The Tarmints help break in a new performance space with a triple-bill show that includes the Cool-Rays and the Fifth Utility. On Saturday, December 29, the three bands will share the stage of the newly restored Oriental Theatre on 44th Avenue and Tennyson, a space now used by the Artists’…
In two shows, Slim Cessna’s Auto Club, Sunday, December 30, and Monday, December 31, at the Bluebird Theater, will say farewell to the year 2001 as well as the state of Colorado and three members of the band: Pedal-steel guitarist John Rumley, bassist “Danny Pants” Grandbois and drummer Ordy Garrison…
The year 2001 produced its share of catastrophes: major terrorist campaigns in D.C. and New York, a widespread anthrax scare — and J. Lo’s solo debut. Fortunately, there’s plenty worth remembering about the first official year of the new millennium, as artists of every genre proved that music still matters,…
Though they’re unabashedly spunky and devoid of pretense, the Dinnermints’ brand of bubble-punk still has its artistic leanings: The band sprang from the obtuse, intentionally difficult ambient project called the Twins, which enlisted ‘Mints singer/guitarist Sarah Mesmer and drummer Peter Carnovale. No surprise, then, that the guitar- and hook-heavy trio…
Gigi, at the Palace Event Center on Saturday, December 22, has helped to modernize and popularize a style of pop music that thrived in Addis Ababa, the capitol of her native Ethiopia, in the late ’60s and early ’70s. Produced by Bill Laswell, Gigi’s recently released debut album abounds in…
On Monday night, the Denver City and County Building reeked of teen spirit. During a meeting at which they were finally to vote on a much-belabored bill allowing for a new class of cabaret license — one that would allow patrons over sixteen years of age to mix with grownups…
Brenda Harp helps ring in the season, community style, as one of the musical guests at the Colorado Music Association Holiday Celebration at the Soiled Dove on Sunday, December 16. The Denver-based Harp seems a fitting choice for such an event: As a guitarist and vocalist, she brings a probing,…
The kids, it appears, will be all right after all. On Monday, December 17, Denver City Council is expected to approve a new type of cabaret license that allows patrons under 21 — under 18, for that matter — to regularly attend concerts and shows in most clubs and venues…
When Ursula Schletz was preparing to move to the United States from Berlin in 1984, she reached out and wrote someone. “I had lots of pen pals. That was the way I learned what Americans were like,” she says. “I found that conversing, even through letters, made me feel more…
It is difficult to mistake the humble snow globe for an objet d’art. While today’s variety of the cultural relic — generally, a plastic orb filled with water and sealed with a rubber stopper — has a certain amount of low-rent charm, the funny world-within-a-world bubbles are often derided as…
Shoegazers sometimes get a bad name. There’s something to be said for bands that investigate the more restrained spaces of ethereal, dreamy pop — rather than attempting to shatter the passageways of their listeners’ inner ears — while contemplating issues of the heart. On its self-titled debut CD, Breathing Eve,…
Presiding over a press conference in the mayor’s office last Tuesday night, Theaters and Arenas director Fabby Hillyard gushed that she was “pleased to see that we’re all sitting at the same table.” It was quite the understatement, considering the congregation she was addressing: Seated around a large table were…
If you were to imagine folk music made on a faraway planet called Aquatari — where Sonar’s Captain 69, Commander Colt 44, Commodore 64 and Doctor NC 17 claim to hail from — you might expect a robotic kind of electronic music, with lots of erratic little Jetson-y space noises…
For more than two months, the American powers that be have given us plenty of indirect warnings that Westerners who dare set foot on certain soils in certain parts of the world will be immediately jailed, dismembered or at least diabolically scowled at. Yet all of the shadowy imagery that’s…
About 24 hours before arriving at a friend’s home in Ann Arbor, Michigan, for a rare day off following a string of live dates in the northeastern United States and Canada, Dan Bern is happy about a couple of things: that he’s touring behind his fourth and best album, the…
Not only does Armando Zuppa have the distinction of being one of Denver’s first and only Italian-born and -bred banjo players, he is also the neo-grass world’s first bona fide superhero: On Wednesday, November 28, at the Soiled Dove, the leader of recent European transplants New Country Kitchen will release…
Some items from the what-ever-happened-to? file: When Skull Flux, the visceral and heady Denver-based combo that trudged along for more than six years (and along the way snagged three nominations in various Westword Music Showcases), finally splintered for good two years ago, some suspected frontman Conrad Kehn couldn’t stay quiet…
The Pepsi Center is actually an okay place to pass an evening, no matter what’s going on inside, if you stick to the outer edges and avoid the actual event altogether. The club level has a couple of bars and a nice patio with a view of downtown. In the…
In some parts of Mexico, Jaguares frontman Saul Hernandez is more popular than President Vicente Fox, political muralist Diego Rivera and his iconic artist wife, Frida Kahlo, and revolutionary Emiliano Zapata. At least that was the suggestion last year, when a Mexican Web site asked citizens to vote for their…
When Andrew Herm sealed the envelope on his early-decision application to Brown University just over a month ago, he included the usual materials — test scores, letters of recommendation from teachers, forms detailing his accomplishments as a senior in the top of his class at Littleton High School. But amid…
School Aid, Sunday, November 11, at the Paramount Theatre, is a charity event organized to raise money for New York City students and teachers affected by the September 11 terrorist attacks. But altruism is not the only incentive here. With performances by Three Degrees of Freedom, Liz Clark, Tinker’s Punishment…
The great dot.com crash proved that the Internet is not the pot of entrepreneurial gold that start-up types had hoped. But for some of us, the evaporation of so many e-commerce sites is a welcome development, as it leaves more time for discovering the Web’s true gems — like biblical…
