JUICY J @ CERVANTES’ MASTERPIECE BALLROOM | 5/28/13 Juicy J is like the frying pan that you don’t wash. You’d never show your guests you’re cooking with him, but he is just so damned flavorful. With the crowd at Cervantes’ already in his hand, and the energy fading somewhat, Juicy…
While you’ve already got well over a hundred compelling reasons to pick up your tickets for the nineteenth annual Westword Music Showcase, here’s one more: Last night, in the basement of Boettcher Concert Hall, I got a sneak peek at the highly anticipated and ground-breaking collaboration between the Colorado Symphony…
MUSICFEST @ MAGNESS ARENA | 5/25/13 The Head and the Heart took the Magness stage at around 10 p.m., after the outdoor acts played earlier in the day and the three other groups played the main stage off and on for about three hours. At that point, folks seemed far…
Soundgarden formed in 1984 as a three-piece with Chris Cornell on drums on vocals, Kim Thayil on guitar and Hiro Yamamoto on bass. Though noisier in the beginning, the band would go on to be one of the main purveyors of a slow, sludgy, intense, punk-rooted rock that was dubbed…
ZZ Ward released her debut album, Til The Casket Drops, in 2012. Growing up, she honed a talent for writing bluesy R&B songs. Her knack for that can be heard prominently on that disc, and well as her proclivity for hip-hop, which is even more prevalent on her Criminal EP…
ZZ WARD @ GOTHIC THEATRE | WEDS, 5/29/13 While riding the bus to school as a child, Zsuzsanna Ward spent her time in headphones, thinking about just how much she wanted to become a singer. As an adult better known as ZZ Ward, she reached the crux of that dream…
Update 5/24/13: Contest is over. Winners have been chosen. HaloEleven, russ.christiansen, candy.I.angel, ej8085 and ajgutierrez77, check your email for details on how to claim your tickets. Thanks to everybody else for all the entries. See also: – The ten best concerts to see in Denver this week – Review: The…
Kev Kash is a rising talent from the local scene who has songs with the likes of Innerstate Ike, Myrical and Mr. Midas. Kash says 2Pac is his biggest influence, but he says his style is comparable to Lupe or Kendrick Lamar. We recently caught up with the rapper, who…
Time (aka Chris Steele) has long been focused on enacting positive change and has rarely been shy about voicing his opinions. As a journalist, he’s written on controversial subjects ranging from UFOs to the government’s role in the death of Fred Hampton of the Black Panther Party — and has…
Rob Garza has a lot going on besides Thievery Corporation — he’s also a touring DJ in his own right who ignites dancefloors everywhere he spins, and he has a new album out entirely comprising remixes he’s tweaked. We caught up with him to talk about the album, how he…
THE HEAD AND THE HEART @ MAGNESS ARENA | SAT, 5/25/13 Formed in Seattle in 2009, this project started out playing open mics and within a year after playing countless shows, the Head and the Heart independently released its debut album. The band, whose self-titled album came out on Sub…
MOON BOOTS @ NORAD | FRI, 5/24/13 Moon Boots maintains a mysterious persona appropriate for a being who’s allegedly imbued with sentience in a top-secret NASA experiment, but here’s what we know about him: He’s based out of Chicago, he’s signed on the French Express label, and he has a…
A lifetime of music fandom and a voracious appetite for new things has given me a wide-ranging (if sometimes shallow) knowledge of musical styles, forms and history. Despite that, there are holes. Big holes. And some of those holes are, well, embarrassing. I’ve decided the time has come to fill…
Feel like partying in the park this holiday weekend? Here’s your soundtrack, courtesy of Jay Bianchi’s Summer of Serendipity series. The two days of free music this weekend at Civic Center Park features The Space Lab: Kraftwerk ReAmped, a supergroup of sorts comprising Jesse Miller from Lotus, Steve Molitz from…
The Great American Techno Festival has revealed part of the lineup for the third annual edition of the burgeoning techno extravaganza. Following up last year’s banner lineup of Kevin Saunderson and John Tejada, this year’s Great American Techno Fest, which is slated to take place Friday, September 13, through Sunday,…
There are many different versions of DJ Babyshoe running around Denver, depending on who you ask and when they last saw him. On any given weekend, Babyshoe (aka Eric Talledo) is crisscrossing the city spinning forgotten hits at the Lost Lake, playing a party hosted by TheHundred or unleashing late…
Okay, so you know how fan-shot videos by all accounts generally suck? Beside the shaky, migraine-inducing footage, the audio is generally awful and sounds like it was literally recorded from the inside of the speaker cone. I think we can all agree that they’re a monumental waste of time for…
People come up and say, ‘I’ve never seen anything like that before. When are you playing again?'” marvels bassist Harmony Star about how audiences often react to her band, Dangerous Nonsense. “We don’t even know how to explain it. Our influences couldn’t explain what we sound like.” “And it wouldn’t…
With its refreshing take on percussion and production, the music on Dawn Safari’s Mask isn’t what you’d expect during the height of bass’s fame. Rather than building up to massive drops, this chilled-out drum-and-bass relies on samples and loops, with nods to hip-hop — but even those are subtle and…
Durango’s self-proclaimed country-fried indie-rock act Farmington Hill sums up Road to Nowhere as “music suitable for both a raucous Saturday night and the accompanying Sunday hangover.” Sure enough, some of the five-piece’s twangy alt-country tunes — “Oh Yeah,” “Pass Me the Bottle,” “Pass Out” — could be the ideal soundtrack…
It’s fairly clear from the opening cut of Justin Francoeur’s debut, Moving Through Universes, what an ambitious undertaking the disc was: “Gravity” starts off with a rock groove and gradually works in various worldly elements such as the erhu, a Chinese stringed instrument played here by Brian Mullins. Francoeur clearly…
There is something otherworldly and old-worldly about the songs on the Seven Hats’ Scientific American; they’d be right at home on a Guy Maddin soundtrack. Julie Davis’s voice, while in the foreground, sounds like it was captured on film and then played until the film stock was worn to the…
