The death of Amy Winehouse, in July 2011, at age 27, was the first great tragedy of 21st-century pop music, an event — like the deaths of Tupac Shakur and Kurt Cobain in the last decade of the 20th — that emphasized the jarring contrast between the fragility of human…
Festival Season is in full swing, and with the summer of 2015 comes a new, scrappy, homegrown festival called the Bluebird District Music Festival. If you bought a 3-day wristband, (which you can do here) you’ll be spending this hopefully rain-free weekend traversing the five venues and half mile of…
Boulder’s iconic Trident Cafe, which opened in 1980, is a good place to go if you want to feel bad about your fashion sense. Tom Abraham, one of the cafe’s numerous baristas, can generally be found behind the counter in the daytime sporting his trademark fuzzy black hair and glasses,…
A fan of both Riot Fest and Denver punk band SPELLS created a petition this week to get his favorite local band to play his favorite punk-themed music festival. Bradley Ambrose, an apprentice at Boulder design studio AngryBovine, made it his personal project of the year to get SPELLS to…
“Before this, we were renting a glorified storage unit in Globeville with no heat, no bathroom and no running water,” says artist and musician Zach Reini. “After a winter there, we were done.” As he lounges on a couch in the sun-drenched front room of his multi-use venue Leisure, Reini…
The last time Steely Dan played in Colorado, in 2013, a flash flood struck parts of the Denver metropolitan area and it rained like mad on and off. Much of the crowd bailed on the show and the relatively small group remaining moved forward as it could to, as someone…
Steely Dan and Elvis Costello & the Imposters will perform together tonight at Red Rocks. Perhaps today, the pair share a status as FM radio rock legends from another era, making them reasonable playlist companions. But they still seem to occupy very different musical worlds. Steely Dan has come to…
Rubedo means the fourth and final stage of alchemy. It signals alchemical success, creation of the philosopher’s stone or gold or both, even. As a band name, it’s a pretty bold one. And while Denver group Rubedo did not create literal gold with notes and melodies on stage at the…
In Bill Pohlad’s new film, Love & Mercy, the director explores two different eras of Brian Wilson. One is the mid-’60s Wilson (portrayed by Paul Dano), who had stopped touring with the Beach Boys to work on songs that would eventually end up on Pet Sounds. The other is the…
Winning a Best New Artist Grammy is often the kiss of death for a group that aspires toward commercial success. But that was not the fate of the Zac Brown Band, which won the prestigious award in 2010. The group has only continued to raise its profile since then, not…
The Babysitters are playing their final show this Friday, July 3, at the Walnut Room, with …and the Black Feathers and Super Phoenixes. The latter is Babysitters’ singer and primary songwriter Greg Hill’s new band. Hill has a real gift for a good bad joke and deadpan-humor observations — all of…
DC and Hooks (Dylan Mamid and Zach Rapp-Rovan), the duo known as Zed’s Dead, first became friends because DC needed someone to paint a wall in his garage. “He had a garage that people would hang out in and listen to music, and he wanted his wall painted,” says Rapp-Rovan…
Instant Empire (scheduled to release a new album with a show this Thursday at the Marquis) played one of the first slots at the Westword Music Showcase last weekend. Most rock bands play at night, and most people experience music that they actively seek out after the sun has already…
Celebrity culture is a bit twisted, so Ed Sheeran is, unfortunately, more famous for being Taylor Swift’s best friend then he is for his impressive singing voice. If you Google him, there will be more videos of him stumbling out of a London club then of him using his looping…
According to organizers, some 45,000 people converged in Michigan this past weekend for the jam-bands-meets-ravers annual festival known as Electric Forest. The weather was perfect, the denizens were impossibly friendly, but the logistics and other quirks sometimes wrecked the vibe. The Worst Getting in Big festivals are often a logistical…
The Seattle-based rock band Chastity Belt made its second Denver appearance at Dryer Plug Studios over the weekend. (The first was in 2013, when the group played with Pony Time at Rhinoceropolis.) This time, at least half the band members discarded their shoes while performing. The way the they interacted…
The annual Bohemian Nights concert series at New West Fest in Fort Collins is getting a loud, energetic and modern addition this August: Electronic artist Michal Menert, who will be playing his hometown. The Michal Menert trio will take the Linden Stage from 8:50 to 9:50 on Saturday, while a…
Since its founding in 2008, Electric Forest has split the difference between jam bands and EDM. On Friday night Skrillex, playing a guitar, joined String Cheese for a medley of Doors’ songs “Break on Through (To the Other Side)” and “L.A. Woman.” It wasn’t as bad as it sounds! Though…
At big music festivals like Electric Forest, totems are critical for meeting up with your friends — just stick ’em in the sky and your people will stop wandering in circles. These decorated placards-on-sticks have become tremendously popular in recent years, and Electric Forest attendees had some definite winners. For…
We all know kids die at raves. It happens all the time, including most recently at EDC last weekend in Las Vegas. Usually, the cause is drugs. But not everyone who takes drugs die; those who know what they’re actually taking, stay hydrated and take other precautions have a better…
The organizers of Electric Forest set their sights this year on breaking the record for the world’s largest group hug. This is a real thing, certified by Guinness: 10,554 folks in Ottawa, Ontario held each other in 2010, setting the standard. Since Electric Forest draws more than 30,000 attendees —…
