Review: Deadmau5 at the Fillmore – 10/06/10

DEADMAU5 With Jonas Tempel 10.06.10 | Fillmore Auditorium view full slide show Deadmau5 brings out the party kids in droves — and with good reason: The light show alone is enough to drag you off your couch to a dance party on a Wednesday night. And when you combine the…

Critic’s Choice: Smoothbore at 3 Kings Tavern

Migrating from the East Coast and Midwest underground music scenes, Sonya Decman played nervy, aggressive, angular punk with the Symptoms, her first Denver band, an outfit with a pointed yet playful sense of humor. When that band called it quits, Decman joined the ranks of the darkly intense and literate…

Helmet

Before forming Helmet in 1989, Page Hamilton had been active in the New York underground scene in the ’80s. Partly because of his jazz background and partly because he wasn’t afraid to explore the possibilities of the creative use of distortion with guitar, Hamilton worked with Glenn Branca before joining…

Surfer Blood

Less than a year after inception, Surfer Blood was high on the hype list — the New York Times sang the band’s praises, and a Reading Festival appearance was on the horizon — but it’s those big steps that often spell disaster for a baby band. Instead of imploding on…

Phish

After an almost ten-year break from the Centennial State, Phish in Colorado is becoming a regular occurrence again, with four shows at Red Rocks last summer, two nights in Telluride two months ago, and now three nights at 1STBANK Center in Broomfield. These shows mark the first time the band…

Foals

A few oddly brilliant Nintendo cover bands — notably the Advantage — began packing clubs everywhere a few years back with a sound culled from the 8-bit video-game music that saturated our souls a couple decades ago. More interesting than those unabashed musical Zelda and Metroid devotees, however, are bands…

Halden Wofford and the Hi-Beams

Bret Hertholf — better known around Denver as Halden Wofford — is the author of The Long Gone Lonesome History of Country Music, a book that teaches children about the development of the genre Wofford has devoted much of his life to. But it’d be a big mistake to think…

Remember May

Feather (slated for release this Saturday, October 9, at Casselman’s) is the first batch of new recordings from Remember May since its debut EP in 2007. Led by the muscular vocals of Amanda Capper, whose voice often recalls Linda Perry, the outfit starts off solid with “Silverplume,” a lumbering rocker…

Black Sleep of Kali

Listening to Our Slow Decay, Black Sleep of Kali’s latest effort, calls to mind easy comparisons to Torche because of the heavy melodicism and aggressive vocals, while the progressive structures and densely layered, expansive guitar work recall mid-era Isis. Rather than clutter the songwriting by hitting the listener with as…

Kurt Feldman of the Depreciation Guild expresses his love for Tears for Fears

Based in Brooklyn, the Depreciation Guild made prominent use of the Nintendo Famicom early in its career to build electronic rhythms to underlay founder Kurt Feldman’s luminously melodic guitar pop. Inspired in part by artistically ambitious synth-pop bands of the ’80s as well as experimental, melodic guitar bands like Cocteau…

A Q&A with young Colorado rapper Catch Lungs

Catch Lungs is a bright, emerging MC steadily making a name for himself, both as a member of the Fresh Breath Committee and on his own with a pair of mixtapes, 2008’s Food the Famished and his latest effort, Sleeping Pills Scriptape. Born John Morse in Grand Junction, Catch Lungs…

Scratching the Surface: German trance duo Cosmic Gate at Beta

German trance duo Cosmic Gate — Nic Chagall and Bossi — has spent the last decade producing exactly the kind of slick, spacey trance you’d expect from a German trance duo named Cosmic Gate. It’s big, it’s shiny, it sounds best after 2 a.m. with a head full of illicit…

Who will be Colorado’s next breakout band?

The founders of Next Big Sound believe the Boulder-based tech company can use online chatter to uncover the next big breakout bands. To test their system, we asked them to track down the most buzzed-about Colorado acts. And here are the results: the top 24 bands listing Colorado on their…

Accordion Crimes/Lion Sized

Cash Cow Recording Company started nearly two decades ago with vinyl releases from Squid, Tugboat Annie, Milf and others, but it was inactive for the past thirteen years, and has recently been reborn as Cash Cow Productions. And what better way to get back into the swing of things than…

Lipgloss’s ransom note aesthetic kidnaps our heart

The old “cut up magazines and make it look like a ransom note” approach is so old school, it may have existed before there was a school. But it’s fallen so far out of favor that when it’s occasionally revived, it’s hardly fair to call it cliche. Throwback maybe –…

Eels at Ogden Theatre – 10/05/10

EELS With Jesca Hoop 10.05.10 | Ogden Theatre When we interviewed Eels frontman Mark Oliver Everett (aka E) last week, he said he was having the most fun he’s ever had on tour and that it might surprise people how much fun the shows are. Sure enough. Last night’s show…