto native took the hip-hop scene by storm with his catchy lyrics, emotive production…
Since 2005, Montreal’s Plants and Animals has been writing some of the most critically acclaimed music to have come out of that town in recent years. Its debut album, Parc Avenue, found the band exploring a vast array of sounds with a sense of playful abandon. It was a sprawling…
Time Capsule is ProJect Aspect’s 1320 Records debut. Showing notable maturity, the rising producer more than lives up to the outsized expectations that come with being on STS9’s label. If the opening track, “Tina Turnon,” doesn’t grab you instantly with its beat-matching bass line, then the slow roll into “White…
On Chicks Only, GirlGrabbers’ ode to the ladies, the crew has crafted a damn near perfect array of instrumentals, mating soul samples with vocal loops. Each track is named for a different “hot chick,” from Arcadia Lake to Paula Patton. The cuts are slinky, uber-sexy and incredibly well arranged. The…
“Cat Magick” starts this album off on a refreshing, nearly unclassifiable note: The vocals, raspy and difficult to decipher, are right out of crust and black metal, while the music has a kind of mathy but sinuous intensity, like something from At the Drive-In. Twisty guitar leads intertwine with urgent,…
The members of the Say So have a lot to say — mostly about their faults and their past relationships, of which they remain firmly critical. “It’s not me,” lead singer Sean Palmer bleats on their latest album. “It’s you.” On The Romantic, the emotional foursome blurs the lines between…
This past February, the Fray released Scars & Stories, the band’s third full-length release, produced by Brendan O’Brien. “I believe in this record,” Joe King told us. “I believe it’s our best work. I believe that we’re better now and we’ve written better songs than we ever have.” Scars marks…
Electronic music is like any other of genre of music in that the artists who stick around for decades tend to be the most innovative, the ones who constantly experiment and evolve as artists. Patrik Skoog is one such example; he’s created hard techno under his Headroom project, made a…
The American Idol model of pop-star selection is obnoxious for a variety of reasons — the regular televising of Steven Tyler’s grotesque mask/face, for example — but the biggest one is the artifice of it: the implied presumption that some contrived elimination contest can dictate what we like. Even as…
While we’ve been mourning the untimely passing of Adam Yauch (aka MCA) of the Beastie Boys last week and reminiscing about the act’s shows in Denver, we’ve learned that the musician/activist had pretty interesting ties to our city beyond playing here nearly a dozen times over the past two decades…
By all accounts, the Beastie Boys performed in the Denver metro area ten times over the course of two decades, beginning with the act’s first show at the Mammoth Events Center on Friday, February 13, 1987, and culminating with its Rock the Vote double bill at the Fillmore with Tenacious…
The Brian Jonestown Massacre (due tonight at the Bluebird Theater) has been through a lot of ups and downs since 1990. But singer and primary songwriter Anton Newcombe has steered the band through the release of more great albums per decade than most bands have across their entire career. For…
ROGER WATERS @ PEPSI CENTER | 5.7.12 See Also: (Review) Roger Waters at the Pepsi Center, 11/23/10 Roger Waters at the Pepsi Center slide show “Thirty years ago, when I first wrote this album, I was rather famously not very good at being in rooms with people liking me a…
Mos Def and Talib Kweli, two whirlwind rhyme-slingers in their own right, first came together as Black Star in 1998. Their first album, Mos Def & Talib Kweli Are Black Star, was propelled by Mos Def’s poetic lyrics and Kweli’s poignant delivery, and it instantly had heads clamoring for more…
JunoWhat performed on Friday at Cervantes’ Masterpiece Ballroom in Denver with Bernie Worrell (Parliament-Funkadelic, Talking Heads) on keys and Euforquestra, which opened the show. Photos by Nick Callaio for Westword…
Fresh off its appearance at this year’s SnowBall Music Festival and 2010 Westword Music Showcase alumni, BoomBox came back to the Centennial State on Saturday, May 5, 2012 for a show at the Ogden Theatre. Photos by Eric Gruneisen for Westword…
