Set to perform at The Summit Music Hall on Thursday, June 18th, The Sonics from Tacoma, Washington are, outside of Dick Dale, the oldest, most influential rock band still touring today. All garage rock as we know it stems from what The Sonics innovated at their inception in 1960. The…
Join us this Saturday, June 20, 2015, for the 21st Westword Music Showcase! The Showcase is a celebration of our state’s vibrant music scene. Colorado is home to internationally renowned experimental bands, pioneering folk artists, Grammy winners and much, much more. On most nights in Denver, you can see just…
The opening moments of Surfer Blood’s 1000 Palms sounds nothing like the work of the fresh-faced Florida boys who brought fuzz to surf-pop back in 2010. “Time waits for no one” singer JP Pitts bellows over a menacing, building drum cadence. A minute in, however, the drums break and a…
Denver band Reno Divorce has toured the world and released a lot of music in the past decade and a half, all while staying firmly rooted in the Mile High City — a place that founding member, vocalist and guitarist Brent Loveday didn’t even realize had a music scene before…
Sunday, June 14th, KOOL 105.1 hosted its annual KOOL Concert. This year, the featured artists were stars of ’80s New Wave pop with Tears For Fears, B-52s and Berlin. Sometimes a line-up with an appeal to nostalgia can have some essentially one-hit wonders but not so for this show, as…
Westword approached the ballot for the 21st Westword Music Awards a little differently this year. In order to help highlight the burgeoning Denver scene, we limited this year’s ballot to bands and artists who have not been repeatedly recognized in the past, and created a new group comprising of bands…
The rain started coming down in sheets right at showtime, so the music had to be delayed for more than an hour. Then, by the time the downpour tempered into a steady pattering, the wind picked up. Sharp gusts snaked their way through Red Rocks Amphitheatre, and the temperature plummeted…
Cheap Trick, performing with Peter Frampton at Red Rocks on Tuesday, June 16th, occupy a unique place in the history of rock music. Its music was almost definitively power pop, while it also often rocked a little harder than its peers stamped with that genre designation. Its raucous live shows…
Have you been to the River North Art District lately? You know, The RiNo? Maybe you’re thinking — what in the hell is River North? Where is it, even? You’ve definitely heard a lot about it — it’s recently been declared one of Denver’s hottest up-and-coming neighborhoods. Even TEDxRino has…
Join us on Saturday, June 20, 2015, for the 21st Westword Music Showcase, featuring over 100 of the best bands and artists from Colorado and beyond on a dozen stages in Denver’s Golden Triangle neighborhood. Tickets start at $30 and are on sale now! This year’s headliners are Flume, the…
This weekend’s concert calendar features a legendary guitarist (Tedeschi Trucks band) a couple legendary rappers (Summer Jam) and a legendary Latin lover (Romeo Santos). The rest of our picks follow.ALL WEEKEND Snowmass Mammoth Fest$55-$225 2:00PM Snowmass Village Palisade Bluegrass and Roots Festival$35-$135 4:00PM Riverbend Park Golden Music Festival$10-$20, 3-DAY PASS $30 6:00PM Clear…
It’s a rarity that any band lasts ten years and remains interesting up to the end, much less a band of people who have played music together since the members were in middle school. Fissure Mystic started in 1998, when Taylor Evans-Rice, Fernando Guzman and Andrew Elkins were in middle…
Darin Bowman worked as a bartender at the Park Tavern for more than a dozen years and sang for local punk band Dr. Neptune in the ‘90s, and he knows that booze and music go hand in hand. He’ll bring the two together under one roof when he opens Bowman’s…
While living in an old mill in Nyack, New York, the skilled jazz drummer Brian Blade, who’s been part of the Wayne Shorter Quartet for the last fifteen years and fronted his Fellowship Band for the past close to two decades, started an audio diary of sorts on a four-track…
It’s been over fifteen years since D’Angelo blessed Denver with his presence. Last time, he was here in support of his critically acclaimed album Voodoo and playing at the Paramount Theatre. Some things have changed since then; D’Angelo has put himself into the small group of legendary bandleaders like the…
The nightly rain of the past month in Denver spared the Violent Femmes at Red Rocks. When Colin Hay opened the show, there was a sprinkling, but it went away quickly and a patchwork of clouds in the sky that promised a potential downpour that never really arrived. As evening…
For more than a century, every generation of American women has had their Latin lover, their tanned man that provoked swooning and screaming and spontaneous chonis melting. Flappers had Rudolph Valentino; the Mad Men generation threw woo at Ricardo Montalbán. Ladies of the 1980s went crazy over Julio Iglesias, while…
Panic! At the Disco headlines JEEP on the Rocks at Red Rocks on Saturday, October 10 with American Authors and X Ambassadors opening the show. Tickets ($39.50-$59.50) go on sale on Friday, June 12 at 10 a.m. Lola Black’s Borracho Bash will be at the Summit Music Hall on Saturday,…
In early April, a group of protesters gathered outside of the Regional Transportation District headquarters in downtown Denver to decry a proposed fare hike, which they believed would have a particularly damaging effect on low-income residents who rely on public transportation. Although RTD’s board of directors ultimately approved the rate…
For its first Denver show since 2004, veteran indie-pop group Belle & Sebastian will collaborate with the Colorado Symphony Orchestra for an expanded presentation of its signature storytelling style. It’s a songwriting method with creative roots in the years that bandleader Stuart Murdoch spent more or less bedridden due to…
Tonight at Red Rocks, Denver avant-garde improv group Animal / object will join Violent Femmes on stage for the improvisational sections of “Black Girls” and “Confessions.” Since the early days of the Femmes there has been a horn section called Horns of Dilemma whose membership has included, at various times,…
