Concerts

We unleashed photog Aaron Thackeray on the city this weekend, and he came back with hundreds of photos from Friday’s 3OH!3/Cobra Starship concert, an after-party at Suite 200, the Cuervo Games on Saturday and the Cannabis Cub on Sunday. See the photos at westword.com/slideshow…

We would hate for you to miss out on all the awesome that happens every weekend in our fair city, so we’ve decided to run down five of the best shows in one easy-to-swallow post, with video and audio. Tell us — and the rest of the world — what…

Earlier this month, with very little fanfare, SP Double, one of the area’s more promising MCs, picked up stakes and headed for the notably sunnier confines of South Florida. The move comes just as SP — who just inked a deal with Digital Dollar, an independent imprint from the Sunshine…

So, you think Lady Gaga is a vapid, no-talent fad? Wrong. You think she’s an entertaining, fun pop star? Wrong. You think she’s a strange, high-concept performance art project meant to manipulate our expectations of what a star is? Getting close but still wrong. Newly revealed, top-secret and utterly batshit…

Nathaniel Rateliff • The Tallest Man on Earth 05.19.10 | Bluebird Theater “Shut up!” demanded one rather surly fellow somewhere in the balcony. In a classic case of the cure being worse than the disease, the indignant exhortation came during the opening strains of “When You’re Here,” which Nathaniel Rateliff…

Um, like, ewww and stuff. That’s about all we have to say about 3OH!3 latest turn on the cover of AP. If you’re keeping track, this is the third time the outfit has graced the cover. For the July edition of the magazine commemorating the Cleveland-based rag’s 25th anniversary, the…

What could be more ridiculous than a tribute band, really? Maybe a tribute band for the hilariously absurd, entirely fictional, animated-series metal outfit Dethklok from the popular Metalocalypse program on the Cartoon Network’s Adult Swim segment. Even deeper into that hole is the fact that an actual band tours as…

The floodwaters might be receding from his home town of Nashville, but Landon Pigg isn’t wallowing in them. Still on the road behind his 2009 full-length, The Boy Who Never, the young singer-songwriter is touring through a string of smaller venues, despite the fact that his star seems to be…

I Fight Dragons is ostensibly edgy because it has an obscure-sounding genre tag: chiptunes. Really, it’s not even that. Chiptunes would be all-eight-bit music, which, if annoying, is at least a challenge. This is just the first HelloGoodbye album, but with NES controllers instead of (or, really, in addition to)…

With a name that refers to an old Jackie Chan movie rather than a phrase from the dictionary of Winston Smith’s Oceania, Nice Nice hails from Olympia, Washington, and offers up music that is as difficult to pin down as it is to guess what kind of music a band…

Isaiah “Ikey” Owens is the mad-genius keyboard player for the Mars Volta, but before that, he played with Sublime and the Long Beach Dub Allstars. On stage, Owens looks like a supernatural agency is at work, guiding his hands and body in a frantic display of instrumental wizardry. In his…

Romano Paoletti opens Story of a Lifetime with “Ragtime Blues,” an ode to his grandfather, “Ragtime” Bob Darch, an inductee of the Ragtime Hall of Fame. It’s a measure not only of Paoletti’s dedication to family and tradition, but of the album’s commitment to live up to its title. Across…

If you plan on nodding your head to the beat of Solar Bear’s newest album, good fucking luck. Time signatures switch suddenly and unexpectedly throughout the six-song EP, creating oceans of frenzied, finger-stretching chaos before melting into beautiful and sprawling half-tempo breakdowns. The band, recently stripped down to a foursome,…

After the sound of crickets ends at the beginning of the opening track, “Delirium Heights,” Glass Hits dives into a savage bit of noise rock that sounds like it was recorded right at the line of pegging the board. Fans of Drive Like Jehu and the VSS will appreciate the…

The ’90s are long gone. But, hey, sixteen-year-old kids are still getting sad, right? So why not throw some pillow-soft vocal melodies about missed opportunities in love over sunrise guitars and piano and puppy-dog drums? This is a band that lists Counting Crows among its chief influences, and it would…

Somewhere in the Netherlands, some scientist has been hard at work genetically engineering dance-music titans. How else can you explain such a large number of top-level dance producers and DJs — Junkie XL, Sander van Doorn, Armin van Buuren, Tiësto, just to name a few — coming from a country…

When it opens the weekend of May 21, Boudoir 1434 might be the most expensive place in town. But you’ll get what you pay for, says the bar’s manager, J.C. Granger. “It’s exclusive, has the best decor, the best drinks, the best service, the best everything,” he explains. “We know…

When Greg Harris went into the studio for Glass Gold, his newest record, he literally did not know what was going to be on the album. As in, hadn’t even written the songs yet. “Somehow, a bunch of the tracks on that album, they were all completely free, in the…

Years after moving back to Denver from New York, Emily Frembgen still has a 917 area code. It therefore shouldn’t come as a surprise that the singer-songwriter is packing up her guitar and heading back to the Big Apple at the beginning of June. But she’s not leaving Denver empty-handed:…

Last year, Local Natives battered SXSW with nine shows in three days, ultimately leading to a record deal in the U.K., followed by a tour. This year, the L.A. five-piece is gaining traction stateside, thanks to a debut album stocked with sturdy indie-rock arrangements and a touring schedule that slots…

The complete lineup for Showcase has been finalized, and all that’s left to do now is countdown the days until the sixteenth annual Westword Music Showcase takes place on Saturday, June 19. Nearly a hundred local acts (well over a hundred if you count Single File and Tickle Me Pink)…