Another full dance card this weekend: Sub.mission celebrates its fifth anniversary with a big blowout at City Hall on Saturday, Connie (in her first-ever Denver set) and Ana Sia are both bringing the girl power in different genres this weekend, and they’re balanced out by duo Thugfucker in that act’s…
Holy Jesus! The bizarro-but-awesome Big Head Todd and Bill Murray saga just took an interesting turn. Last week, as you might remember, we posted a short item about Big Bad Bill being spotted all over Austin recently at SXSW rocking Big Head Todd T-shirts. The actor and La Cabeza Grande…
Explosions in the Sky (due tonight at the Boulder Theater) is an instrumental rock band based out of Austin, Texas. For the last thirteen years, the quartet has been creating a kind of anthemic, instrumental guitar rock that sparkles with impressionistic melodies building to a cathartic apex, not unlike a…
It’s official: Flobots are no longer without a label. After parting ways with Universal Records in December 2010 — the label that issued the band’s last full-length, Survival Story — the band has officially been picked up by Shanachie Entertainment, a prominent independent label founded in the mid ’70s by…
With Choice of Weapon, The Cult’s first studio album in five years, slated to hit stores on May 22, the band kicks off the first leg of its North American tour in San Diego on May 25 and hits the Ogden Theatre on Wednesday, May 30. The Cult’s current line-up…
Oh, now, this is rich: In an effort to thwart the efforts of any would-be paparazzi on her upcoming tour, which hits the Pepsi Center on Thursday, October 18, Madonna has reportedly contracted a cluster of Madonna-bes to impersonator her in various cities. If indeed true (for what it’s worth,…
mr. Gnome (due tonight at the Hi-Dive) tours more than most bands. The act’s music is often thrown under the umbrella term “psychedelic.” But clearly this Cleveland-based duo isn’t really trying to sound like another psychedelic band. From the way Nicole Barille and Sam Meister present themselves in their press…
While legendary Chicago-based punk band Screeching Weasel has broken up and re-formed a number of times since being founded in 1986, frontman Ben “Weasel” Foster, the only constant member, is hitting the road with a new line-up as part of the band’s Heard You Were Dead tour, which stops at…
Jason Mraz is coming to Red Rocks on Monday, September 24, as part of his tour in support of his forthcoming album, Love is a Four Letter Word, due out Tuesday, April 17. Philadelphia-based singer-songwriter and Atlantic label mate Christina Perri opens the show. Tickets ($39.50-$59.50) go on sale to…
This past Friday night, MCA Denver opened its Search & Destroy exhibition, which displayed everything from the works of photographers Bruce Conner and Richard Peterson to old copies of MRR to posters and large-scale Black Flag art. Backbeat cartoonist Noah Van Sciver was there and brings back his interpretation…
Skream & Benga’s show at the Ogden Theatre, originally slated for tomorrow, Wednesday, April 4, has been moved to the Bluebird Theater. All tickets for the Ogden show will be honored, and tickets ($26.50) are still available through AXS. Hijak, Plastician, Sgt Pokes and Jackmaster are set to open the…
Jimmy Cliff at the Ogden Theatre on Tuesday, June 19. Tickets ($34.95 plus fees) to see the reggae legend, whose career spans five decades, go on sale this Saturday, April 7, at 10 a.m. via Axs.com. On his most recent effort, the Sacred Fire EP, released last November, Cliff collaborated…
Yo! We’ve got a hip-hop whodunit on our hands. Well, maybe not a whodunit, but still, there’s a mystery afoot in the world of rap. And if there’s anything we love more than rappers, it’s mystery rappers! Who the hell is this Benjamin Butters cat? Do you know? We need…
The date for this year’s Westword Music Showcase is coming up fast, and while we’re still putting together the all-star local lineup (seriously, this is shaping up to be the best one yet), we have another headliner to announce: Baywood, the funtastical duo featuring former Single File bassist, Joe Ginsberg,…
Santigold is coming to Ogden Theatre on Tuesday, May 29. Touring in support of her forthcoming release, Master of My Make-Believe — her first release since 2008’s Santogold — due out on Tuesday, May 1, the artist otherwise known as Santi White is bound to arrive in the Mile High…
The Fray performed the national anthem at the NCAA championship last night, and like most songs the boys cover, they made it their own. There was nothing inherently wrong with their performance, except that, well, if you’re a purist, there was everything wrong with their performance. Really, is it too…
SP Double just wants to keep it moving. The MC (aka Adrian Perlman) has endured his share of personal travails and had enough beef with other rappers to fill a warehouse. But all of that’s in the rearview now; he’d rather focus on what’s ahead. Just the same, he’s smart…
Before she moved to Denver, Nicole Cacciavillano was planning to be a full-time teacher on the East Coast. But then something tragic happened that altered her course. “The guy that I was with, who I had my whole life planned with,” she says, “got murdered.” When this unexpected event happened…
The Skeleton Show (due at Bender’s Tavern on Saturday, April 7) exemplifies the free-spirited fire of ’60s garage bands who sat on the cusp of psychedelia and waded deep into that dirty musical water more than half the time. With a raw live performance in which some bandmembers come dangerously…
When the Format broke up in 2008, frontman Nate Ruess regrouped and formed Fun. with the help of Andrew Dost and Jack Antonoff, venturing firmly into the realm of pop rock with the act’s debut album, Aim and Ignite. That release garnered acclaim, but the group really hit the big…
The most startling aspect of Gotye’s sound is its sincerity. This is — as others have noted both about him and to him — very Phil Collins of him, quite broodingly Sting and earnestly Peter Gabriel. A fact that fewer tend to point out is that this isn’t Gotye’s first…
Kawabata Makoto, the founder of Acid Mothers Temple, started his career in music in the late 1970s. Whether he experienced Flower Travellin’ Band’s motes of resonating distortion or the dark, haunted droning of Les Rallizes Denudes firsthand is anyone’s guess. But since founding Acid Mothers in 1995, Kawabata has forged…
