Selko’s a beatmaker who thrives in the shadows

You may not have heard much about Selko, and there’s a good reason for that. With the exception of some occasional tweets and the placement of his ninja stickers around town, he’s kept a relatively low profile. Tomorrow night at Herman’s Hideaway (with Yo, Flaco!, the Dendrites, Gamerlife and Blazing…

Free mix from DJ Narky Stares of the Real is a Feeling crew

Not a lot of holiday parties circle around events that only happen every 456 years, but tomorrow night at Meadowlark, Real is a Feeling is holding it down as your winter solstice pre-party headquarters. To honor the solstice — which is extra special because it also falls on the lunar…

Photos: Creep at Beauty Bar, 12/15/10

Last night the first-ever Creep party at Beauty Bar — you may have read about it here on Backbeat — went down. Nightlife photographer Jonathan Shoup brings back these photos. See the full slideshow here: Creep at Beauty Bar…

Tonight: Girls Walk By at 3 Kings

Yet another great project featuring Suzi Bromfield, Girls Walk By is a guitar-pop band, yes, but in a Pixies kind of way. Three-part harmonies and surf guitar abound, but the darkness saturating the vocals and instrumentation is what gives the quartet an distinction beyond its psychadelic undertones…

Jagwire

In the world of rap and circumstance, there is room for pretty much everyone. Unreleased Tension, Jagwire’s latest, carves out the MC’s lane among the mediocre, if not the motivated. He raps over production that is more advanced than his flow, as is the case with “Shangri-La,” a track about…

Spoke In Wordz set to drop Power of Wordz

Spoke In Wordz has completed work on the Get the Power comp he spoke about this past August. The platter — now titled Power of Wordz and slated for release on Friday, January 21 at Casselman’s — features a vibrant cast of characters from the local hip-hop scene, a veritable…

Top 10 Denver New Year’s Eve Concerts 2010

Arguably the best single night of the year for live music, New Year’s Eve can be an overwhelming thing to plan for. To help you narrow down your options, we’ve picked the ten best shows this year, plus a few extras we couldn’t ignore. Also, feel free to hype your…

Winter Solstice flier gives the holiday a dark vibe

The Winter Solstice is the holiday people celebrate when they don’t want to celebrate any of the major holidays. It was also a popular Viking tradition that included a number of badass-sounding celebrations like the Feast of the Dead and the lighting of Yule logs in honor of Thor…

Tonight: Halford at the Ogden

Though Rob Halford still holds it down as the leader of Judas Priest, the enigmatic band leader has kept busy with several other music projects during his forty-plus years in music. With a vocal range that is unmatched, Halford has carried the crown as the living heavy-metal god through two…

Mark Farina plans to mix it up at the Gothic

“I feel I’m a good conduit, you could say, for bringing new music to a crowd,” muses Mark Farina. “I get a lot of enjoyment from playing new music, even though vibes and artists have changed over the past twenty years. One of my initial things starting out was playing…

Francois Safieddine has plans for Ruth’s Chris Steakhouse

In September, Francois Safieddine bought the building at 1414 Market Street — which is home to his clubs Oak Tavern and 24K — for $1,525,000. At around the same time, he also bought the former home of Mori, the old Nisei lodge at 2015 Market, from the Nisei Veterans Heritage…

Flashlights, December 17 at the Larimer Lounge

Ethan Converse and Sam Martin started Flashlights (due Friday, December 17, at the Larimer Lounge) messing around with synthesizers and software while living in Boulder. They say their early material was rough and not as evolved as they would have liked. Be that as it may, anyone who saw any…

Steel Panther

How long has it been since the Darkness finally went away? The correct answer: not long enough. Don’t count your blessings yet, though. Steel Panther is filling the vacuum, doing to American glam metal what the Darkness did to British glam rock — namely, ass-fucking it. The group’s only saving…

D.R.I.

Dirty Rotten Imbeciles started out as a speedy hardcore band in Houston in the early ’80s. The band was renowned for its short songs, its leftist politics and the frenzied passion of its playing. D.R.I.’s appropriately-titled, landmark 1987 album, Crossover, lived up to its name by introducing a sound that…

Low

When Low formed in Duluth, Minnesota, in 1993, no one could have guessed it would become one of the most respected underground bands of the next two decades. In an era when most acts traded in sheer volume, Low focused instead on raw emotional honesty expressed with a quiet and…

Buzzov•en

Whole generations of doom-, sludge-, and stoner-rock bands have come and gone since Buzzov•en first trod the earth in 1989. Raw, screamy and ragged, the outfit helped set the tone for underground metal throughout the ’90s and ’00s — despite the fact that the band hasn’t released a studio album…