Founded by Anna Smith, Megan Crooks, Cody Coffey and Derrick Bozich in the summer of 2013, Ancient Elk is actually only a little over a year old. Smith and Crooks had played together before in Birds of a Feather, a kind of avant-garde band with roots in bluegrass, folk and…
The Gaslamp Killer stands out, even when he’s part of a long night of wide-ranging modern electronic music. His DJ set spanned decades seamlessly and he has a constant, even hyperkinetic movement — an effort that makes many musicians not from Denver reel from the exhaustion. In fact, he scoffed…
Former Sonic Youth guitarist Thurston Moore has spent the past four summers teaching a course on William Burroughs at Naropa University in Boulder. In this week’s music feature, now posted on the Backbeat blog, Tom Murphy talks to the rock legend about how he got the job and how Patti…
Thurston Moore is best known for his role as one of the pioneering guitarists of the now-defunct experimental band Sonic Youth. But he’s been spending his summers in Boulder for the past four years, teaching a course at Naropa University on William Burroughs’s connection with and influence on music. “The…
The Gaslamp Killer is making an appearance at The 1up on Colfax this Thursday, August 7. Born William Benussen, GLK has been involved directly in producing and creating some of the most innovative electronic music and hip-hop of recent years. When he moved to Los Angeles from San Diego in…
Cut Copy co-headlines Red Rocks with Chromeo this Tuesday, August 5. With Flume and Duke Dumont sharing the bill, the show will represent different facets of an international electronic dance music that isn’t directly connected with the EDM phenomenon. Cut Copy first came to the attention of audiences outside its…
There was no gobbing, no fighting, no obvious fascist skinheads ruining last night’s Black Flag show for other people. There were also no members of the classic line-up beyond the band’s founder, Greg Ginn. But twenty-eight years after Black Flag last did a national tour, that was to be expected…
There were no gimmicks over the weekend at the Buffalo Rose, beyond some rock theater, and none were needed. Great White, of all bands, gave us a startlingly strong rock and roll show, the likes of which isn’t often seen these days. When the band came on stage, it looked…
Great White is due to play at the Buffalo Rose this Saturday, July 26th. The veteran blues rock band got its start in 1977 during the early days of the Los Angeles Hard Rock scene, when Van Halen was in its ascendancy and the glam metal with which it later…
Enrique Jimenez is a man about town — if you’ve been to more than a handful of local shows over the last several years, chances are you’ve crossed paths with him. His own band Altas (formerly Panal S.A. de C.V.) is an experimental instrumental rock band par excellence and can…
Jux County is playing a rare show this Thursday, July 24th, at 9 p.m. at the Eslinger Gallery for the UMS. Since forming in December 1986, Jux County has become a fixture in the local music scene. Within the first few years of the band’s existence it had released its…
Going to a Deep Club event is a bit of an adventure. The label and host of “DIY Parties” hides the addresses of its shows until you RSVP. They’re always at a place well off the beaten path, and you never find out the exact location until the day of…
It would be easy to dismiss a show like this as something aging fans of ’90s alternative rock take their kids to. But Nine Inch Nails and Soundgarden still have plenty of intellect and challenging music. And opener Oneohtrix Point Never, an experimental electronic and ambient artist, likely challenged the…
When Planes Mistaken for Stars made its return to Denver over the weekend after a long break, it attracted an assemblage of old fans and new. This included some people you don’t much see at shows anymore — a true testament to the enduring impact of Planes. There wasn’t a…
Ask anyone who was around the underground rock scene in Denver in the early ’90s and chances are that person at least heard of Sympathy F. Since its 1991 debut at 7 South, a club now known as the hi-dive, Sympathy F became a favorite of peers and fans by…
Tommy Metz works as a web developer and is unassuming and friendly. He’s also one of Denver’s more prolific musicians. His voice is unexpectedly powerful and brightly melodic, and it floats over his finely crafted beats. Lately, Metz has separated his work, releasing his darker, more experimental pieces under the…
Despite the closure of Broadway south of Alameda, it wasn’t too difficult to find one’s way over to Syntax Physic Opera on opening weekend. Walking through the front door felt like exiting Broadway in Denver on a hot July evening and entering a ’50s jazz lounge or after-hours club, with…
The neighborhood surrounding Dryer Plug Studios, along a strip of current and former light industrial buildings on 43rd Avenue, isn’t exactly quiet. Freight trains run at semi-regular intervals less than two blocks away. Next door is a church, and across the street are some houses. The entrance is on the…
It is known that there are still several hundred bodies somewhere beneath the surface of Cheesman Park, which was a burial ground during the late nineteenth century. Many of the dead were re-interred at Riverside Cemetery, but plenty remain. If there is a haunted place in the heart of Denver,…
Few bands that were around in 1994, at least in Denver’s punk milieu, are still around. But somehow King Rat has endured and reinvented or reinvigorated itself again and again, despite personal turmoil and the vicissitudes of public tastes in punk and music in general. And it was the reinvigorated…
Bringing the bombast, drama and light show of a larger venue to Lost Lake, EMA and opening act Mas Ysa pushed enough air to test the sound system of most smaller rooms to its limits. Mas Ysa even commented that he thought he was overloading the monitor, but it didn’t…
When Nick Cave and The Bad Seeds went into “Stagger Lee” from the 1996 album Murder Ballads, it was an iconic moment of an evening of music in which the band took the tradition of American folk mythology and breathed into it a larger-than-life electricity. Cave brought raging emotional intensity…
