The Pretty Reckless could have been a vanity band led by a previously famous member. When guitarist Ben Phillips met future lead singer Taylor Momsen in 2008, she was a fourteen-year-old up-and-coming actress known for roles in the 2000 version of How the Grinch Stole Christmas and the television show…
Since signing a record deal in December 2004, the Denver-based band the Fray has found a healthy amount of success – so much so that picking a venue like the Fox Theatre, which holds no more than 500 people, for a concert a day before its big show at the…
The Fray released its first greatest hits album, Through the Years, on November 4, 2016. Often a greatest hits album signifies a band either in need of a late-career shot in the arm or a way to mark a milestone in the group’s career. For the Fray, it seems more of a celebration of how far the group has come, and the compilation includes three new songs. “Throughout the career at certain points we kind of had our head down in the game focusing on one record or one song or one tour or whatever,” says drummer Ben Wysocki. “This is the first time we’ve been able to step back and look at the whole arc of what we’ve done and what the bands have provided to us, and it’s been really amazing.”
Mannequin Pussy’s latest album, Romantic, was the product of conversations the band was having about the nature of romance — and the parallels between the modern era and the tumultuous Romantic era of the late 18th and early 19th centuries.
Maria “Masha” Alyokhina and Alexandra “Sasha” Bogino, members of Pussy Riot, brought great humor, poise and warmth to the conversation and Q&A held at the Oriental Theater last night, Monday, November 14, 2016. Hosts Ru Johnson and Bree Davies (former and current Westword contributors) facilitated a lively and engaging presentation.
When Lukas Graham released the single “7 Years” in the summer of 2015, it expected the song would hit big only among northern European audiences, the band’s main supporters. But by fall, the song had gone viral and made the Danish band international pop stars.
The memorial event for musician Tyler Marchant Despres, who died on November 1, 2016, was held Saturday afternoon at Larimer Lounge. It began with speakers who talked about Despres’s life and his impact on them and the world around him. Speakers included relatives and friends like Jonathan Bitz, who booked the Meadowlark during Despres’s tenure co-running the open-mic night with Maria Kohler and others. That open-mic night fostered a section of Denver’s underground music scene that allowed for a wide spectrum of musicians to have an accepting place to try out new material and develop their art.
This Saturday at Cameron Church, avant-garde guitarist Neil Haverstick is holding Microstock 11 wherein he and Ned Evett, an associate of Joe Satriani, will demonstrate their own microtonal compositions in individual sets. Microtonality or microtonal music has been around since humans started making music. Generally speaking, a microtonal music is that which contains tiny intervals between notes, making it different from the twelve tone equal temperament scales we hear in a lot of popular or even classical music. Often the concept is associated with non-Western music, but it has long been a part of gospel, blues and jazz where the inflection and manipulation of standard use of the strings is often employed with bends and pulling on strings with one hand as they are struck with a pick in the other.
At eighty years old, Harry Tuft is finally getting the time and opportunity to do what he came to Colorado to do in the first place in 1960: play music. Not that Tuft hasn’t played music all along and put out albums, but it is the first time he’s been free to do so without the weight of running a store, leading the local chapter of the musicians’ union, or, in years past, booking acts like Joan Baez and arranging for her to meet the Beatles when the Fab Four played Red Rocks in 1964. He basically served as the de facto godfather of Denver folk through his establishment of the Denver Folklore Center in 1962, and he was instrumental in founding Swallow Hill. If Tuft hadn’t left Philadelphia to move here, inspired by stories of the opportunities to play live out west, Denver music and culture would be immeasurably diminished.
Colfax Speed Queen is releasing its sophomore album Talk To Your Doctor through Heavy Dose Records on Friday, November 11. The Denver-based rock band started in 2010 as a college project for singer/guitarist Matthew Loui who had only recently started playing guitar.
Experimental pop band Holophrase has always existed on the fringes of Denver, whether with its difficult-to-qualify musical style or in its living arrangements. The band currently resides in Henderson, a community in Adams County. At the end of a dirt driveway, three-fourths of the band shares the basement of a house and a garage. Outside, you can see undeveloped fields, an increasingly rare sight in most of the metro area.
Denver is brimming with bands taking it to the next level, and November 2016 is particularly bountiful with new album releases. Here are fifteen of the noteworthy albums and EPs being released by Colorado artists this month. Let us know what else should be on our radar.
While it may not be historic, it felt significant that two pioneers of the disco/dub beat-driven post-punk, one from the original wave, Gang of Four, and one from its 1990s revival, the Faint, shared the stage at the Gothic Theatre on Saturday night.
Tonight it was easy to forget that Chrissie Hynde of the Pretenders and Stevie Nicks are both senior citizens and that their greatest impact on popular culture happened in the first half of the 1980s when both ruled the airwaves. Go ahead, try to tell them that. Because last night, both stars rocked like the old days.
Post-punk since the ’90s has been largely shaped by the music of two bands: Joy Division and Gang of Four. The furious energy, disciplined songwriting and angular guitar work of Gang of Four are clear and direct influences on the likes of the Faint, the Rapture and every band that…
Theater Electronic-music imprint Always Human TapesTheater is putting on a showcase of its artists over three days at the ATLAS Black Box Theater on the CU Boulder campus and at 1010 Workshop in Denver. Ryan Wurst founded the label in the summer of 2013 while earning his master’s degree in visual…
Halloween in Denver seems to inspire more holiday-themed musical events than any other holiday outside of the Fourth of July, and one list of things to do just wasn’t enough. What follows are ten more of the best concerts/musical happenings for the season of the witch — in chronological order. 1. Halloween…
Marillion may not be a name familiar to a lot of people who didn’t pay attention to progressive rock in the 1980s and 1990s. However, the veteran progressive-rock band pioneered the concept of crowdfunding for tours and albums starting in the late ’90s. Marillion released its earliest recordings in 1982…
‘Tis the season for spooky shows and Halloween-themed musical events. Listed in chronological order, here are ten of the best concerts offered in the Mile High City to set the tone for the Samhain holiday season For more seasonal events, please visit the Westword calendar. 1. True Widow, Emerald Siam and Lowlands Larimer…
You might assume that an event called Freedom On to be a kind of garish celebration of overzealous patriotism: nothing more than less-than-mediocre bands plus the Pledge of Allegiance led from the stage. It’s true that last weekend’s inaugural festival took place at the Grizzly Rose, a club that generally hosts…
Last weekend’s Cloak & Dagger music festival felt very different from going to EDM shows at Red Rocks in the summer, due to the event’s crowd and performers. The attendees represented an interesting mix of races, genders, sexual orientations and other social groupings that often divide people. Rock music hasn’t brought so…
Friends of Red Rocks is an organization that came together in 1999 out of concern for the corporatization of the legendary music venue. At that time there had been talk of turning the planting boxes into box seats bearing advertising, a development antithetical to the concept of a public park…
