Concerts

ELLIE GOULDING at the OGDEN THEATRE | 8/8/11On her second North American tour in less than a year, Ellie Goulding filled the Ogden Theatre last night, but at a price: The opening act, Bag Raiders (scheduled to play a one-off at Larimer Lounge this Friday), weren’t quite as captivating, but…

Spires is a brand-new band, by traditional standards. The band made its debut just after the first of the year, which, in the blogosphere, could be considered a lifetime ago. Regardless, you’d never know Spires was a freshly minted act just from listening to its self-titled four-song debut. The inherent…

Although Celebrity Sports Center closed in 1994 after a 34-year run on Colorado Boulevard, its memory lives on through a number of memorial sites on the Internet. And now its name will be resurrected at the 50,000-square-foot Celebrity Lanes, which will open later this month at 15755 East Arapahoe Road…

Maybe Brian Knab, Brandon Roth and Ryan Murphy wanted to be Laymen Terms back in their days living in Monument and failed at it miserably. But when the trio reconfigured in Denver with bassist Jeff Wiencroft and fused punk-rock spiritedness with a full-bodied, almost orchestral aesthetic, The Still City was…

Artists mining the territory between chamber pop and Americana aren’t exactly a rarity right now — and everyone writing pop music worth listening to has been influenced by the Beatles or, for the slightly more adventurous, the Velvet Underground. The Grownup Noise started out writing songs that draw immediate comparisons…

Idiosyncratic singer-songwriter and painter Joseph Arthur has always been something of an enigma. First, there’s his music: haunting and utterly nocturnal gravel-voiced hymns to desolation, lushly presented with eclectic beats, electronic loops and multiple tracks of his own voice. Most of this is played by Arthur himself, both live and…

Swedish writer Erich Von Däniken is alive and well, lecturing on the influence of extraterrestrial contact on ancient civilizations. His writing, meanwhile, has evidently inspired song titles for this Irish band. Since forming in 2002, God Is an Astronaut has created dense instrumental music in the vein of acts like…

Although gypsy-jazz guitar pioneer Django Reinhardt died in 1953, there’s been a steady stream of players inspired by him over the past few decades. One such player is Robin Nolan, who’s hailed as one of the world’s leading guitarists in the Reinhardt tradition, as well as being a favorite guitarist…

Everyone needs a hobby. I, for example, sometimes enjoy figure drawing, which I am not-terrible enough at to produce people with bodies that are only a little contorted, faces that are recognizable but off-putting, and alarmingly freakish hands and feet that come out looking like withered claws. But what separates…

While it would probably be best to dispense with any sort of wintery metaphors or similes in describing this EP, as they’d be both hackneyed and obvious, they’d also be incredibly apropos. Winter, the fourth and final installment of Houses’ series of seasonally themed releases, is the darkest of the…

Neil Ewing has spent the past several years exploring the odds and ends of experimental hip-hop and experimental electronic music of various stripes. But with this solo project, he takes his creativity to its furthest extent. On this sprawling release, Ewing’s dark-hued pop songs take on a range of sonic…

Although Snake Rattle Rattle Snake has been playing some of the finest dark dance rock around these parts for more than two years, the band has only released a few recordings, including a four-song EP and a two-song seven-inch single. One spin of Sineater, the band’s debut long-player, and you’ll…

Anyone who’s seen Itchy-O knows that the thirty-piece group is a far cry from your average marching band. About half the band is made up of percussionists, so seeing Itchy-O live can be a totally bombastic experience. But while the drums and cymbals can sometimes overpower the other instruments in…

When John Legend first came to Denver — with Kanye West, in 2004 — he was a fresh face with a healthy buzz and tons of talent. Even then, you could tell he was going places. And this was before he and will.i.am crafted the smash single “Ordinary People,” before…

In 1995, Rob Garza and Eric Hilton came together to form Thievery Corporation, an outfit that blends electronica with dub, jazz and bossa nova sounds to create a groovy tribal sound with Middle Eastern and Brazilian undertones. The pair’s mid-tempo music, which falls somewhere between acid jazz and trip-hop, has…

Since launching in 1994, much has changed about the Warped Tour. For everything that’s different about the annual traveling punk-rock caravan now, some things such as the hairdos have, for the most part, stayed refreshingly the same — surprising, considering that the majority of attendees this year were babies when…

AGAINST ME! at WARPED TOUR | 8/5/11Without delving into the history of the Vans Warped tour, it can be argued that a lot about it has changed. What started as a tour meant to showcase punk-rock rebellion has now become a major cog in the corporate machine — attaching itself…

BLKHRTS at OLD CURTIS ST. BAR | 8/6/11In advance of this show, BLKHRTS spread the word that there would be a sacrificial ceremony to kick off its tour. Considering the names of the opening acts and the lyrical content of the band’s music, this “sacrificial ceremony” promised to be tongue-in-cheek…

Ellie Goulding (performing tonight at the Ogden Theatre with Bag Raiders) may have only been on the international radar since 2009, but the English singer-songwriter has all the trappings of a star with some serious longevity. In a world of copies of pop star copies, Goulding shines brightly as both…

FLUX PAVILION & DOCTOR P at FILLMORE | 8/6/11Sub.Mission, Colorado’s leader in the dubstep production movement, teamed with Triad Dragons to present Flux Pavilion and Doctor P at the Fillmore Auditorium. Backed by a strong team of locals including Dodger, RumbleJunkie, DJ Ishe, and Coult-45, the night proved to be…

How do you honor a musician when awards and certifications aren’t enough? By naming something in his honor, of course — be it a bridge, a street, an asteroid or even a whole day after the guy. But in naming something after a musician, it’s easy to forget that while…