Concerts

It’s another big weekend for music on the Front Range. Tonight, Otis Taylor kicks off his Trance Blues Festival, which runs from this evening through Sunday and is spread across a variety of venues in Boulder. Elsewhere, Nathaniel Rateliff’s hosting his annual holiday soiree at the Gothic with stacked bill…

Feel like dancing? There’re plenty of places to get your groove on this weekend. Tonight, Bar Standard is hosting Spacetime Continuum and DJ ESP (aka Woody McBride) as part of Full Flavor Fridays; expect ambient techno and experimental live PA or vinyl sets from the double-header. Ivy, Brandon Brown and…

Sunday was a good day for Taylor Swift. A glowing profile by 60 Minutes’ Leslie Stahl, followed by her cleaning up at the American Music Awards; she took home the awards for Favorite Country Female Artist, Artist of The Year, Favorite Country Female Artist, and Speak Now won Favorite Country…

Update, 7:54 p.m.: Astoundingly, unless our eyes are playing tricks on us, Five Iron Frenzy appears to have already reached its Kickstarter goal of raising $30,000 to record its new album. Holy crap! That’s got to be some kind of record. So far, this reunion seems to be off to…

Update (11/22/11): The good news is our pal Jim Norris is back on the mend. The bad news is that his recent hospital stay has left him with a stack of bills. With that in mind, a number of friends are rallying to support the good Rev with a number…

Update 11/22/11: Good news! Chris “Citrus” Sauthoff appears to be on his way to making a recovery from the minor stroke he recently suffered. The sensation in his hand is evidently improving. Just the same, it’s going to be a while before he’s back to 100 percent, and so in…

As if we don’t have enough to be thankful for already being blessed to live here in God’s country, the land of eternal sunshine and medicinal mary jane, here’s something else to give thanks for this week. This Thursday, Open Air 1340 AM, the freshly minted Colorado Public Radio station…

Everybody thinks I play gloom-and-doom music,” says Otis Taylor, “so I don’t get hired to play during the holidays, because people think my music is too dark. It’s just what people think: ‘You’d get Otis Taylor for a Christmas party? I don’t think so.'” Taylor’s trance-blues shows are actually uplifting…

The fourteen-year-old Dave & Buster’s at 2000 South Colorado Boulevard just became the chain’s first location to get a major overhaul. The redesign is the initial phase of the company’s rebranding, and while there’s no schedule yet for rolling out the changes through the other 56 locations, Sean McCullough, regional…

Everyone in Denver got to take Nathaniel Rateliff for granted for many years — both as the frontman of Born in the Flood and with the Wheel — watching him perform at intimate places like the hi-dive and the Larimer Lounge. But over this past year, Rateliff’s profile grew considerably…

Since releasing 2007’s Like Love Lust & the Open Halls of the Soul, Jesse Sykes has left Barsuk Records, her longtime label, left Seattle, her longtime home; left Sweet Hereafter guitarist Phil Wandscher, her longtime boyfriend; and given up drinking, her longtime salve. Today Sykes is intellectually engaged and ferociously…

Tennessee’s Whitechapel crafts its malevolent deathcore with three guitarists. The down-tuned doom of this act is marked by finger-widdling flurries and false harmonic squeals, Phil Bozeman’s disturbingly possessed post-Pantera vocals and a rhythm section that attacks with a cornered, Gadhafi-esque cruelty. Last year’s A New Era of Corruption is both…

Peter Murphy is probably best known for his role as the charismatic, mysterious, ectomorphic frontman for influential post-punk band Bauhaus. But before that act reunited in the late ’90s and since, Murphy has released a string of accomplished albums under his own name. It wasn’t until his second solo record,…

Named after a state park of the same name in the Ozarks, Ha Ha Tonka plays the sort of Americana that would be right at home in an episode of Prairie Home Companion. Although its lyrics are focused on imagery and themes you’d expect from a poet laureate from rural…

Ah, Thanksgiving, when we gather together to give thanks for that handful of well-meaning but unbelievably misguided Native Americans who fed our ancestors through the harsh winter so that our ancestors could later slaughter them and destroy their culture by engaging in the traditional gluttonous excess for which they paved…

This debut EP from Seris sounds like the band is serious about courting label attention. And it’s not just because the sonic character of all three songs is top-notch, but also because there isn’t a subpar performance in any of them. Seris sounds a lot like Nightwish with its penchant…

Rapper and singer Moss shows diversity on his latest release, It’s Like I’m Famous. “My Zone” has an intergalactic production feel, which complements Moss’s deep vocals over a rapid snare, and he spits with confidence on lines like “My flow is hot like I rap with Satan.” Not a lot of metaphors to be…

Instant Empire hasn’t been together all that long, but that fact isn’t readily apparent from listening to the indie-rockers’ self-titled EP. There’s a certain tightness and a strong sense of dynamics on the three main cuts (there are also a brief intro and short instrumental outro), especially “Without Wires,” which…

Although Tyler Despres originally formed Science Partner in 2008 as an outlet for his acoustic material outside of his work with Dualistics, the project has developed into a six-piece. Despres already had a knack for writing moving songs on his own, but on Science Partner’s eleven-track full-length debut, Rocky Mountain…

Lilly Scott formed Varlet with her brother David when she was still in high school. In 2009, after playing some low-key local shows, Lilly decided to audition for American Idol. After spending all day at Invesco Field before her audition, Scott ended up in the hospital with appendicitis. Fortunately, she…

Full Flavor Fridays (in association with Pleasuredome) will be bringing DJ ESP (aka Woody McBride) to Denver for the second time this year — and techno legend Spacetime Continuum (aka Jonah Sharp) for the first. Sharp released solo studio albums on the Astralwerks and Virgin labels in the ’90s, and…