Concerts

Despite having been together for only a short time and not playing many local shows, Tennis (due on Friday, September 10, at the Larimer Lounge) has stirred some buzz outside of Denver through write-ups on Pitchfork, Gorilla vs. Bear and, most recently, the New York Times blog. Inspired in part…

Owen Ashworth started Casiotone for the Painfully Alone in 1997 as an electro-pop one-man band. But over the years, the act has made its sound more organic, especially as Ashworth started playing with various collaborators. The seemingly confessional lyrics are really snapshots of American life, and the kinds of portraits…

Formed in 2004, when its members were still in high school, Paramore has become a rock-radio institution, with several tours down and three albums on the venerable pop-punk imprint Fueled by Ramen under its belt. Hayley Williams’s robust and pitch-perfect vocals shoot the band far beyond contemporary acts like Boys…

Capitalizing on the best part of Bloc Party, lead singer Kele Okereke has stepped out and found a better place for his vacant and sexy vocals: the club. Enlisting Spank Rock producer XXXChange for his solo debut, The Boxer, Kele released an early-summer single, “Tenderoni,” which served as a dirty…

“Tramps like us, baby we were born to die,” shouts Titus Andronicus singer Patrick Stickles on the opening track of his band’s latest album, The Monitor. The line is an obvious homage to both the Garden State, from which he and his bandmates hail, and that state’s most celebrated Boss…

With his modified wok-lid resonator guitar, rigged-up drum kit (which includes a metal washtub for a snare), a rusty Falstaff beer-can microphone and assorted other things, you have to wonder how the hell Brent Burkhart, aka Reverend Deadeye, takes the one-man band concept to a completely different level — and…

Five 13 trades in a very distinctive blend of metal, minted in the latter part of the second Reagan administration. If the names Fates Warning, Scorpions, Dokken or Warrant make you scoff or otherwise turn up your nose, you’ll want to steer clear of this album, which sounds like a…

Daralee Fallin is working with drum machines and synths with effects — familiar elements of electronic music — across this four-song release. From the jump, though, there’s an undeniably organic feel to the music and a warmth that doesn’t just cradle the listener in a sense of comfort and well-being;…

Listening to side one of this cassette-only release, you can’t help but think of the scenes from Videodrome where James Woods watches the TV show of the same name and becomes both repulsed and obsessed with the programming. The textured drone is reminiscent of those distorted images, and, while abstract,…

The promo sticker on Crowded House vocalist/guitarist Neil Finn’s 1998 debut solo disc, Try Whistling This, praised him as “one of the finest songsmiths of his generation.” It was a claim few pop lovers would dare to deny. If you’ve turned on a radio in the past two decades, chances are…

If not for Pavement all but deconstructing the dominant paradigm of rock music throughout the ’90s with albums like Slanted and Enchanted, Crooked Rain, Crooked Rain and Wowee Zowee!, so much of the underground rock that’s come out since the band parted ways in 1999 would have been much more…

Along with Claude Von Stroke, the Martin Brothers (actual brothers Christian and Justin Martin) have carved out a distinctive brand of dance music on the dirtybird label. The brothers have both notched some notable successes on their own, but their collaborations on tracks such as “Dum,” “Duckface” and “Stoopit” are…

Back in the 1980s, music journalism was a field people were falling over themselves to get into. This was hot on the heels of the Lester Bangs era, when DIY and punk movements started taking over and bands were coming out of every small town in America. It also marked…

NPR has been quietly building a reputation as the best place to get a peek at hotly anticipated new albums a week or two before their official releases (welll, for those of us who prefer to avoid leak sites and torrent servers, anyway). Today, it got a lot louder, with…

SLEEP Git Some • Russian Circles 09.05.10 | Gothic Theatre view full slide show From brutal, clipped guitar work to huge, foreboding sounds created by guitars that are more akin to synths, Russian Circles scrolled through a wide range of styles that it executed with both ease and precision, like…

WILCO 09.03.10 | Jazz Aspen Snowmass “Don’t even think about yelling ‘Freebird,” Wilco frontman Jeff Tweedy responded to the guy in the crowd who screamed out the name of the Lynyrd Skynyrd tune early in Wilco’s ambitious two-hour set at the Jazz Aspen Snowmass Labor Day festival. “You can wait…

Vampire Weekend Dum Dum Girls • Beach House 09.03.10 | Red Rocks Amphitheatre view full slide show Dum Dum Girls opened the show with a notable display of confidence and music reminiscent of Elastica with a ’60s girl-group vibe. The combination of chiming textures and flowing atmospheres in the guitar…

As you might have read here on Backbeat, Electric Avenue Music and Arts Festival is going on this weekend (it wraps up tonight.) Last night, photographer Eric Gruneisen stopped by the festival in Five Points and brings back these photos: Electric Avenue Music & Arts Festival (slideshow)…

If you missed it last night — you can’t blame us, we we’re giving away tickets — here are photos (shot by Aaron Thackeray) of the indie tour that swung through Red Rocks Amphitheatre last night: Vampire Weekend (for whom we can Justify Our Love), Beach House and Dum Dum…

Ah, Labor Day weekend: Time for us to chill and do nothing like it’s our job. Our musician friends, however, well, they’ll be putting the “labor” in Labor Day. To that end, there’s a ridiculous number of options if you’re looking to do something compelling and music related, and we’ve…