The Jazz Aspen Snowmass nonprofit started throwing an eclectic music festival on Labor Day more than twenty years ago. Now it has expanded to three days, and this year includes headliners like Carrie Underwood and Fun. In this week’s music feature, now posted on the Backbeat blog, A.H. Goldstein explores…
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There was a moment on Friday night when, in the general vicinity of an IKEA, all six feet, three inches of Waka Flocka was jumping into a crowd of teenagers, waving a Flosstradamus flag. Flosstradamus, meanwhile was sending a cacophony of drums and drum-like electronics and rapid-fire laser noises and…
Future Islands, touring on the strength of an album that has demonstrated to a much broader audience what the DIY crowd has known all along (namely that Future Islands are awesome), will be in town on Wednesday. There are a few other good ones, including MC Frontalot at Larimer Lounge…
When Black Kids seemed to disappear from the popular music landscape in the .mp3-blog heydey of 2009, it looked like another example of too much hype, too soon. If the pressure of impossible expectations is weighing on the band’s members still, it sure wasn’t present at Larimer Lounge, because everyone…
Back in December of 2013, the Denver Public Library put out a call to local musicians asking for song and album submissions to be considered for a future database that could be accessed by DPL card holders. Just like other media available for free through the system, once in place,…
Our annual celebration of the Denver dining scene, Dish, will be Sunday, September 7 in Sculpture Park at the Denver Performing Arts Complex. Over 40 area restaurants will bring samples, and drink samples are included with the price of the ticket as well. We’re telling you about all this food…
Last year when musician and hairstylist Kitty Vincent broke her foot in a car accident, she found herself confined to the house with idle hands. “I had six months in a cast to sit on the couch and sort of dream up all of these ideas, so I’ve had a…
About twenty minutes before Jack White took the stage at Red Rocks, a hard rain started falling and lightning flashed to the east. Fog machines on the stage were fired up and the wind was blowing the haze, tinted hues of blue from the stage lights, around. For a moment…
Nirvana songs played at the Gothic Theatre before the opener, Toronto-based July Talk. Singer Leah Fay kept nuzzling her head against her bandmates and yelling about pizza. “It’s hard to open for the Presidents of the United States of America” she said as she tried to coax fans to come…
As the old saying goes, “Any show that starts with a giant singalong to Pink Floyd’s ‘Another Brick in the Wall pt. 2’ is going to be a good show.” Okay, that’s not actually a saying, but it probably should be after Portugal. The Man began its Larimer Lounge show…
In 2012, Thadeaous Mighell, Mitchell Pond and David Moke came up with the idea for an interactive arts festival after meeting at the now-defunct DIY space Unit E. Soon after, Moke — who organizes events for the Denver Theater District non-profit — helped get the ball rolling and Blacktop was…
Ark Life has accomplished a staggering amount in its first year and a half, playing over 150 shows across the country, including a headlining show at the Boulder Theater and an opening set for a sold-out Film on the Rocks at Red Rocks. The band will finally release its debut…
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Planet Bluegrass is nothing if not durable. That durability became a widely-disseminated story as the ranch and music festival operation in Lyons rebuilt when a historic flood utterly wrecked it last September But this weekend’s Rocky Mountain Folks Festival proved another kind of resilience, one that relates not to backhoes…
Spread across two venues two blocks apart, four stages between them, Denver Psych Fest, in its second year, proved a memorable experience. The walk between the Larimer Lounge and the Savoy Events Center — as well as the Big Wonderful Sustainability Park between them — was easy to navigate, and…
This week’s crop of shows includes a busy lineup at the big venues, including guitar heaven at Fiddler’s Green with ZZ Top and Jeff Beck. Elsewhere, the Coathangers return to Denver after a short time away, Styrofoam Sanchez plays Rhinoceropolis and, yes, Huey Lewis and the News are in Colorado…
People throw all kinds of things at Deer Tick in order to express their love of the gritty rock-and-roll band from Providence, Rhode Island. At the quintet’s sold-out show at the Bluebird Theater in Denver, they threw half-full beers, shoes, even themselves. Even before the group, led by John McCauley,…
Deep in City Park on Saturday, past the father and son playing catch and the picnicking family, in a fenced off area, was a sea of “Keep Calm and Chive On” shirts and neon green. It was the first Chive Fest, and after several hours of music and revelry, a…
You might have thought that Beck’s Red Rocks set would be a slowpoke, folksy affair akin to his latest studio album, Morning Phase. Nope. The night was a twenty-plus year retrospective, covering everything from 1994 mega-hit “Loser” to his recent foray into Nick Drake territory…
Genre-defying five-piece dance and jam band Lotus will be playing its annual Red Rocks show on September 19. The set was originally targeted to support of the band’s most recent album Gilded Age, but after the group debuted a successful new Talking Heads tribute set, featuring Gabriel Otto of Denver’s…
Somewhere on West Colfax in Lakewood is a strip mall, virtually indistinguishable from all the others on any given stretch of the meandering 26-mile boulevard. The only thing that differentiates this particular strip mall — for music fans, anyhow — is that it is now the home of Chain Reaction…
