Concerts

Titus Andronicus: Rebels Against the Orthodoxy of Punk

When Titus Andronicus released its conceptually ambitious triple album The Most Lamentable Tragedy on July 28, 2015, it became a landmark of modern punk. It also marked singer Patrick Stickles’ thirtieth birthday and came out the day of the end of a five-night run of sold-out shows at New York…

Concerts

Top Picks for This Summer’s Underground Music Showcase

The annual Underground Music Showcase (aka The UMS) takes place July 28-31, 2016. Featuring a wide variety of musical artists, The UMS dominates Broadway between Sixth and Alameda avenues and offers shows from hundreds of bands. The majority of the festival’s featured acts are based in Denver, but the UMS’s…

Concerts

Beach Slang Is in Love, and You’re to Blame

It’s appropriate that Beach Slang is from Philadelphia, the City of Brotherly Love, because that’s how it conducts itself with the people that come to the band’s shows. Whether it’s before, during or after the show or down the line. Frontman James Alex is known for answering letters and messages…

Concerts

The Melvins’ Basses Loaded Showcases Its Many Faces

In its seemingly never ending pursuit of keeping things fresh for itself and fans, veteran rock band the Melvins are releasing their latest record, Basses Loaded, on June 3 through Ipecac Recordings. The record will feature six separate bass players across twelve songs. This will include Steve McDonald of Redd…

Concerts

They Might Be Giants and the Resurrection of Dial-A-Song

They Might Be Giants is one of the most well known bands from that pre-alternative rock era in the 1980s when there wasn’t an all-encompassing, vague umbrella term for music that wasn’t punk, wasn’t mainstream pop, not quite straight-ahead rock and yet accessible. The band’s self-titled 1986 debut album was…

Concerts

Joe Strummer Is Eleanor Friedberger’s Spirit Animal

Eleanor Friedberger was once a member of experimental rock band Fiery Furnaces with her brother Matthew from 2000 until 2011, when it went on indefinite hiatus. In that band the Friedbergers seemed to try out any crazy, creative idea they pleased from record to record, establishing themselves as one of…

Concerts

Freakwater on War Stories and the Power of Memory

Throughout its long career, irreverent humor and compassion for the human condition is at the core of Freakwater’s alternative country music. On its latest record, Scheherazade, its first album of new material since 2005’s Thinking Of You, founding members Janet Beveridge Bean and Catherine Irwin explore modern myths and archetypes…

Concerts

Afrika Bambaataa Brings Electrofunk to City Hall

Afrika Bambaataa is one of the architects of hip-hop culture as we know it. He was there when DJ Kool Herc and Kool DJ Dee were throwing the parties that were the foundation stone of hip-hop in New York City in the 1970s. The term hip-hop was coined by Cowboy…

Concerts

Speech, of Hip-Hop Veterans Arrested Development, Keeps Growing

Arrested Development, which performs on Saturday, December 19, at Ophelia’s Electric Soapbox, was one of the earliest incarnations of alternative hip-hop, as it would come to be called by critics. That designation is, of course, problematic when part of the reason the group wasn’t immediately embraced by hip-hop culture was…

Concerts

!!! on Its Stereolab Cover Band and Hiring Crystal the Monkey

!!! (aka ChkChkChk, if one is trying to do an Internet search) performs today, Monday, December 14, at Larimer Lounge with DJ Trundle and a Stereolab cover band called Stereolad composed entirely of members of !!!. !!! came together in 1996 in Sacramento, California, after two earlier bands, the noisy,…

Concerts

Ten Emo Songs to Cry Over at Taking Back Tuesday

Break out your studded belt and that old pair of Converse signed in marker by Bert McCracken and Kenny Vasoli, because Emo Night LA is coming to Denver. On Tuesday, December 8, twenty-somethings and former scene queens can cry their eyeliner off for Taking Back Tuesday at the Marquis Theatre…

Concerts

Electronic Artist Slow Magic on the Paradox of an Anonymous Identity

Slow Magic makes another appearance in Colorado at the Gothic Theatre on Thursday, December 3, with like-minded electronic pop artists Giraffage, Lindsay Lowend and Bollywood Life. Performing in a costume and striking mask, Slow Magic aims to direct the audience’s attention to the music and the show’s visual art. The mask…