Jack White Muscles Through a Downpour at Red Rocks

About twenty minutes before Jack White took the stage at Red Rocks, a hard rain started falling and lightning flashed to the east. Fog machines on the stage were fired up and the wind was blowing the haze, tinted hues of blue from the stage lights, around. For a moment…

Ark Life Wants You to Sing Along

Ark Life has accomplished a staggering amount in its first year and a half, playing over 150 shows across the country, including a headlining show at the Boulder Theater and an opening set for a sold-out Film on the Rocks at Red Rocks. The band will finally release its debut…

How Ark Life Made a Promising Career Out of Drinking With Friends

When Jesse Elliott came to Denver in early 2013, he was only passing through. As the frontman of Washington, D.C.-based rock band These United States, he’d passed through Denver plenty of times. In fact, that group toured so much that Elliott hadn’t kept a home address for three years. But…

In Defense of Liking Music for No Good Reason

Why did you like Yeezus? Did you find it anarchic? Did you like how it challenged racial norms in a confrontational, blacked-out way? Did you like its minimalism? Or its maximalism? Did you find the songs to speak to a larger narrative of where Kanye West is artistically and emotionally?…

Rufus Baxter Pisses Off an Old Man

[jump] • PREVIOUSLY • -Rufus Baxter: Park Eight -Rufus Baxter: Part Seven -Rufus Baxter: Part Six – Rufus Baxter: Part Five – Rufus Baxter: Part Four – Rufus Baxter: Part Three – Rufus Baxter: Part Two – Meet Rufus Baxter: Part One Follow @Westword_Music…

Six Musicians Who Are Way Better Than Their Music

Press PhotoNot the worst guy ever, despite all those songs.Do you ever wonder about the positive qualities you may be overlooking in the artists you hate? Probably not. Who has time to dig through the details to find out who’s actually pretty cool, but an unfortunate victim of their own…

Things You Won’t See at Any Music Festival Outside Planet Bluegrass

Planet Bluegrass is nothing if not durable. That durability became a widely-disseminated story as the ranch and music festival operation in Lyons rebuilt when a historic flood utterly wrecked it last September But this weekend’s Rocky Mountain Folks Festival proved another kind of resilience, one that relates not to backhoes…

The Eleven Best Shows in Denver This Week

This week’s crop of shows includes a busy lineup at the big venues, including guitar heaven at Fiddler’s Green with ZZ Top and Jeff Beck. Elsewhere, the Coathangers return to Denver after a short time away, Styrofoam Sanchez plays Rhinoceropolis and, yes, Huey Lewis and the News are in Colorado…

Strangers Will Buy You Beer When Deer Tick Comes to Town

People throw all kinds of things at Deer Tick in order to express their love of the gritty rock-and-roll band from Providence, Rhode Island. At the quintet’s sold-out show at the Bluebird Theater in Denver, they threw half-full beers, shoes, even themselves. Even before the group, led by John McCauley,…

Chive Fest Kept Calm at City Park

Deep in City Park on Saturday, past the father and son playing catch and the picnicking family, in a fenced off area, was a sea of “Keep Calm and Chive On” shirts and neon green. It was the first Chive Fest, and after several hours of music and revelry, a…

Beck – Red Rocks – August 15, 2014

You might have thought that Beck’s Red Rocks set would be a slowpoke, folksy affair akin to his latest studio album, Morning Phase. Nope. The night was a twenty-plus year retrospective, covering everything from 1994 mega-hit “Loser” to his recent foray into Nick Drake territory…

Lotus Will Perform a Talking Heads Tribute Set at Red Rocks

Genre-defying five-piece dance and jam band Lotus will be playing its annual Red Rocks show on September 19. The set was originally targeted to support of the band’s most recent album Gilded Age, but after the group debuted a successful new Talking Heads tribute set, featuring Gabriel Otto of Denver’s…