Concerts

Often imitated but never duplicated, Too $hort (performing tonight with DJX, Shade Loc G, Hypnautic, King Tef, Johny Rocketz, 20:12, Nominee, Mya Rose, Spoke n Wordz, Playalitical and Felisa Latin Soul at Casselman’s) has been making records for almost thirty years, helping to establish Oakland, California, as a reputable rap…

JOAN OF ARC with Air Waves, Fire Season 05.06.11 | hi-dive So much noodling. That’s all there really is to say about Joan of Arc. It’s guitar-noodling masked behind a pop song. It’s not a bad thing, but it is what it is — and it still strikes me as…

WAKA FLOCKA FLAME 05.05.11 | Club Arriba Waka Flocka Flame blazed through Denver last night in a whirlwind of dread locks, expensive jewelry, marijuana smoke and gang banger salutations of “Suwoop!” After more than a few terrible openers, he took the stage at a very late 1:20 a.m. By 1:40,…

THE BLACK ANGELS With Sleepy Sun 05.11.11 | Fox Theatre Last night at Boulder’s Fox Theatre, as Austin’s Black Angels shrieked, stomped, thrashed and pounded, my mind kept curiously dragging me back to the old-school AC/DC anthem, “Hell Ain’t a Bad Place to Be.” Yes, the Devil’s music is still…

UPDATE (05.06.11 – 2:02 p.m): Just before lunchtime, Martin Anderson discovered another batch of master reels, more than a hundred by his guesstimate. Since then, he’s sent over an updated list of bands, and there’s some very prominent bygone Denver bands on the list, including Pinhead Circus, the Psychedelic Zombiez,…

This might be some of the weirdest copyright related news we’ve run across in a while. FilmOn founder Alki David has teamed up with a slew of musicians to file a lawsuit against CBS Interactive and CNET over CNET’s distribution of LimeWire. Back in November, a federal judge had to…

One listen to The Black Angels (playing tonight at the Fox Theatre with Sleepy Sun) and it is almost unfathomable that the band was concieved in 2004. The Austin quartet isn’t a tribute to the psychedelic rock — it defines the decades-old genre with dark organ echoes, heavy percussion and…

Bust out your sombreros hombres, it’s time to bailar en la dance floor. In addition to being the official unofficial start of the weekend, this Thursday also happens to be Cinco de Mayo. If you haven’t already found another Cinco event in which to get your drinko, take a gander…

Jessica Lea Mayfield has risen through the songwriting ranks with one foot in the old and the other in the new. She got her start touring with her family bluegrass band, but after a stroke of luck, she was suddenly pushed into the spotlight with high-profile tours accompanying the likes…

Tomorrow is Cinco de Mayo, a day commemorating the Mexican army’s defeat of the French at the Battle of Puebla. In honor of the occasion, rather than randomly heading off to your closest Mexican restaurant or bar to drink some tequila, we’ve come up with a list of things to…

tUnE-yArDs (playing tonight at the hi-dive with Buke & Gass and Papa Bear) is the off-kilter moniker of Merrill Garbus, a multi-instrumentalist whose voice is her biggest asset. Although the songstress is often backed by live percussion and strings, she plays the ukulele and the drums while simultaneously creating beats…

DANZIG 05.03.11 | Boulder Theater The first time I went out to see Danzig, over a decade ago, as a teenager in Pittsburgh, the concert was inexplicably canceled minutes before showtime, and I returned to my ’89 Pontiac Sunbird to find it towed. Last night in Boulder, I feared a…

In the last decade or so, many metal musicians realized that while writing songs about demons and wizards was kind of cool, it was also a little silly. So they turned to largely instrumental music with titles that hinted at that world without the potential embarrassment of having to come…

Joan of Arc may be one of the most pretentious bands in existence, but it also puts on a kick-ass live show. The group doesn’t come off its throne above the city of Chicago often, but when it does, it almost always ends up snagging a few converts along the…

Waka Flocka Flame is an artist known just as much for his antics on stage as off. The rapper (born Juaquin Malphurs) hit the scene in 2009 with a monster single, “O Let’s Do It,” which not only spawned a new era of down-south bounce rap, but also ushered a…

Formed in Lafayette, Louisiana, this Bay Area band will immediately sound familiar to anyone who has been paying attention for the last handful of years to acts like Washed Out and Small Black, mainly because there is a similar effervescent, sun-washed flavor to Painted Palms’ electro-pop. But there is also…

Circuses are creepy. At least, clowns are creepy. On a philosophical level, the subtle menace of clowns is partly the result of the mask that separates them from the realm of normal society; basically, the clown is not quite human, but rather a grossly exaggerated caricature of one aspect of…

“Looking Down the Barrel,” Altitude Sickness’s opening track, leads with a Celtic feel and a tinge of bluegrass, with the fiddle pulling the melody along. James Campbell’s vocals seem informed by hip-hop in both his delivery and the flow of the lyrics, but the music never really crosses over into…

With Ninth and Lincoln’s 2008’s self-titled debut, founder and composer Tyler Gilmore pushed the boundaries of what a large jazz ensemble could do. But that album feels somewhat conservative compared to Gilmore’s compositions on Static Line. He’s developed considerably as a composer in the past couple of years, moving further…

The Roadside Profits have crafted an work of more-than-good production, slightly off-kilter rapping — in the pleasing sense — and a ubiquitous undertone of rap nostalgia with Roadside Saves. The album weighs in at a hefty fourteen tracks, with more than a few of those slowing down the record’s progress…