Concerts

Arguably the best single night of the year for live music, New Year’s Eve can be an overwhelming thing to plan for. To help you narrow down your options, we’ve picked the ten best shows this year, plus a few extras we couldn’t ignore. Also, feel free to hype your…

Though Rob Halford still holds it down as the leader of Judas Priest, the enigmatic band leader has kept busy with several other music projects during his forty-plus years in music. With a vocal range that is unmatched, Halford has carried the crown as the living heavy-metal god through two…

Whatever the measure of success — whether it’s defined by artists making music on their own or having someone else doing their bidding — a music scene is only as interesting as, well, the music being made there, of course, and the people who are making it, naturally. As you’ll…

“I feel I’m a good conduit, you could say, for bringing new music to a crowd,” muses Mark Farina. “I get a lot of enjoyment from playing new music, even though vibes and artists have changed over the past twenty years. One of my initial things starting out was playing…

In September, Francois Safieddine bought the building at 1414 Market Street — which is home to his clubs Oak Tavern and 24K — for $1,525,000. At around the same time, he also bought the former home of Mori, the old Nisei lodge at 2015 Market, from the Nisei Veterans Heritage…

Ethan Converse and Sam Martin started Flashlights (due Friday, December 17, at the Larimer Lounge) messing around with synthesizers and software while living in Boulder. They say their early material was rough and not as evolved as they would have liked. Be that as it may, anyone who saw any…

How long has it been since the Darkness finally went away? The correct answer: not long enough. Don’t count your blessings yet, though. Steel Panther is filling the vacuum, doing to American glam metal what the Darkness did to British glam rock — namely, ass-fucking it. The group’s only saving…

Dirty Rotten Imbeciles started out as a speedy hardcore band in Houston in the early ’80s. The band was renowned for its short songs, its leftist politics and the frenzied passion of its playing. D.R.I.’s appropriately-titled, landmark 1987 album, Crossover, lived up to its name by introducing a sound that…

When Low formed in Duluth, Minnesota, in 1993, no one could have guessed it would become one of the most respected underground bands of the next two decades. In an era when most acts traded in sheer volume, Low focused instead on raw emotional honesty expressed with a quiet and…

Whole generations of doom-, sludge-, and stoner-rock bands have come and gone since Buzzov•en first trod the earth in 1989. Raw, screamy and ragged, the outfit helped set the tone for underground metal throughout the ’90s and ’00s — despite the fact that the band hasn’t released a studio album…

Trout Steak Revival formed in the summer of 2008 on the secret shores of a Colorado mountain lake. After singing songs and telling stories during days of rain, the five guys, some of whom are originally from the Midwest and East Coast, came away from the outing with a true…

It’s no secret why Meese’s bid for major-label success failed. Blame the industry all you want, but the bottom line is this: The band was mediocre. But with their new outfit, the Centennial, Patrick and Nathan Meese are trying a new approach: leading instead of following. By ditching Meese’s strum-by-numbers…

“5low” sounds like what it must be like to wander around a sprawling mansion in the dark, guided only by the muffled voice of your would-be murderer three rooms away. If someone made a movie about a benevolent occult group trying to conquer the world through the use of remote…

Skrillex is a dance-music name you might not be familiar with yet, but you will be. The former frontman for From First to Last, Skrillex (aka Sonny Moore) is spreading like wildfire: He broke a record by having eight of the ten best-selling tracks on Beatport, and he also had…

Chris Westin has become something of a fixture on the DIY scene in Denver since 2008, when he moved here from Oklahoma City and met nervesandgel’s Johnny Wohlfahrt while the two were working at the same restaurant. Westin had experienced the underground world before, but it was recording on Wohlfahrt’s…

At the tender age of twenty, DJ Craze had already won the DMC World Championships — which he went on to win twice more as a solo artist and again as part of the Allies crew, with A-Trak and Infamous. Actually, we could fill this entire space just listing the…

The Red Lion Hotel on I-225 and Parker, the venue that hosted last night’s 5280 Urban Music Awards, is just west of nowhere. Really, it’s in southeast Aurora, but to an inner city gal like me, it might as well have been in Kansas. Having beat around the bush long…

Before Beauty Bar, there was the Snake Pit, a club best known for its dance nights. From Drum and Bass to ’80s throwbacks, each weekly event brought a slightly different but enthusiastic crowd to the cozy, two-room club. Beauty Bar is paying homage to the nights with some reunion-style dance…

MIKE MARCHANT’S OUTER SPACE PARTY UNIT With Le Divorce • I Know You, Rider 12.11.10 | Larimer Lounge Le Divorce has always been good, but it seems the quartet has really honed its stage craft and sound in the past few months. Shrouded in a bank of fog, the band’s…

THE BAD PLUS 12/12/10 | Dazzle Over the last ten years, the Bad Plus has established itself as one of the most daring jazz trios in the world. And in the decade that pianist Ethan Iverson, bassist Reid Anderson and drummer Dave King have been together, they’ve proved they can…