There are many kinds of charmers in Denver this week: Holly Golightly brings her impressive catalog and excellent humor to the hi-dive, and later in the week cock-rocking joker/not joker Steel Panther plays the Ogden. The rest of our picks follow…
Are you a music lover with a burning desire to carry a tiny guitar wherever you go? Don’t fret (Ha! See what we did there?), because Avon-based inventor Mark Roebke has created just the thing: the FretPen! What is the FretPen? It’s a pen – just a normal pen -…
Kaskade is embarking on a small-venue tour, which is quite the change for the Grammy nominated EDM producer. Ask any DJ and producer who was spinning/attending shows in the ’90s, or even into the early 2000s, and the general consensus would be that it’s a great lifestyle, but not one…
Robert Castro has spent over a decade running music blogs, so that’s about a lifetime in Internet years. He ran A Walking Disaster for a while, but school and work forced him to give it up around 2009. On a 2011 trip to SXSW, he got into a conversation with…
One month after the full Mayhem Fest tour announcement which includes only five of the boasted 19 bands at Red Rocks July 14, the tour has announced an accompanying Taste of Mayhem show. The Fillmore will host the other 14 acts on July 13, including Cannibal Corpse, Suicide Silence and…
FaceMan, helmed by the uni-monikered frontman Steve, is just as interested in performance art as it is acoustic guitars. Case in point: the elaborate shark-shaped stage the band set up at Lost Lake last year, which added a theatrical dimension to the band’s music (it also picked up an award…
There was a time in the not so distant past when a social networking profile was a place to proclaim your relationship status with something more than the obligatory “in a relationship” or “single” statement. It was a grand gesture to be “taken,” complete with a glittery, GIF-y image of…
It was kind of cold and crappy this week, but that was just a way to enhance your appreciation for this weekend, which is supposed to be the kind of beautiful where cartoon birds appear from trees. Ride your bike to one of these shows:…
Eastern Europe has a long tradition of communal music. It’s about the culture, history, experience bringing people together in a moment through music. By contrast, much of American music is about the spectacle. It’s Gene Simmons with his tongue out next to a a jet of flames. A Gogol Bordello…
Editor’s note: Each week, illustrator Noah Van Sciver asks a Colorado band or musician four questions and then draws their conversation. Sometimes he does other stuff. We call the resulting comic “4 Questions: Comic Strip Interview” either way, for some reason. You can see more of Van Sciver’s work and…
The wedding invitations are coming in fast now, and although we typically don’t enjoy sitting in a church and staring at comb-overs, there are two things provided at weddings we can all agree on: food and alcohol. I can live like the lord of the event center, alternating between sips…
The jazz program at the University of Denver’s Lamont School of Music is about to get a lot more competitive. Officials from the school’s jazz studies and commercial music departments announced this week that Grammy-nominated jazz trombonist, composer and arranger Steve Wiest will join DU’s faculty this fall as an…
TaunTaun is a band of unusual provenance. Its members are all luminaries of the Denver music scene, but their other bands don’t sound much like each other, and they sound even less like TaunTaun. It was the musicians’ shared teenage love for ’80s metal that initially informed the group’s music,…
NORAD Dance Bar, which grew to become a fixture in the underground electronic-music community over the past two years, is closing at the end of May. The building that houses the club is coming under new ownership, and NORAD doesn’t figure into the new owner’s plans. The displacement will have…
Between 2006 and 2011, jazz guitarist Matt Fuller endured the loss of his grandfather, his father, his grandmother and his mother. During that period, Fuller wrote a number of songs that helped him through the healing process. Those songs appear on his debut album, Waiting for Violet, which he will…
The 20th annual Westword Music Showcase is less than two months away. This year’s installment will be on June 21. It’s the day Denver music goes on vacation to the Golden Triangle, and I can go from watching a rapper to watching a punk band to watching a band with…
Tonight, the Colorado Avalanche and Minnesota Wild will play one more time to determine who moves to the next round of the playoffs. In honor of the occasion, I got into an Internet debate with our favorite Minnesotan, Drew Ailes, that is somewhat about our state’s respective music scenes and…
Update, 5/1: Since this story went to press, some of the promotional entities involved have come up with a new arrangement. Please see the bottom of the story for details Preston Douglas opened NORAD Dance Bar two years ago with the intention of uniting an underground dance-music scene that had…
For now, the story of Planet Bluegrass is about the floods and the devastation they brought to towns like Lyons. The storied venue sits nestled in the canyon, no small part of its appeal being that it does not have proximity to natural beauty so much as it is actually…
Critic Jessica Hopper has played in and managed bands, toured internationally, booked shows, produced records, worked as a publicist, and is the author of The Girls’ Guide to Rocking, a how-to for teen ladies. She is here to help you stop doing it wrong. Send your problems to her –…
Boulder-based Immersive Studios has an impressive resume. Its owners, Steve Vidaic and Mike Yach, are both Grammy Award-winning producers. Vidaic is a musician himself, at one time touring with the Motet and now playing as a solo act. Immersive has some of the best recording equipment in the area. They…
Arctic Monkeys, touring in support of their latest effort, AM, will headline Red Rocks for the first time on Thursday, September 4. General-admission and reserved tickets ($39.95-$46.50) go on sale on Friday, May 2, at 10 a.m. Waka Flock Flame returns to the area with a stop at the Gothic…
