Music

Welcome to the weekend! We know, it’s here already? Indeed. Hooray for short weeks! As always in our beloved Mile High City, the options are ripe for the picking and plentiful. We have them all listed in our massive concert calendar. If you’re feeling industrious and have some time to…

Elm and Oak, the boutique clothing/art shop and music imprint that has absolutely blown up since opening its doors just off the Pearl Street Mall in Boulder, Colorado in 2009, has started what may be the best thing to happen to the University of Colorado since being named the ‘Top…

WHY? @ GOTHIC THEATRE | 9/05/12 After a great set from Why?, no one seemed to be in a hurry to leave the Gothic last night, so the band came back on stage for an encore. The rapid xylophone figure meant the band was going to play “A Sky For…

Are the Astronauts Colorado’s first great jam band? G. Brown thinks so. Although the often pejorative term has been associated more with the genre-bending improv scene, Brown, director and curator of the Colorado Music Hall of Fame, thinks it fits. In an era when bands would go out, play their…

Chris McGarry grew up near the banks of the upper Mississippi; it was in this environment that his parents first exposed him to classic country and gospel music. But like many people who grew up in the ’90s in middle America, he got into Nirvana and then dabbled in jam…

Five Iron Frenzy was like an eight-year-long supernova that came, burned brightly for a few years and was then extinguished, with one final hurrah at the Fillmore in 2003. While its members splintered off into various factions, with bands that were compelling in their own right (Yellow Second, Nathan &…

George Lewis Jr. grew up in Florida but moved to Boston before forming his punk-funk cabaret outfit Mad Man Films. That band split after releasing two albums, and Lewis moved to Brooklyn, where he started writing songs on his own under the name Twin Shadow. The project’s debut album, 2010’s…

If corporate rock of the ’70s and ’80s has a modern contemporary, it’s Rascal Flatts. While, granted, there’s far more twang accompanying this Nashville outfit’s ballads, the group trades in the kind of earnest, rubber-stamped sentimentality that once propelled bands like Toto and Journey on songs like “Without Your Love”…

One of the most influential bands of the past thirty years, the Melvins are well known for their sludgy punk-rock sound, which formed the arc of records like Houdini and Stoner Witch in the ’90s. With nineteen full-length albums, numerous collaborations — including a record with Lustmord — and a…

The members of the aptly named Nightbringer are from Colorado, a place where the sun allegedly shines 300 days a year. You would never know it, though, from listening to Hierophany of the Open Grave, the act’s excellent third album. Playing an absolutely ferocious brand of black metal that’s every…

The sprawling two-disc set from this long-running noise/experimental hip-hop project is clearly drawn from sounds that Mike Schleipfer has been collecting since the last Bill Picket’s release. Not really comparable to any other music, except for maybe the output of the Revolting Cocks and Warlock Pinchers gone even more zany,…

Boulder’s Stuart Davis, a practicing Buddhist monk otherwise known as the “punk monk,” has made a name for himself with his HDNet show Sex, God, Rock ‘n Roll, which includes comedy sketches, monologues and music. He’s also made a number of albums under his own name with producer and engineer…

On “Here Lies,” a track from Paradox and Sean P’s latest, Mending, the beats are impressive — DJ Premier-esque, sample-driven boom bap — as are the rhymes, which touch on government conspiracies, injustice and sundry ills of society. This is solid underground hip-hop that doesn’t seem to match the label’s…

Cecil Bailey and Chris Garrow first played together in the stoner-rock band Core of the Earth. As fashionable as that musical style was a few years back, Core stood out from the pack for having good, solid songs. During their time in the band, Bailey and Garrow started up a…

K.atou is one of the hometown heroes of Athens, Greece. Not long after she was honing her needles as a teenager at Bossa Nostra, one of the city’s biggest clubs, she was going to college in the United Kingdom, where she managed to expand her musical education while still keeping…

Summer’s over — well, at least according to the time-tested seasonal benchmark, the annual passing of Labor Day. Of course, it still feels like we might burst into flames at any moment, but whatever. The Taste of Colorado has foisted its parade of also-rans upon us and Phish has now…

Matt Rutherford spent more than 300 days sailing around the world in a small boat. Many thought this dubious expedition was impossible, but not only did he complete it, he’s now the subject of a new documentary, a film that his old friend and former classmate, Spoke In Wordz, has…