SAT, 8/20 Get a hip-hop education tonight at Blackberries Ice Cream & Coffee Lounge, 710 East 26th Avenue. Tupac’s acting debut, Juice, will screen as part of the of the Colorado Hip-Hop Coalition’s every-other-Saturday Hip-Hop Flix Film Series. The show goes on at 7:15 p.m., and admission is free, although…
“This isn’t a Michael Moore movie,” Gary Austin says of his new one-man stage show, Oil. “I’m entertaining an audience in the same way that any theatrical presentation is meant to. But I want to actually inform as well as entertain. That’s how I get my point across.” When it…
Bands are like bats. They make noise, let it bounce back at them, and then use these reverberations to form a picture of their environment and their own place in it. Take, for instance the Ebb and Flow — drummer Sara Cassetti, guitarist Sam Tsitrin and keyboardist Roshy Kheshti –…
Fate can be a sick fucker. As a founding member of Immortal Dominion, former bassist Stephen Sherwood helped forge some of the most brutal and unflinching metal Colorado has ever seen. On August 3, he shot his wife and then himself, killing them both, after returning from service in Iraq…
With MPs and blogs disseminating and then commenting on new music at a nearly instantaneous rate, young bands can find themselves thrust into the spotlight before the ink on their discs is even dry. The self-released debut by Brooklyn’s Clap Your Hands Say Yeah — with no label or publicist…
WED, 8/17 In 1947, the first Edinburgh International Festival — a post-war attempt to reunite Europe through art — was crashed by eight uninvited theater groups. They played ’round the fringes of the Scotland town, drawing crowds to their makeshift storefront and rooftop stages. Before long, their spontaneous act of…
SAT, 8/13 Attempting to promote diversity and raise funds for the non-profit educational art program Destination: Artistic Activism, local poet Day Acoli has launched the first-ever Aurora Black Arts Festival. This lively benefit, beginning today at 10 a.m. and running through 7 p.m. tomorrow at Fletcher Plaza, 9900 East Colfax…
Shoegazer? Not exactly. During Sybris’s first show in its native Chicago two years ago, lead singer and guitarist Angela Mullenhour got so excited that one of her shoes flew off into the crowd. Likewise, the young quartet’s eponymous debut — recently released on the Flameshovel imprint, home to fellow art-pop…
Sometimes you have to wonder if artists name their records with the intention of baiting critics. Yes, Resilience is the title of the eighth album in as many years by San Diego’s Miguel Depedro, otherwise known as Kid 606; instead of his typically abrasive mash-ups of pop-culture carrion and splattered…
“I try to get to this point on stage where I’m totally out of my head,” says Red Sparowes drummer and former Coloradan David Clifford. “Like I’m not even physically there. What we’re going for is the same as ritual, cathartic music. I hate to use the word ‘tribal.'” Even…
SUN, 8/7 To Fara Tolno, tradition is everything. Born in the former French colony of Guinea, he’s spent most of his life dedicated to preserving his homeland’s rich heritage, touring the world as both a teacher and a living embodiment of West African performance arts. Tonight at 8 p.m. at…
FRI, 8/5 Most people in this country don’t equate Canada with the word “exotic.” But risqué Canadian dance troupe Fluffgirl Burlesque hopes to turn up the heat on any chilly notions of our friends to the north. Fluffgirl founder and performer Cecilia Bravo started producing sold-out burlesque shows in her…
Logophobia — the fear of words — has taken on all kinds of meanings beyond those of mere pathology: Michel Foucault defined it as angst caused by the capricious nature of language, while Peter Farb considered it an aversion to abstraction itself. And although Denver’s Peña avoids lyrics like the…
When you’re just one dude with a mike and a laptop, it’s good to seek strength in numbers. Billy Pollard, the 23-year-old Canadian also known as Knifehandchop, has learned this lesson well. As part of the Paws Across America tour, he’s crisscrossing the country with his Tiberbeat6 labelmates Kid 606,…
It’s tragic that Zolof the Rock & Roll Destroyer gets stuck touring with lousy bands like My Chemical Romance and the Starting Line. While those acts bank on keeping up some sort of punk facade, Zolof pumps out pure, breathtaking pop — and makes no apologies for it. Fronted by…
“Trance blues” is Otis Taylor’s catchphrase for his sixth record, Below the Fold. And he ought to know: After an up-and-down career that’s spanned nearly four decades, he’s refined his droning, modal blues and hypnotizing groan to a science. But that’s not to imply that Below is short on soul…
Suites: those ornate, flowery compositions that bluebloods in powdered wigs used to listen to between bouts of beheading peasants. Sweets: the sucrose-saturated foodstuffs that make your tooth enamel turn to crud. The two homophones neatly bracket Spelled in Bones, the third full-length by Chicago’s Fruit Bats. Mainly the brainchild of…
FRI, 7/22 The ascendancy of hip-hop as a cultural phenomenon has brought a kindred form of expression to the masses: the spoken word. Landmark proto-rap records by the likes of the Last Poets and Melvin Van Peebles more than thirty years ago paved the way for artists such as Michael…
The Things They Carried, Tim O’Brien’s semi-fictional memoir of Vietnam, is considered one of the greatest war books of all time. Although Fort Collins’s The Things They Carry hasn’t quite reached that level of acclaim, its gritty, relentless post-punk is every bit as visceral. The troupe formed in 2002 from…
Ian Svenonius has been many things to many people. But mostly, the enigmatic frontman of Weird War has served as a source of emulation. While every outfit he’s been involved with over the past fifteen years, from Nation of Ulysses to Cupid Car Club to the Make-Up, has met with…
What do Willie Nelson and Wayne Coyne of the Flaming Lips have in common? Besides resin-caked brainstems, both legends have handpicked the same unknown singer-songwriter as an opening act: Travis Graves, otherwise known as Mt. Egypt. And while his upcoming sophomore disc, Perspectives, is already sparking up a buzz on…
When bands in the ’90s like Grade and Boy Sets Fire first employed a jarring mix of tuneful whining and cathartic screams, it felt like a smack in the face — the good kind. Since then, the recipe’s become as rote as reality TV, with the same sense of fabricated…
