Brace yourself: Looks like the word is out on BLKHRTS. After an enviable co-sign from Jeff Weiss — an extremely well-regarded West Coast blogger who also writes for the Los Angeles Times — on the LA Times blog in advance of its show last night at that city’s famed Low…
Every week in an effort to pay tribute to the old-school way of promoting shows by hanging up posters, we make our way around the Mile High City to get a gander of the eye candy. Here’s the fliers we spotted this week across the city on random telephone poles…
Not too long after opening in June of 2010, Wild Ivories dueling piano bar hit a few sour notes when Tim Kirkland, one of the club’s partners, discovered that Caz Bzdek, the club’s founder, was running up a bunch of bills with construction, marketing, advertising and vendors. As a result,…
Vitamins (playing tonight at the Larimer Lounge Gauntlet Hair, Woodsman and Hearts In Space) is seemingly unstoppable — The Denver-by-way-of Fort Collins band has been on a roll with new releases and stunning accompanying videos (like the just-released “Vimanas” below), plus, the quartet had the opportunity to the stage with…
Update: Contest is over. Thanks for all the entries. We’ve picked the winners. Congrats to Jeremy Coss, Dave Shuck and Francine Profitt, who will be seeing the show on us, courtesy of our friends at Soda Jerk. Be sure to follow us on Twitter @Westword_Music and Facebook to get the…
Smoke ’em if you got ’em: After, ahem, cough, cough, blowing folks away at Summit Music Hall this past spring on his Jet Life Tour, Curren$y is coming back to the Mile High City, with Method Man, on the Smokers Club Tour, with Big K.R.I.T., Smoke DZA, Fiend, The Pricks,…
The 2011 DMC World Championship went down over the weekend at Santos’ Party House in New York City, and after having dominated the U.S. finals last year with nearly half of the competitors hailing from our fine state, we can now officially say that this year’s United States DMC champion…
It looks like Mr. Big (playing at Summit Music Hall tonight with Romero and Quitter’s Anonymous) is brand-new again. The Los Angeles-born band started in the late ’80s, found noteworthy success with its pleasantly listenable hard-rock style in the years following, and, despite a break from 2002 to 2009, have…
ELLIE GOULDING at the OGDEN THEATRE | 8/8/11On her second North American tour in less than a year, Ellie Goulding filled the Ogden Theatre last night, but at a price: The opening act, Bag Raiders (scheduled to play a one-off at Larimer Lounge this Friday), weren’t quite as captivating, but…
Spires is a brand-new band, by traditional standards. The band made its debut just after the first of the year, which, in the blogosphere, could be considered a lifetime ago. Regardless, you’d never know Spires was a freshly minted act just from listening to its self-titled four-song debut. The inherent…
Although Celebrity Sports Center closed in 1994 after a 34-year run on Colorado Boulevard, its memory lives on through a number of memorial sites on the Internet. And now its name will be resurrected at the 50,000-square-foot Celebrity Lanes, which will open later this month at 15755 East Arapahoe Road…
Maybe Brian Knab, Brandon Roth and Ryan Murphy wanted to be Laymen Terms back in their days living in Monument and failed at it miserably. But when the trio reconfigured in Denver with bassist Jeff Wiencroft and fused punk-rock spiritedness with a full-bodied, almost orchestral aesthetic, The Still City was…
Artists mining the territory between chamber pop and Americana aren’t exactly a rarity right now — and everyone writing pop music worth listening to has been influenced by the Beatles or, for the slightly more adventurous, the Velvet Underground. The Grownup Noise started out writing songs that draw immediate comparisons…
Idiosyncratic singer-songwriter and painter Joseph Arthur has always been something of an enigma. First, there’s his music: haunting and utterly nocturnal gravel-voiced hymns to desolation, lushly presented with eclectic beats, electronic loops and multiple tracks of his own voice. Most of this is played by Arthur himself, both live and…
Swedish writer Erich Von Däniken is alive and well, lecturing on the influence of extraterrestrial contact on ancient civilizations. His writing, meanwhile, has evidently inspired song titles for this Irish band. Since forming in 2002, God Is an Astronaut has created dense instrumental music in the vein of acts like…
Although gypsy-jazz guitar pioneer Django Reinhardt died in 1953, there’s been a steady stream of players inspired by him over the past few decades. One such player is Robin Nolan, who’s hailed as one of the world’s leading guitarists in the Reinhardt tradition, as well as being a favorite guitarist…
Everyone needs a hobby. I, for example, sometimes enjoy figure drawing, which I am not-terrible enough at to produce people with bodies that are only a little contorted, faces that are recognizable but off-putting, and alarmingly freakish hands and feet that come out looking like withered claws. But what separates…
While it would probably be best to dispense with any sort of wintery metaphors or similes in describing this EP, as they’d be both hackneyed and obvious, they’d also be incredibly apropos. Winter, the fourth and final installment of Houses’ series of seasonally themed releases, is the darkest of the…
Neil Ewing has spent the past several years exploring the odds and ends of experimental hip-hop and experimental electronic music of various stripes. But with this solo project, he takes his creativity to its furthest extent. On this sprawling release, Ewing’s dark-hued pop songs take on a range of sonic…
Although Snake Rattle Rattle Snake has been playing some of the finest dark dance rock around these parts for more than two years, the band has only released a few recordings, including a four-song EP and a two-song seven-inch single. One spin of Sineater, the band’s debut long-player, and you’ll…
Anyone who’s seen Itchy-O knows that the thirty-piece group is a far cry from your average marching band. About half the band is made up of percussionists, so seeing Itchy-O live can be a totally bombastic experience. But while the drums and cymbals can sometimes overpower the other instruments in…
When John Legend first came to Denver — with Kanye West, in 2004 — he was a fresh face with a healthy buzz and tons of talent. Even then, you could tell he was going places. And this was before he and will.i.am crafted the smash single “Ordinary People,” before…
