Concerts

It is easy to pass off White Denim (due tonight at the Larimer Lounge with The Growlers) as psychedelic garage rock — except the reverb isn’t there and the Austin-based act implements some seriously dub-like rhythms. Labels aside, the power trio (that recently became an even tighter foursome) incite a…

Welp, looks like it’s the end of an era. If you haven’t heard, everyone’s favorite gay zombie, Maris the Great, is about to become food for worms — uh, actually, “retiring” is how he put it. Semantics aside, after a fruitful killing spree that lasted more than a decade (eleven…

Congrats to Lance Meyers and Jessica Harris, winners of the VIP upgrade. And so the countdown begins. We’re just a little more than two weeks away from this year’s Westword Music Showcase. You excited? We sure are. If you haven’t got your tickets yet, have at it — and then…

Sharon Jones (performing this evening with her band, The Dap Kings, at the Denver Botanic Gardens) is a soul revivalist, whether she intended to be or not. The Brooklynite was a session singer in the ’70s, but it wasn’t until the late ’90s that Jones was finally given the chance…

Surely you’ve heard the expression: “That’s a heart attack waiting to happen”? While we’re not inquiring enough to Google its origin, from the sounds of it, that phrase could very well have been coined to describe the Fool’s Gold Loaf from the Colorado Mine Company that Elvis once flew to…

Celldweller (performing tonight at the Marquis Theater with Die Brucke and Kevin Callison) is the moniker of Klayton, a singer, multi-instrumentalist, music programmer and producer based out of Detroit. Bringing his own unique form of industrial music to the masses via movie, video game and television soundtracks, including collaborations with…

Last Monday, Amazon decided to give away Lady Gaga’s new album, Born This Way for just 99 cents. The sale was so popular it brought the site down, and so the site repeated the same promotion on Thursday. That’s all well and good for cheapskate Gaga fans, but it reportedly…

HOOLIGANS IN WONDALAND at 1STBANK | 5/31/11″It would have been easy to snark all over this show, but the babies were dancing to Mayer Hawthorne, and you can’t hate on the babies. Babies are adorable.”…

When starting any new relationship, you generally look for positive traits in a person as a way of gauging compatibility. For the members of Il Cattivo — whose name roughly translates from Italian to “the horrid” — it was the negative qualities they all possessed that brought them together. “I…

In The Horse’s Mouth, Alec Guinness plays an expressionist painter on a quest to find the perfect wall to paint on. Painter Don Callarman refers to that 1958 movie when he says he might have found the perfect canvas: the blank back wall of Quixote’s True Blue (2151 Lawrence Street)…

Ed Marshall has had his hand in music in Denver for the past several years, both as a keen observer of the ebb and flow of music out of this town and as a musician with a penchant for the psychedelic with bands like Stargazer, Into the Ether, Overcasters and…

Two years ago, the Dodos were in the process of smoothing out the more abrasive elements of their sound, cutting back on the clattering drums and frantic strumming in order to better highlight their gift for writing sticky, bittersweet pop songs. But with the recent release of fourth album No…

May the faint of heart stay at home when the Academy-Award-winning, multi-platinum legends in Three 6 Mafia take over Casselman’s this Friday. The crew — now consisting of original members Juicy J and DJ Paul — is known for crass Dirty South bounce rap and inflammatory lyrics. Originally hailing from…

From 2002 to 2006, Evan Patterson and Nick Thieneman were in the renowned post-hardcore band Breather Resist, from Louisville, Kentucky. After a lineup change and a decided move toward evolving its sound, that band morphed into Young Widows. Unlike Breather Resist’s penchant for distilling raw emotion into vectored blasts of…

If you were to make a short list of the greatest bass players of all time, Bootsy Collins would surely be included. After firing his backing band in the late ’60s, James Brown hired Collins and his brother Catfish’s band, the Pacemakers, to back him up. Collins later became a…

When I was a kid, I had a friend whose mom’s name was Hermine — which, admittedly, is an atrocious name. But a weird name can also be kind of endearing, and despite the fact that she was a cold shrew who clearly hated her life, I grew to like…

The first half of the A-side of this cassette conjures a mood of being on an intercontinental flight, a peaceful sense of being out of time and floating on a journey whose destination is half a day ahead. That evolves into the sound of early analog video-game malfunctioning — like…

R&Beast, the latest mixtape release from Wil Guice, finds the R&B crooner essentially taking rap songs and touching them up with his rhythm-and-blues charm. He takes on “H.A.M.,” Kanye West and Jay-Z’s monstrous joint, and, over a stock beat, sings it like nobody’s business with close to perfect pitch, which…

There are quite a few moments on the Owen Kortz Trio’s self-titled five-song EP in which Kortz — who teaches music at the University of Colorado Denver — sounds remarkably similar to James Taylor, both in tone and phrasing. Kortz’s voice blends well with those of singer Rich Sletvold and…