Concerts

It’s a good one, folks: KS 107.5 FM’s Summer Jam brings hip-hop royalty to Englewood tonight, and most of the people there will probably be capping off their weekends with The Fray at Red Rocks on Sunday. There’s more: Dragondeer, subject of this week’s Backbeat feature, will release its long-awaited…

Film on the Rocks kicked off its fifteenth season on Tuesday with a screening of Caddyshack. As at all of these, a couple Colorado bands played opening sets. We won’t make you wait for a verdict: It is spectacularly awesome to have one of those spots. There are down sides…

A Colorado summer can be short, but there are plenty of ways to make it sweet, especially if you pack it with as many festivals, road trips and patios as possible. We’ve picked out ten music festivals sure to give you the flavor of the state’s musical offerings — everything…

Eric Halborg is best known in Denver music for his work fronting the Swayback, a hard-driving rock band that has toured the country and attained unusual success here at home. He’s got another band these days; called Dragondeer, it’s an outlet for the kinds of blues and jam bands he…

Fantasia 2014 is billing itself — at least on Facebook, anyway — as a “performance festival.” But it’s not a big, multi-stage summertime throwdown for thousands. Fantasia 2014 is an intimate experience, one that co-curators Colin Ward and Stefan Herrera hope will draw people to fest location Rhinoceropolis, especially those…

It’s Westword Music Showcase month, and today we have a schedule for you. In case this is unfamiliar territory: For the twentieth year, we’ll celebrate the wide array of Denver’s music scene with a music festival right here in the city. The thing has grown over the decades, and this…

Ed. We got a dispatch from this weekend’s Bassnectar show by a young writer and music lover who is just over three months sober. We’ve chosen to leave her name off of it because the Internet never forgets anything. She is experiencing her first summer in the concert playground of…

Going to an electronica show is a fantastic excuse to bust out a wild outfit to accentuate your dance moves, and Bassnectar, in town this weekend for their annual appearance at Red Rocks, was no different. Here are the ten best getups from the show, as found by photographer Eric…

Iain Chisholm owns the Italian restaurant Amerigo on Upper Larimer. It’s a good place to be, and recently the lines necessitated expansion. “As the neighborhood came online, we were starting to turn a lot of people away on the weekends because we didn’t have any place for them to wait…

The Pretty Reckless stopped by The Fillmore this weekend, and things got a little wild. For those who rarely go to hard rock shows, or have just forgotten the proper etiquette, a concert like this can pose a lot of questions: What should I wear? Will there be a mosh…

In 2010, just days after the earthquake in Haiti, Wheelchair Sports Camp’s Kalyn Heffernan and fellow local musician Greg Cronin decided to do something. The two hastily set up a benefit show and raised close to a thousand dollars; the funds went directly to supporting medical assistance in Haiti, and…

There are bigger concerts, sure, but for our money there is no better way to see Red Rocks than during Film on the Rocks. The series, which features Colorado bands opening for beloved movies, starts Tuesday with Ark Life, Covenhoven and Caddyshack. You can also see some masterful old-timey updates…

It’s the most wonderful time of the week. There are some excellent concerts in town on this final weekend of May, including John Prine with Emmylou Harris and Bootsy Collins in Civic Center Park for the The Kinfolks Soul Food Festival. There are some fresher faces too, like Bassnectar at…

In the early hours of Thursday, March 13, 2014, a drunk driver injured 23 people and killed two at SXSW. There has been an outpouring of national support for the victims of the incident, and today it comes from Colorado. A benefit show called SXSW Cares is being held at…

When Luis Etscheid and Caleb Henning launched their boutique effects-pedal company, Mantic Conceptual, in spring 2013, they had a great deal more curiosity than experience. Fortunately, the Denver-based musicians are pretty good at experimentation, and in their first year, they found an impressive list of clients. Etscheid sent Adrian Belew,…

Let’s keep it simple for a moment: Science Partner and In the Whale are playing a show next Friday, June 6 at Stoney’s, and it’s free. Doors open at 7 p.m. and it’ll be over by 10. “Science Partner all is about the bounce and the sigh” wrote Jason Heller…

The first time I saw tUnE-yArDs, the avant-pop project of Merrill Garbus, was in 2011 at Fun Fun Fun Fest. She was dressed as if she had fallen in a trunk of costumes with a painted face and was pounding on a taped-up ukulele while creating intricate loops on top…

There is a generally agreed-upon set of rules among young and hungry music fans: You show up early, you stay late, you find new things, you stand in the front. That’s how Amber Taufen learned to love music. It’s how she met her husband, in fact. But in this week’s…

Mutiny Information Café may be ground zero for the next generation of Denver’s music scene. The shop sits on the southeast corner of Broadway and Ellsworth. Its modest but inviting exterior hasn’t changed too much since Matt Megyesi, Joe Ramirez and 3 Kings Tavern co-partner Jim Norris took over operations…

A group of firefighters with yellow walkie talkies swaying at their chests were examining the new on-site structures at the first show at a renovated Fiddler’s Green Ampitheatre. They wanted to ensure that they were familiar with the new facilities in case they were called to the scene in the…

We hope your long weekend was as full of smoked meats and assorted outdoor activities as ours was. And now we’re back and ready to talk about Denver concerts some more. Obviously the selections are a little lighter in this week’s show round-up given that we lost a day. But…