Tonight: Fitz & The Tantrums at the Bluebird

Seven-piece outfit Fitz & The Tantrums (playing tonight at the Bluebird Theater with Ximena) is all about the soul revival, for sure. But band leader Michael Fitzpatrick brings just the slightest hint of Tom Jones-inspired campiness to the group’s cool vintage sound, which works well with co-vocalist Noelle Scaggs’ sweet…

House Revival goes all-vinyl in July

Local man-about-town and house-music ambassador, Brett Starr, has found a niche with his fifth-Friday House Revival shows at Funky Buddha; the basic idea is to bring together three DJs with different styles and have them spin a cohesive set together, switching off one-after-another at the decks. It’s proven to be…

Cheapskates Action Sports Bar now open

After working in the action-sports industry for years and setting a Guinness World Record for longest journey on a mini-motorcycle, Ryan Galbraith and Chris Stinson have now embarked on a different journey: Cheapskates Action Sports Bar, which opened last week in the former home of Bliss Café at 7501 Grandview…

Gauntlet Hair signs with Dead Oceans

Hooray for Gauntlet Hair and congrats to Dead Oceans for having the good sense to add the Lafayette-based duo to its roster. The outfit attracted the attention of the “instantly spellbound” label with a pair of 7-inch releases, one on Mexican Summer and the other on Gorilla Vs Bear’s Forest…

Tonight: White Denim at the Larimer

It is easy to pass off White Denim (due tonight at the Larimer Lounge with The Growlers) as psychedelic garage rock — except the reverb isn’t there and the Austin-based act implements some seriously dub-like rhythms. Labels aside, the power trio (that recently became an even tighter foursome) incite a…

Maris the Great is about to be laid to rest

Welp, looks like it’s the end of an era. If you haven’t heard, everyone’s favorite gay zombie, Maris the Great, is about to become food for worms — uh, actually, “retiring” is how he put it. Semantics aside, after a fruitful killing spree that lasted more than a decade (eleven…

5 Degrees closing this weekend

After more than a decade-long run, 5 Degrees (1475 Lawrence Street) is closing this weekend with a final bash on Saturday, June 4, with $20 for all-you-can-drink wells and $50 of bottle service. The building that houses the club is under construction to make way for University of Colorado Denver…

Tonight: Sharon Jones & The Dap-Kings at Botanic Gardens

Sharon Jones (performing this evening with her band, The Dap Kings, at the Denver Botanic Gardens) is a soul revivalist, whether she intended to be or not. The Brooklynite was a session singer in the ’70s, but it wasn’t until the late ’90s that Jones was finally given the chance…

Tonight: Celldweller at the Marquis

Celldweller (performing tonight at the Marquis Theater with Die Brucke and Kevin Callison) is the moniker of Klayton, a singer, multi-instrumentalist, music programmer and producer based out of Detroit. Bringing his own unique form of industrial music to the masses via movie, video game and television soundtracks, including collaborations with…

Il Cattivo pools its bad habits and makes great music

When starting any new relationship, you generally look for positive traits in a person as a way of gauging compatibility. For the members of Il Cattivo — whose name roughly translates from Italian to “the horrid” — it was the negative qualities they all possessed that brought them together. “I…

Don Callarman’s murals make the walls pop at Quixote’s

In The Horse’s Mouth, Alec Guinness plays an expressionist painter on a quest to find the perfect wall to paint on. Painter Don Callarman refers to that 1958 movie when he says he might have found the perfect canvas: the blank back wall of Quixote’s True Blue (2151 Lawrence Street)…

Forests of Azure, June 4 at the Larimer Lounge

Ed Marshall has had his hand in music in Denver for the past several years, both as a keen observer of the ebb and flow of music out of this town and as a musician with a penchant for the psychedelic with bands like Stargazer, Into the Ether, Overcasters and…