Westword Music Showcase is right around the corner, and the lineup keeps getting better. Earlier this year, we announced the national acts gracing our main stage – Shakey Graves, the Revivalists, Cut Copy, Bob Moses, COIN and A R I Z O N A – as well as a handful of the locals who will be playing. Today, we’re announcing fifty more local acts who will perform at venues throughout the Golden Triangle.
Waiting in a line that spanned almost two Boulder blocks before Primus’s sold-out show at the Fox Theatre last night – part of the renowned Boulder venue’s twentieth-anniversary celebration – I heard a guy in his mid 20s tell a friend incredulously, “My cousin said he’s never heard of Primus. He didn’t even know fucking ‘John The Fisherman!’”
Katy Perry just announced her new album The Witness is coming out on June 9, and to celebrate, she is headed on the road for a world arena tour. Lucky for us, this will include a Denver stop on November 26.
Have you ever been stuck waiting to go through security at Red Rocks Amphitheatre? Depending on what time you choose to venture inside, the security line can seem to stretch on for an eternity. Many people grumble about security’s snail-pace, but the reality is the speed of the line depends on all of us.
In order to understand Flint Eastwood, you must first understand Detroit. And not the crumbling and derelict caricature of Detroit splattered across the national news, but the real Detroit.
It’s a great week for fans of Les Claypool as he’ll be with Primus at the Fox Theatre for a sold-out show tonight, at Red Rocks tomorrow, and with Sean Lennon as part of the the Claypool-Lennon Delirium on Wednesday.
The new Com Truise album Iteration, due out June 16, marks the conclusion of a loosely science-fiction themed trilogy that began with the project’s 2011 debut Galactic Melt. Without lyrics, the themes may not be as obvious, but song titles like “Ether Drift,” “Dreambender” and “Ephemeron” conjure visions of a retro-futurist aesthetic embodied by films like Blade Runner and the more recent Beyond the Black Rainbow.
While there have been a few shows at Red Rocks over the last few weeks, the summer season at the storied venue kicks into gear this weekend with Bonobo and Nick Murphy (Chet Faker) tonight and Lettuce tomorrow night. Swallow Hill’s Denver Ukefest continues tonight and tomorrow night and Denver All Day Fest III is at multiple venues on South Broadway. Also on tap this weekend are Flogging Molly at the Fillmore Auditorium, Old Crow Medicine Show performing Bob Dylan’s Blonde on Blonde at the Paramount Theatre and Son Volt at the Fox Theatre and Gothic Theatre.
On May 26, English folk-rock veterans Jethro Tull will play a show with the Colorado Symphony at Red Rocks. The beloved amphitheater was, of course, the venue for an infamous riot in the summer of ’71 that resulted in a cloud of tear gas, 28 serious injuries, and the cancellation of the remainder of the venue’s 1971 summer program.
A few years ago, Son Volt frontman Jay Farrar was preparing the twentieth-anniversary edition of the band’s 1995 debut album Trace. The album cover was a photo of a 1930s Webster Chicago solid-state amplifier.
Simon Green, the brains behind Bonobo, grew up in Brighton, England, playing piano. He picked up guitar in his teens, but soon ditched it for electronic music, preferring the portability of electronics and how they allowed him to create on his own schedule without having to rely on a full band.
Die Antwoord, who headlined the Ogden Theatre last year, will move to much bigger digs when the duo brings its Love Drug World Tour to Red Rocks on Sunday, August 20.
The epic pop rock band Imagine Dragons is headed for Denver, Saturday, October 14, as part of a world tour celebrating the release of the act’s third album, Evolve, which will be released on June 23.
Lettuce is a funk band that was born when the various members were at the Berklee College of Music in Boston in 1992, though most of the members are proud New Yorkers. However, when Lettuce drummer and hip-hop producer Adam Deitch moved to Denver about a year ago, his colleagues were keen to follow. Guitarist Adam Smirnoff arrived in October, and he couldn’t be happier.
Youth on Record is like a teaching hospital for music producers, says Jamie Duffy about the Denver-based music-education program she runs.
Ethan McCarthy sits on the front steps of Flatline Audio, a recording studio in Arvada. His band Primitive Man has been preparing for a short tour and has just laid down tracks for a soon-to-be-released album.
Few words will make a music fan cringe more than, “actor-turned-musician.” And with good reason.
Not all music buffs have hundreds of bucks to sink into multi-day festival passes, concerts and season ticket subscriptions. This is when creative fans find ways to save some money.
When they made Kinky Friedman, they broke the mold immediately afterwards. Like, they smashed that thing into unrecoverable dust. Because God knows, there’s nobody else on this Earth quite like Friedman.
Chris Brown’s the Party Tour stops at the Pepsi Center tonight with openers O.T. Genasis, Fabolous, Kap G and DC Young Fly, and E-40 comes to the Summit Music Hall tomorrow night. Also on tap this week are KONGOS, who play two nights at the Marquis Theater, actor Kiefer Sutherland brings his country-steeped songs to the Fox Theatre on Wednesday and metal acts Opeth and Gojira play Red Rocks on Thursday.
More than 200 people from the music industry form a nominating committee that helps select acts that make it onto the Westword Music Awards ballot, where readers have the chance to vote for the best acts in various genres, many of which will appear at the Westword Music Showcase on June 24.
David Crosby is one of those rare musicians who is in the Rock-and-Roll Hall of Fame twice, as are all of the members of Crosby, Stills & Nash. For Crosby, it’s his work with CSN and the Byrds that earned him his spots (Graham Nash is also in with the…
