Concerts

Since 2005, Montreal’s Plants and Animals has been writing some of the most critically acclaimed music to have come out of that town in recent years. Its debut album, Parc Avenue, found the band exploring a vast array of sounds with a sense of playful abandon. It was a sprawling…

Time Capsule is ProJect Aspect’s 1320 Records debut. Showing notable maturity, the rising producer more than lives up to the outsized expectations that come with being on STS9’s label. If the opening track, “Tina Turnon,” doesn’t grab you instantly with its beat-matching bass line, then the slow roll into “White…

On Chicks Only, GirlGrabbers’ ode to the ladies, the crew has crafted a damn near perfect array of instrumentals, mating soul samples with vocal loops. Each track is named for a different “hot chick,” from Arcadia Lake to Paula Patton. The cuts are slinky, uber-sexy and incredibly well arranged. The…

“Cat Magick” starts this album off on a refreshing, nearly unclassifiable note: The vocals, raspy and difficult to decipher, are right out of crust and black metal, while the music has a kind of mathy but sinuous intensity, like something from At the Drive-In. Twisty guitar leads intertwine with urgent,…

The members of the Say So have a lot to say — mostly about their faults and their past relationships, of which they remain firmly critical. “It’s not me,” lead singer Sean Palmer bleats on their latest album. “It’s you.” On The Romantic, the emotional foursome blurs the lines between…

This past February, the Fray released Scars & Stories, the band’s third full-length release, produced by Brendan O’Brien. “I believe in this record,” Joe King told us. “I believe it’s our best work. I believe that we’re better now and we’ve written better songs than we ever have.” Scars marks…

Electronic music is like any other of genre of music in that the artists who stick around for decades tend to be the most innovative, the ones who constantly experiment and evolve as artists. Patrik Skoog is one such example; he’s created hard techno under his Headroom project, made a…

The American Idol model of pop-star selection is obnoxious for a variety of reasons — the regular televising of Steven Tyler’s grotesque mask/face, for example — but the biggest one is the artifice of it: the implied presumption that some contrived elimination contest can dictate what we like. Even as…

While we’ve been mourning the untimely passing of Adam Yauch (aka MCA) of the Beastie Boys last week and reminiscing about the act’s shows in Denver, we’ve learned that the musician/activist had pretty interesting ties to our city beyond playing here nearly a dozen times over the past two decades…

By all accounts, the Beastie Boys performed in the Denver metro area ten times over the course of two decades, beginning with the act’s first show at the Mammoth Events Center on Friday, February 13, 1987, and culminating with its Rock the Vote double bill at the Fillmore with Tenacious…

ROGER WATERS @ PEPSI CENTER | 5.7.12 See Also: (Review) Roger Waters at the Pepsi Center, 11/23/10 Roger Waters at the Pepsi Center slide show “Thirty years ago, when I first wrote this album, I was rather famously not very good at being in rooms with people liking me a…

Mos Def and Talib Kweli, two whirlwind rhyme-slingers in their own right, first came together as Black Star in 1998. Their first album, Mos Def & Talib Kweli Are Black Star, was propelled by Mos Def’s poetic lyrics and Kweli’s poignant delivery, and it instantly had heads clamoring for more…

JunoWhat performed on Friday at Cervantes’ Masterpiece Ballroom in Denver with Bernie Worrell (Parliament-Funkadelic, Talking Heads) on keys and Euforquestra, which opened the show. Photos by Nick Callaio for Westword…

Fresh off its appearance at this year’s SnowBall Music Festival and 2010 Westword Music Showcase alumni, BoomBox came back to the Centennial State on Saturday, May 5, 2012 for a show at the Ogden Theatre. Photos by Eric Gruneisen for Westword…

RUBEDO @ UNIT E | 5/4/12 See more photos in Rubedo at Unit E slide show In a show of sustained enthusiasm, Rubedo ended its set with one of its most visceral and dynamic numbers: “Give My Heart a Break.” The song began with feedback created by Kyle Gray as…

We haven’t even really had a chance to absorb and process the news of Beastie Boy Adam Yauch’s death yet — and this? Some people never cease to amaze me. Seriously. While it’s since been amended, just a bit ago we noticed that some insensitive dickhole apparently thought it would…

Adam Yauch (aka MCA of the Beastie Boys) has died. He was 47. Forming the Beastie Boys as a teenager in Brooklyn in the late ’70s, Yauch was part of a pivotal assembly of artists that defined rap music for the radio. Early incarnations of the group shifted genres and…

If you’re looking to get your dance on along with your drink and your partying this weekend, you have lots and lots of options. Tonight, Colette’s taking on Bar Standard with her deep Chicago house sound, and the following night 3Deep kicks off its latest Soiree at the club, while…

Welcome to another outstanding music-filled weekend in the Mile High City! Local music abounds: We’ve got a trio of CD release shows from Rubedo, the Congress and Chingaso, a three day Mini Fest with forty bands at 3 Kings Tavern and the hi-dive. If that weren’t enough, BoomBox is back…

PORTUGAL. THE MAN at OGDEN THEATRE | 5/2/12 Portugal. The Man really, really likes Denver — at least as much as the Portland-by-way-of-Alaska act appreciates band names with unwarranted punctuation and song titles with extra parentheses, it seems. “I know a lot of bands come out and say that every…