The Weekend Showdown: Picking up the Pirate Signal

We would hate for you to miss out on all the awesome that happens every weekend in our fair city, so we’ve decided to run down five of the best shows in one easy-to-swallow post, with video and audio. Tell us — and the rest of the world — what…

Mark Farina weaves a tapestry of funk at the Gothic

Mark Farina|Miguel Migs 4.29.10 | Gothic Theatre Downtempo guru Mark Farina has been touring with deep house DJ Miguel Migs, but fortunately for Denver, his stop at the Gothic added two local players to the bill. First up was Half Color, a two-man group out of Fort Collins playing downtempo,…

Mark Farina tonight at the Gothic Theatre

Didn’t get tickets to Lupe Fiasco and B.o.B. at the Ogden? Bummer, kid. It’s sold out, from what we hear. No worries. Mark Farina’s at the Gothic tonight with Miguel Migs, J Flash and Half Color, and there’s still tickets left for that show. Farina, in case you’re not familiar,…

Below Bar re-opening as gay bar tonight

Below Bar is re-opening tonight as a gay bar with Rockstar Aaron at the decks. Bill Ward has revamped his two-year-old, subterranean spot at 1422 Larimer Street — from changing out some furniture to adding a lot of mirrors — and turned it into a gay bar at the request…

A few changes to the Showcase ballot

Okay, so even though we’ve been doing this Showcase for sixteen years — sixteen!, can you believe it? — we still haven’t perfected this ballot process, even if we think you’ll agree that we came closer than ever to nailing it this year. Still, a number of acts — and/or…

3014 learns the cold, hard fax of surviving on Colfax

After a two year-stint as Senger’s on the Fax, the bar at 3014 East Colfax Avenue closed quietly last July, then reopened the next month as 3014, under the ownership of Nick O’Sullivan, one of the brothers responsible for Brothers BBQ, with former owner David Senger back running the joint…

Jazz at the Root, at the Meadowlark

Jazz has long been music reserved for the best players and has produced some of popular music’s most memorable eccentrics and rebels. While not a jazz show in the purest sense, Jazz at the Root (taking place this Thursday, April 29, at the Meadowlark with a wealth of talent on…

Bob Mould

As one-third of Hüsker Dü, Bob Mould would have been important solely for having been in one of the most influential bands of the 1980s — a band that arguably established “alternative” music as commercially viable in the world beyond the American underground. But after the group’s breakup, Mould went…

Fucked Up

Fucked Up seems to have a little crush on Denver. Besides playing a now-legendary show inside the cramped confines of Wax Trax Records last February, the Canadian punk outfit even chose a photograph submitted by Wax Trax co-owner Duane David to grace one of the alternative covers of the band’s…

Common Loon

Champaign, Illinois, hardly seems like a catalyst for noteworthy bands, but Hum came from there and so does Common Loon, an act that occupies similarly atmospheric territory. A quick listen to any of the music from the band’s new album, The Long Dream of Birds, reveals that these guys might…

Pat Metheny

As one who’s embraced musical technology for over three decades, guitarist Pat Metheny has put a completely new spin on an old idea with his latest album, Orchestrion. With some help from inventors, Metheny took the player-piano concept to a whole other level by using devices like pianos, drum kit,…

Paean

There is no shortage of super-earnest bands with a dozen members and twice that many instruments in Colorado. Paean, probably the flagship band of Fort Collins label Act So Big Forest, is one of the better entrants in the category (real number of members: six). Live, the act is consuming…

Get Three Coffins Ready

In one of the best scenes in the spaghetti Western A Fistful of Dollars, Clint Eastwood tells the old undertaker to “get three coffins ready,” then blows away a few of the Baxter clan for laughing at his mule. While this band might have borrowed its name from that film,…

Lisa Bell

On her debut album, Dare to Be…, Boulder-based singer Lisa Bell put modern spins on jazz standards, and there was still a fair amount of jazz on her second album, It’s All About Love. On her third and latest effort, Dancing on the Moon, Bell holds on to her jazz…

Dodsfalla

Forget trying to decide whether or not this music is just grind or a combination of crust and grind. What this record does from beginning to end is comment on the horrors of the modern world by embodying them in feral, distorted vocals and slashing yet pummeling guitar riffs. Where…

Meet the curators of the Denver Noise Fest

The idea of “noise” as a form of audio art can be traced to the early-twentieth-century avant-garde. In the larger realm of music, the aesthetic of noise and its sound can be heard in the work of bands like Sonic Youth and newer acts like HEALTH. In Denver, noise is…

Oblio’s Arrow has changed its name, but not its sound

First known as Oblio Duo and then Oblio Duo + the Archers, the newly christened Oblio’s Arrow makes music as mercurial as its name. Over the past few years, the ever-shifting outfit — which revolves around singer-songwriters William Duncan and Steven Lee Lawson — has crafted a body of work…

Matt Darey at the Church

Trance DJ, producer and radio host Matt Darey is probably best known for his 2007 hit “Beautiful Day,” but he’s been a force in the dance-music world for close to fifteen years: He was releasing tracks like “From Russia With Love” and remixing such trance classics as Binary Finary’s “1998”…

Lion Sized’s new album is all about coughing up your teeth

Ever been pelted in the face with anything before? Doesn’t matter what it is — snow, water, spitballs — it smarts a little, doesn’t it? So why would someone to allow himself to be blasted in the face with a paint cannon over and over and over and over again?…