If you follow F.O.E. and Whygee on Twitter, then you’ve noticed that they’ve been hanging out in the studio together quite a bit lately. Although the two best rappers on either side of Colorado Boulevard are keeping mum on what they’re working on, we were able to get snag a…
Formerly known as the Motion Underground Dance Studio, Mad Monkey Projects, Inc. headed by choreographer Ken Jimenez is gearing up for their Summer Dance Intensive & Auditions in August. In an effort to get dancers to come out for the class, along with their Get Down Station program, they put…
Some say the bowerbird is one of the most fascinating birds in the world. The males go to great lengths to build ornate bowers with twigs, grass and bright objects to attract the females, which is pretty rare in the animal kingdom. This particular bird inspired the moniker of North…
The Jet Entertainment Group has opened Jet South in the former Purple Martini DTC spot at 8000 East Belleview Avenue in Greenwood Village. While the Purple Martini was soaked in earth tones and purple lighting, Jet South is all about silvers, grays and black. Jordan Bullock, Jet’s VP of marketing,…
Multi-instrumentalist Jimmy LaValle, the man behind the Album Leaf, wasn’t always such a mellow fellow. Back in the ’90s, he got his first taste of large-scale musical appreciation as a guitarist with Tristeza, a singing-free combo capable of unleashing a righteous clangor on cuts such as “El Mirador,” and while…
Although technically part of the whole jam-band phenomenon that has come in the wake of the cult of the Grateful Dead, Philadelphia’s Boris Garcia is a cut above most. This band learned early on that at its core, the Dead wrote great songs, without which the extended instrumental passages would…
A rarity among surviving punk bands of the ’70s, 999 actually sports three-fourths of its original lineup — and the missing fourth is filled by Arturo Bassick, a founding member of fellow British sneer pioneers the Lurkers. Then again, 999 never achieved the kind of fame or velocity that tore…
If you think seeing a Black Francis show is essentially the same as seeing a Frank Black show, and that both are at least roughly analogous to seeing a Pixies show, you’re wrong. When Charles Thompson launched his new stage persona, Frank Black, after breaking up the Pixies in 1993,…
This one’s double-take material: Agent Orange, Fear, D.I. Total Chaos and Bloodhook are on tour together, and they’re stopping in Denver. Let’s run that one back: Agent Orange, as in the outfit that invented surf punk. The group every single punk band with a clue has listed as an influence…
Now on his third album as Pictureplane, Rhinoceropolis linchpin Travis Egedy is coming tantalizingly close to fashioning something consistently sublime out of his ultra-low-budget, hallucinatory take on ’80s dance music. On Dark Rift, his Lovepump United debut, his tendency to overstuff his tracks occasionally mutes their danceability; “Cyclical Cyclical (Atlantis)”…
Written as a musical companion to Rachel Carson’s 1951 classic on marine biology, The Sea Around Us, this latest full-length from Fort Collins’s Candy Claws bears immediate sonic comparisons to the Animal Collective opus Merriweather Postpavillion. The dreamy, breathy soundscaping across the entire album captures images of sun-dappled afternoons on…
The messages in contemporary-Christian songs have grown more subtle over time as bands have sought to broaden listenership — hence lots of vague lyrics that work equally well as an ode to a girl or a paean to the Lord. But Rough Draft, out of Fort Collins, is more explicit…
Catfish Kray might be a blues veteran who started playing during the ’60s in Cleveland before moving to Denver in 1980, but he recruited some young talent last year, essentially cutting the band’s average age in half. The young blood seems to have added a notable amount of fire to…
Unless you’re tuning in to some kind of specialty show, the number of female voices, literally and otherwise, that you’ll hear on the radio or see on TV is criminally small compared to those of their male counterparts. That ratio drops further when you try to find women doing challenging…
Derek Vincent Smith is the electronic-music mastermind behind Pretty Lights, the Fort Collins-based act whose last two albums just surpassed 110,000 digital downloads. The music of Pretty Lights is like a mixtape of styles Smith grew up listening to, from ’70s AM Gold-era soul to bass-heavy club beats to gangsta…
Los Angeles based Andy Caldwell claims his ambitions were small when he started out a decade and a half ago: He just wanted to hear his tunes on gigantic speakers in front of a huge crowd. It’s safe to say that he’s exceeded those expectations many times over by now…
Among the most literate of hip-hop artists, Chris Steele, aka Time, is a seemingly endless wellspring of clever turns of phrase and creatively illuminating pairings of words and ideas. The guy certainly has silly, fun-loving songs, but even these are written with a playful intelligence. Time’s true genius can be…
We heard some rumblings a month ago that this might happen, but we were hoping against hope it wouldn’t. Well, hope got played, because today Everything Absent or Distorted (a love story) officially announced that they are calling it quits. The poetic and obscure post names “built-in contradiction” as the…
The author is a Denver-based music junkie and quasi-music writer of the female variety, and not she’s afraid to admit that she sometimes wants to make out with the bands she writes about. This year’s Mile High Music Festival billed some of the hottest bands around. But since I sometimes…
See more photos at westword.com/sldeshow. Tuesday, July 21, 2009 Ogden Theatre Better Than: Chaperoning an unchaperoned prom. Not that different, but definitely better. It’s not often someone asks you, during the first song of a headliner’s set, “Who is this?” It’s even less often that when you answer with the…
Back in December, Colorado MCs Whygee and Sunkenstate connected with Colorado producer Kid Hum to create Suicide Watch, one of the better Colorado hip-hop releases of 2008. And it was free! Now Whygee and Sunk have reconnected for Suicide Watch 2: Sambodextrust, a seven-song collection that features production from Nigel…
Last month, we wistfully reflected on the final razing of Rainbow Music Hall, specifically, the iconic marquee that outlived the venue itself and served as a reminder of the early years of Denver music. As we remembered the many shows we saw there growing up, we became somewhat outraged that…
