Concerts

This weekend’s live music calendar includes a couple good ones, like Channel 93.3’s Not So Silent Night 2015, Elephant Revival, English Beat, Booker T. Jones and Nikki Lane. See the full list of our picks below.  FRIDAY, DECEMBER 4 Chase Rice $23, 8:30 p.m. Grizzly Rose Elephant Revival $27, 8 p.m. Ogden…

At the Tacocat merch table, between some vinyl and sweatshirts for sale, was an old paper book titled The Woman’s Dress For Success Book. It was priced at $100. It was a partially a joke, but mostly a direct statement. There were a lot of statements, musical and otherwise, from…

The Elephant Revival has morphed over the years into this region’s most warm and fuzzy feel-good bands. When considering metro Denver isn’t short on folk bands, that’s no mean feat. It’s no dig either; the Nederland troupe has that mournful, mildly gothic (without the Cure makeup) quality that many country…

It wasn’t that long ago that the Devil Makes Three was playing venues like the Walnut Room and Shakey Graves was playing the hi-dive. Now the two acts are so big that they can co-headline Rocks on Friday, May 27. Tickets ($39.75-$44.75) go on sale on Friday, December 4 at…

Leighton Peterson, frontman for Safe Boating Is No Accident and Jessie Rehms, a Denver University law student, want to help Syrian refugees. Rehms has experience working with refugees, and Peterson has his band, so together the couple has decided to host “Syrian Sock Hop,” a benefit show on Sunday, December…

The day after famed keyboardist Ikey Owens passed away in October 2014, a song came to Rubedo vocalist Kyle Gray. Owens produced every Rubedo album, and was like a brother and honorary bandmate to the Denver trio — constantly providing connections, companionship and words of wisdom. Gray, overcome by grief,…

Tacocat’s web address is tacocatdotcom.com. Tacocat’s name is a lighthearted palindrome. While these initial details might seem silly, they reveal much about the irreverent humor and lateral thinking that underpin the band’s creative work. “Everybody that uses Tacocat on the Internet uses it for [something fairly silly], so we had…

“It’s always the right time to do the wrong thing,” Nikki Lane sings at the outset of All or Nothin’, her latest album — a rousing blend of classic country, roots music and category-defying ass-kicking produced by the Black Keys’ Dan Auerbach. And Lane, who headlines the Bluebird Theater on Sunday, December 6, carries…

“I was basically a DIY punk kid, but doing it through hip-hop music,” says Travis Egedy, aka Pictureplane, about his early days of making music. “It had the same energy and intelligence and sent the same type of message, and I was really into that.” Born in Santa Fe, Egedy…

New York-bred MC Homeboy Sandman is a lyricist that has gained praise from all walks of life in the hip-hop community. He is a lyricist’s lyricist — writing raps that are intelligent and to the point, with instantly recognizable wit, oozing from clever one-liners that stick out like a Magic…

This week’s picks include Kid Cudi at the Fillmore, Lights and the Mowgli’s at the Ogden, the Bad Plus Joshua Redman at the Boulder Theater and HEALTH at the Larimer Lounge. See the full list of our picks below.  MONDAY, NOVEMBER 30 Kid Cudi $49.50/$55, 7 p.m. Fillmore Auditorium All…

This weekend’s line-up includes A. Tom Collins two-night album release at the hi-dive, Warren Haynes’s two-night stand at the Ogden and Leftover Salmon’s release of its new live album with two nights at the Boulder Theater. There’s also a celebration of the life and music of Mike Herrera, who passed…

Happy Thanksgiving, Denver! Westword is technically closed today, but we here at Backbeat understand you need something to read while you’re sitting at the table, avoiding political conversations with your family and checking your phone today. Give thanks and plan ahead: here are this week’s new concert announcements.  Journey and…

Pop-rocker John Mayer fronting a band featuring three of the four surviving members of the Grateful Dead may sound like an odd, even off-putting, endeavor. But 50 years after the Dead started playing LSD-soaked improvisational electric blues at pizza shops in what’s now Facebook and Apple territory south of San…

Riot Fest may have found a place to settle. For the first time since its Denver debut, Riot Fest & Rodeo will return to the same venue two years in a row. Early bird tickets went on sale Tuesday morning for the punk-centric music festival, which happens September 2-4, 2016,…

While there are some bigger Thanksgiving Eve concerts like Dead & Company and the Last Waltz Revisited included in our Twelve Best Concerts in Denver This Week, we’ve compiled the top club events and smaller concerts on what’s hailed as the biggest bar night of the year. See the full…

When High Five came together in 2012, the collective comprised solo artists who pooled their talents and resources in order to create something bigger than their individual efforts — a creative model not unlike that of Minneapolis’s Doomtree. “That’s a very similar format to what we have in that they’re…

Typically a show billed as “An Evening With…” is something of a nostalgia trip for long-time fans. But that wasn’t quite the case with the Public Image Ltd show at The Gothic Theatre on Friday night. A third of the tracks from the set came from the group’s worthy latest…

Our Thanksgiving week top picks include Corrosion of Conformity, Puscifer, Misfts, Ryan Bingham and Dead & Company, which features original Grateful Dead members Bob Weir, Mickey Hart and Bill Kreutzmann as well as John Mayer, Oteil Burbridge and Jeff Chimenti. See our top dozen picks below.  MONDAY, NOVEMBER 23 Corrosion of…

“Toki smiles mischievously, drops dirty beat on unsuspecting crowd,” is what I find scribbled at the bottom of my notepad after TOKiMONSTA’s Thursday show at the Bluebird Theater.  That’s as good a way as any of summarizing what happened when the L.A. beat producer came through Denver to promote her…