Concerts

Lazy LesterThursday, July 9, 2009Boulder Outlook Hotel, BoulderBetter Than: The canned blues playing over the PA between sets — by a long sight.Admittedly, when I first heard about this show coming up, I had to look up who Lazy Lester (Leslie Johnson) was, but after listening to a great deal…

Pitchfork’s Mark Richardson can’t get enough of Travis Egedy’s Pictureplane, slapping the most coveted three words in modern music criticism on “Goth Star,” the first offering from his upcoming full length, Dark Rift. The album’s out on August 4th on Lovepump United. Richardson starts by marveling at 2007’s “Flashion (You…

When tickets to the four nights of Phish at Red Rocks went on sale a few months ago, they sold out about as quick as it takes me to lose a game of washers (the new backyard game sweeping my neighborhood)…yeah, pretty fast. Of course, the concert announcement and subsequent…

Now there are two compelling reasons to make your way to the Meadowlark on a Tuesday night. Denver’s most bipolar bar — with the dingy basement speakeasy and the gorgeous backyard garden party vibes — has been offering up a diverse and not entirely offensive open mike extravaganza for the…

If you aren’t an avid reader of the ticketing industry website Ticket News, you may have missed the news that the Pepsi Center is dumping Ticketmaster. The venue will be switching to TicketHorse, a ticketing company owned by Kroenke Sports Enterprises, owner of the Pepsi Center and several other local…

Kyle Simmons wasted no time making things happen when she first felt the call of music. “I started writing as a solo artist when I was fourteen, released a record at the age of sixteen, and then at the age of eighteen signed with a label.” Now frontwoman of Speakeasy…

Today there are building projects all over the place, but back in the ’80s, the area behind Coors Field felt like some kind of bizarre wasteland. There was no Coors Field, of course, and you had to really work to find the original Tracks or the old Skyline Cafe (which…

Waves of hardcore have come and gone since the salad days of the early ’80s. With few genuine musical outlets for angst and rampaging energy open to young people in the past several years, it was inevitable that a band like Dethbox would come along and put its own stamp…

The music of Audiofly is a delicious mix of funky techno and the deep, dirty side of house: sexy, driving and warm, but always with a distinctly electronic edge. Since meeting in 2002, the duo of Luca Saporito and Anthony Middleton have had tremendous success under the collective name (and…

Copy editors, grammarians and assorted other speakers of English: Apologies in advance for our e-mail interview with Calvin Broadus, aka Snoop Dogg, whose Blazed and Confused tour kicks off in Denver. Turns out Snoop is as big a fan of creative spelling and unusual word usage as he is of…

The Flash Mob is a band that had no problem finding its groove. Formed from the remnants of Boondok Saints and Ultrachronic, the outfit got off to an auspicious start providing main support for the Flobots and hasn’t looked back. A song the players wrote the first time they practiced…

Eric Crespo is at the epicenter of the sonic force known as Ghost to Falco. There’s an eerie timelessness to Crespo’s voice, whether he’s singing more conventional-sounding Americana or the heavy, deeply rhythmic haunted pieces for which his projects are more well known. Comparisons to Nick Cave and 16 Horsepower…

Justin Vernon, Bon Iver’s central figure (joined on these bills by The Wheel), is a Wisconsin-based singer-songwriter who first gained widespread attention for last year’s For Emma, Forever Ago, a cathartic recording laid down during a three-month stay in a remote cabin following the collapse of a romantic relationship and…

Although there have been bass-and-drum duos before, Pittsburgh’s Dark Lingo takes that basic formula and twists it into compellingly nightmarish shapes. Making human voices inhuman by passing them through various guitar effects pedals and then making them swim through the thick churn of hypnotic, distorted bass patterns and insistent drumming,…

David Dondero invented Conor Oberst. Well, that may be a slight overstatement, but it’s no big secret that the poignant songwriting and uniquely emotive vocal style of the former were heavily influential on the latter. His work, however, stands up as far more than the jumping-off point for Bright Eyes…

Many people think of folk music as precious and pretentious in equal measure — the equivalent of arming whiny occupants of reality-show confessional booths with an acoustic guitar. But Canada’s Rural Alberta Advantage, performing with Great Room Victorian and Sandusky, proves that the genre doesn’t have to be a drag…

Plenty of haters ripped into 2007’s Worse Than a Fairy Tale, accusing Drop Dead, Gorgeous of softening its assault to up the accessibility quotient – and the act’s latest will likely be slapped with the same criticism, even though The Hot N’ Heavy is frequently both. Sure, there are missteps,…

The urge to release must be mighty, but Tangible Stereo isn’t doing itself any favors. True, you can’t sell product if you don’t have product, but when your product is as shoddy as this one — a beat-up CDR with the group’s name scrawled in Sharpie, in an ugly-ass, brown-paper-bag…

With analog synths blending in with the most cutting-edge sounds these days, this album sounds like it could have come out at any time post-Who’s Afraid of the Art of Noise? Except that Kyle Person, the act’s only member, couldn’t have composed and put together the music alone as well…

When the fusion of hip-hop and rock was first conceived, it was meant to amplify the respective appeal of each style of music. Yet the hybrid has consistently resulted in prosaic lyrics and inferior beats. Broken Tongues’ debut does nothing to buck that trend. Worse, the duo delves into a…