Concerts

Now, here’s a cool idea. Take all those thousands and thousands of useless, forgotten and worthless, but oh-so-shiny CDs, and use them to make something beautiful. In this case, a giant piece of public art called “CDSea” in Kilmington, UK by artist Bruce Munro…

The opening of Beauty Bar last weekend was apparently cool enough to capture the eye (or lens, more to the point) of LastNightsParty.com. The infamous party photo site has a deluxe sized assortment of photos up from the event, featuring a variety of Denver music personalities and a much larger…

This is the weirdest studio record for us, for sure, in every way,” guitarist Nels Cline says of the Nels Cline Singers’ latest effort, Initiate. “I came into the session with almost no music finished. I had all these sketchy ideas, and I had this desire to make this different…

The 15th Street Tavern is still a legend in this town, even though the downtown bar/club closed three years ago. And ever since, Mykel Martinez has been trying to resurrect it. He was going to open a place on Park Avenue West, but his liquor license application was denied; then…

Ron Cole may not be a name that immediately comes to mind when you think of the best, most well-known electronic artists coming out of Colorado, but that will probably change a great deal in the next year as his music, released under the name Hollagramz (playing Friday, June 25,…

Do thumping club tracks move better when they’re being pumped out by a couple of guys donning gold Jason Voorhees masks? Maybe. In the four years that Toronto duo MSTRKRFT has been supplying thick electro-house, its two producers have kept some impressive company. They’ve famously remixed everyone from the Yeah…

With so many bands seeking new ways to reinterpret the sound of Black Sabbath and Led Zeppelin for the modern era — blissfully unaware of similar efforts in the ’80s — Free Energy wisely took a different route. The outfit, which hails from Philadephia (three of its four members played…

Long tagged as the supreme warlords of sludge, the Melvins have crawled out of that primordial birthplace and undergone a weird yet compelling evolution over the past few years. Perhaps emboldened by signing to Mike Patton’s Ipecac Records — the home of many an experimental rock band — or simply…

Chances are, if you’ve been paying attention for the past seventeen years or so, you know who Tool is. You probably also know some really obnoxious idiots who worship this band mostly for its darkness and the brutal precision of its instrumentation — that, and its supposedly misanthropic themes. This…

Julie Geller bills her latest release, You’re With Me, as “a unique blend of folk and Jewish music” — but unless you count one song that kind of sounds like a Yiddish version of Bob Dylan’s “Subterranean Homesick Blues” and a couple of pop numbers in Hebrew, it doesn’t really…

A few songs into King for a Day’s latest effort, The Light Is On and Shining Brightly for the Masses, the band launches into “Down All the Days” with a propulsive beat and a bass line that recalls “Question of Temperature,” a tune originally done by the late-’60s garage-rock outfit…

The latest release from Nocturnal Dirt Surfers Alliance is a compilation of live recordings conducted at the Oriental Theater over the course of three days in late January 2010 minus an audience. With no overdubs offered, it may be a bit of a lo-fi effort, but some of these artists…

The scope of Grant Gordy’s freshman release is ambitious, to say the least. Swinging echoes of Django Reinhardt, dense guitar melodies worthy of Bill Frisell, Doc Watson-inspired flatpicking and counterpoint experiments straight out of a Debussy suite all find a place across the thirteen instrumental tracks. It’s a brainy musical…

Jakob Dylan’s brand-new collection, Women and Country, is by far the most interesting release by the former Wallflowers frontman. It’s subtle, funny and intimate without being hermetic, not to mention a good contemporary take on the grand old country tradition. Likely first impression: “Wow, Jakob Dylan made the best Springsteen…

Tyvek is an all-purpose synthetic substance and a registered trademark of the DuPont Company. You’ve probably handled it in the form of a priority-mail envelope, or as that sticky bar bracelet that identifies you as being over the age of 21 when you go to a show. But Tyvek’s most…

Something about warm summer nights makes them the ideal setting for high-energy, euphoric trance. Maybe it’s the energy boost you get when the heat finally breaks, or the side effect of too much sun that makes those insistent drums and soaring vocal breaks seem like such a good idea. Whatever…

Shhh! Can you keep a secret? No? That’s what we figured. Ah, well, guess it’s good thing it’s not really a secret, huh? On Tuesday, to celebrate the highly anticipated release of its new album, Streets of Gold, 3OH!3 is slated to give a brief performance at Fiske Planetarium up…

Sure, there are guitarists who’ll say that no software will ever come close to emulating a ’65 Deluxe Reverb or a Marshall JCM800. But the folks at IK Multimedia have been doing a pretty good job emulating those amps as well as effects for a while now. Earlier this month,…

Ah, the producer. It’s one of the most thankless jobs in hip-hop. Apart from a few superstars like Danger Mouse and Timbaland, most producers are destined to be overshadowed by the MC on the track and displaced by a DJ in a club despite their vital role in the music-making…

There’s one for every generation: the shock rocker. For those of us who grew up in the ’90s, it was Marilyn Manson. For our parents, it was Alice Cooper. For the current crop of young, impressionable minds, it’s, uh, Lady Gaga, apparently. As reported (and poorly sourced) by notorious U.K…

Here’s our massive, multi-page report/travelogue of the Westword Music Showcase from (in order) Tom Murphy, Cory Casciato, A.H. Goldstein, Jef Otte, Jon Solomon and Brian Frederick. Let us know in the comments what you saw and loved, saw and hated, or missed and hated yourself for missing. While walking to…