During a break in between songs at the Ogden Theatre last night, Run the Jewels’ Killer Mike joked about someone who ran out of the building during the previous song, clearly out of her comfort zone. This is not music for the uninitiated: Two dudes screaming on stage over beats…
If you haven’t heard or seen NPR’s Tiny Desk Concert series, that’s a rabbit hole you should spend your day going down. Basically, bands huddle around a desk at the NPR offices and play stripped-down versions of their songs. Everyone from The National to T-Pain has stopped by, and now…
Winter on the Rocks, featuring Major Lazer and Damien Marley, is just one day away, and that means it’s time to pick out what to wear. Many Red Rocks shows involve a lot of bare stomachs, bright colors and flower crowns. But Winter on the Rocks is, obviously, in January…
“My doctor told me to drop everything I was doing and check myself into the ER immediately. They would be expecting me,” Jason Hornyak writes in his equally hilarious and sincere blog CancerTrolling. Hornyak went to the ER last week. He went from normal to making a new home in…
At some point last year a drummer with arm sleeve tattoos wandered into Coda Brewery in Aurora. He struck a conversation with the owner, Luke Smith, a pharmacologist turned brewer and lifelong musician, and the local band Dragondeer came up. Blank quickly went to the back of the brewery to…
Belly Up Aspen, an intimate venue hidden in the mountains, turns ten this week. The space has hosted some unforgettable shows in that time (including sets by the Jane’s Addiction, home state hero Pretty Lights, the Wu-Tang Clan, B.B. King and more), and the owners have plans to keep the…
The final word on 2014 music, the Village Voice’s annual Pazz + Jop poll, is out. As has been the case for the last forty-plus years, hundreds of critics across the country submitted their favorite albums and singles of the year, and the picks are compiled into the most comprehensive…
A lot has changed in the area surrounding 26th and Welton in the last twelve years. The neighborhood went from somewhere you didn’t want to venture into to somewhere you would happily go to for a drink or meal or to even find your next apartment. The name even changed…
Who’s Bad, the traveling tribute show to the King of Pop himself stopped by the Ogden Theatre Saturday night. Jackson himself will, for obvious reasons, never play the intimate Ogden, but fans got to glimpse what it might be like thanks to the tribute act. Our photographer was there, and…
Sometimes bad things happen to good people. That was very much the case Monday night when Leighton Peterson, half of Denver’s Safe Boating is No Accident was the victim of a house fire. He and his roommate lost pretty much everything. But both of them (and Peterson’s dog) are fine…
If you were at City Hall’s New Years Eve party, you may have noticed a disco ball that was less sphere-shaped and more shaped like a pair of female legs. Well, that wasn’t just the cocktails getting to you. It turns out those long legs were quite real and something…
OpenAir is getting a new home on the airwaves at the end of this month, in the FM neighborhood. The station, part of Colorado Public Radio, was founded three years ago and has made a home and an impact over at 1340 AM. As of January 27, the station will…
Backstage at the 2012 Westword Music Showcase, Alex Anderson was getting ready to play with his two bands, ManCub and Flashlights, and trying to suppress a rising panic attack. “I had never been that anxious,” remembers Anderson. He and Ethan Converse were about to do two sets, first as ManCub,…
Attending a five-year anniversary party, you naturally have some expectations. You expect, as you walk down the steps to the Soiled Dove Underground, to find an air of celebration. People doing shots at the bar. Friends hugging. A raucous, excited crowd chatting away as a enthusiastic performer plays on stage…
“It wasn’t anything necessarily about the Denver scene itself,” Heffron says about his idea to start Strings and Wood five years ago. “But working as a booking agent I’d reach out to places and they would laugh or pay artists pennies. I saw how poorly the best musicians were treated.”…
Bummeroo, Denver’s first online music festival, occurred on YouTube this weekend. You can read all about the idea here, but basically artists uploaded sets to a YouTube playlist and, as described on the Facebook page, “u can enjoy it from the comfort of yr bed as they are uploaded or…
“Denver is tight,” says P.O.S with a chuckle when asked about the music scene here. The rapper, producer, part-time punk-rocker and founding member of Doomtree will be heading here at the end of this week. He’ll be playing the Bluebird Thursday night, and Friday night he will be heading to…
Halfway through Shakey Graves’s final Denver show of the weekend, he decided to bring out “a local badass” by the name of Gregory Alan Isakov. Together, with local fiddler Jeb Bows, they performed a cover of Townes Van Zandt’s “Colorado Girl” that left few dry eyes in the sold-out Bluebird…
As if the packed schedules at all the local venues weren’t enough, Colorado had more festivals this year than we could keep track of. While not every one was worthy of a year-end mention, many were. From the small to the massive, from the noise to the punk, from the…
Giants & Pilgrims is one part music, one part artwork, one part online community. But the easiest way to understand the project is to think of it as the Coons family scrapbook. “There were times in my life where I felt giant, I felt mountainous, I felt big,” says Tim…
Beloved Denver band Flashbulb Fires is officially no more. “Today is the end of an era for us,” the band wrote on their Facebook page and web site early yesterday morning. See also: Quickly Rising Colorado Band You, Me & Apollo Is Breaking Up…
Spoon is a Texas band, meaning it carries with it a certain pride and ambition that never really allows it to settle down. Britt Daniel and his bandmates produce the kind of music in which every pop, squeak, cymbal hit and second of silence matters. Every noise and lack thereof…
