Wesley Watkins knows how to bring people together. “That’s my superpower as a human being,” says Watkins, a force in Denver’s music scene who is currently playing trumpet for Wheelchair Sports Camp’s Wall to Wall tour. Before picking up the spring touring gig, Watkins started organizing WMN and the Queen City of the Plains, a showcase of Denver women musicians happening this weekend, March 17 and 18 at Syntax Physic Opera.
Indie/math rock band Montoneros’s members named the band after a leftist political group.
Jesse Manley and his six-piece band will release their latest album, Dust, at Syntax Physic Opera, Friday, March 10. The recording represents the fourth time Manley has written music for the ballet company Wonderbound. This is quite the unusual partnership for a guy whose musical roots lie within the folk…
Curved Light is an electronic music project that emerged in 2015 when Peter Tran moved with his partner, visual artist Deirdre Smith, to Austin. It is the product of his life in music and his work with the experimental rock bands Les Rhinocéros and Hume and her work in video…
Samiam came out of the same Berkeley, California punk scene that was fostered by the legendary DIY venue 924 Gilman Street. Coming along slightly after acts like Green Day and Operation Ivy, Samiam never gained as much commercial popularity as its predecessors. But the group tasted success. In the mid-90s,…
The political post-hardcore act Milemarker, which began in 1997 in Chapel Hill, North Carolina, defied Maximumrocknroll’s rule that bands with keyboards were not punk. The musicians decided the band was “going to be even more punk and get keyboards and make some music that you couldn’t say wasn’t punk and see…
Lo Moon took a different route than other bands coming up in the age of the Internet. Rather than share musical ideas and songs immediately through social media or a digital platform like Bandcamp, the Los Angeles group worked on its music for four and a half years before releasing its debut single, “Loveless” in 2016.
The Pretty Reckless could have been a vanity band led by a previously famous member. When guitarist Ben Phillips met future lead singer Taylor Momsen in 2008, she was a fourteen-year-old up-and-coming actress known for roles in the 2000 version of How the Grinch Stole Christmas and the television show…
At eighty years old, Harry Tuft is finally getting the time and opportunity to do what he came to Colorado to do in the first place in 1960: play music. Not that Tuft hasn’t played music all along and put out albums, but it is the first time he’s been free to do so without the weight of running a store, leading the local chapter of the musicians’ union, or, in years past, booking acts like Joan Baez and arranging for her to meet the Beatles when the Fab Four played Red Rocks in 1964. He basically served as the de facto godfather of Denver folk through his establishment of the Denver Folklore Center in 1962, and he was instrumental in founding Swallow Hill. If Tuft hadn’t left Philadelphia to move here, inspired by stories of the opportunities to play live out west, Denver music and culture would be immeasurably diminished.
Colfax Speed Queen is releasing its sophomore album Talk To Your Doctor through Heavy Dose Records on Friday, November 11. The Denver-based rock band started in 2010 as a college project for singer/guitarist Matthew Loui who had only recently started playing guitar.
Theater Electronic-music imprint Always Human TapesTheater is putting on a showcase of its artists over three days at the ATLAS Black Box Theater on the CU Boulder campus and at 1010 Workshop in Denver. Ryan Wurst founded the label in the summer of 2013 while earning his master’s degree in visual…
Marillion may not be a name familiar to a lot of people who didn’t pay attention to progressive rock in the 1980s and 1990s. However, the veteran progressive-rock band pioneered the concept of crowdfunding for tours and albums starting in the late ’90s. Marillion released its earliest recordings in 1982…
After nearly thirty years of performing as Little Fyodor, Dave Lichtenberg is putting his current project, Little Fyodor & Babushka Band, on indefinite hiatus. That means that the band’s show on Saturday, October 15, at the Lion’s Lair will be its last performance for the foreseeable future. The event is…
The Pamlico Sound is releasing its latest full-length album, Jive Church, which represents a good deal of work, re-work and rebirth for the band over the course of the last year and a half. Horn player and vocalist Will Baumgartner put the outfit together in June 2015 after a year’s hiatus…
Rhys Fulber is currently touring with his live electronic-music project Conjure One and making a very rare stop at Tri-Lakes Center for the Arts in Palmer Lake, Colorado, a town across I-25 from Monument. Fulber is perhaps best known for his time with well-known industrial band Front Line Assembly and…
Warpaint’s new album, Heads Up, is being rightfully praised for its seamless integration of rock instrumentation with the aesthetics of electronic music and hip-hop. Since the band’s debut full-length, The Fool, in 2010, Warpaint has been making music that’s difficult to pigeonhole into one genre. Whether dubbed a new kind of post-punk,…
This year, the bands Porches and Japanese Breakfast, two of the most promising pop acts today, released records that evoked moments of significant change in the artists’ lives. The bands are currently on tour together in the U.S., which gives audiences a chance to hear excellent material while it’s still…
With the recent upswing in popularity of industrial and experimental electronic music with new artists emerging from the older Goth-industrial scene, it seems as though Clock DVA was ahead of the curve when it reactivated in 2008. Groups like Youth Code, BURNING, Troller, All Your Sisters, Curse and Echo Beds draw…
Toto is probably most remembered for its string of hits from the late ’70s through the mid-80s; songs like “Hold the Line,” “Rosanna,” and “Africa” are still staples of classic rock radio. But beyond being a talented pop and rock band, the members of Toto were some of the most prolific…
According to Mac Sabbath manager Mike Odd, lead singer Ronald Osbourne believes he teleported across space and time from the 1970s to 2014 to start the band. Think Back to the Future in reverse. The true origins of Ronald Osbourne are shrouded in mystery as is the case with his…
Pioneers of what was once called “art rock” and “progressive rock,” Yes has cast a long shadow on development of any rock music that dares to incorporate literature, high art, futuristic ideas and unadulterated creativity unbound by everyday concerns. Along with contemporaries King Crimson, Curved Air, Emerson, Lake & Palmer,…
Beach House is winding down its touring cycle for its 2015 albums Depression Cherry and Thank Your Lucky Stars. During the past year the band has made good on its impulse to have diverse performance experiences with elaborate props and a light show made especially for the tour. “We had…
