QUEENS OF THE STONE AGE @ RED ROCKS | 8/15/13 Drawing liberally from a broad range of its catalog, Queens of the Stone Age planned its Red Rocks set out especially well last night. Everything rolled forward with ample momentum, but the band and the crowd both had plenty time…
My Bloody Valentine (due this Monday, August 19, at the Ogden Theatre) started as a post-punk band in the early ’80s, but by 1987, the group embarked on journey of sonic experimentation that resulted in some of the most influential music of the 1990s and beyond. The outfit’s genre-defining 1991…
Bad Weather California has reached its natural conclusion. Although the outfit still has a string of dates left to play, including a tour kickoff show is this Thursday, August 15, at the hi-dive, celebrating its brand new EP, Back Seats — due out this week on Fire Talk — Chris…
PHOENIX @ 1STBANK CENTER | 8/7/13 Last night at 1STBANK, when the repeating bell-like sounds at the beginning of Phoenix’s biggest hit “Lisztomania” rung out, the crowd roared expectedly and the outfit almost didn’t have to sing at all. As everybody sang along with every word, you could tell that…
Sleepdial’s latest effort, Ext, begins with a collage of coruscating white noise, seemingly created by taking droning tones and distorting them beyond recognition. What emerges from that chaos is an incandescent melody that ends abruptly. It’s as if you’re in a spaceship, emerging from the star-dense core of a new…
Primitive Man is the latest band fronted by Ethan McCarthy, best known as the frontman for death-grind acts Clinging to the Trees of a Forest Fire and Death of Self. McCarthy formed Primitive Man in February 2012 with original drummer Bennett Kennedy, citing a mutual interest in starting the heaviest…
NO AGE @ RHINOCEROPOLIS | WEDS, 08/28/13 Blurring the line between punk rock and noise, No Age could be mistaken for a particularly frantic and raw garage rock band. But this Los Angeles duo was one of the handful of bands that played at the Smell in L.A. in the…
From the onset of the stoner-rock sea chanty “Pirates Sail for Portsmouth,” which opens …In the Land of Sin, you get the sense that the members of Amputators do their writing with a bit of tongue in their cheeks. “Muscle Truck” ups the ante on the concept of the muscle…
Sebadoh started as a kind of solo recording project of Lou Barlow toward the end of his tenure with Dinosaur Jr. in the late ’80s. Upon his departure from Dino in 1989, Barlow focused on his songwriting with Sebadoh, and his recording aesthetic became synonymous with “lo-fi” of the 1990s,…
ADAM ANT @ THE OGDEN THEATRE | 7/24/13 Adam Ant & the Good, the Mad and the Lovely Posse came on stage with fanfare. Ant was wearing his Blueblack Hussar outfit, and he and his bandmates looked like they’d come out of some indefinable era of punk without an obvious…
Andy Thomas’s new solo album, Wicked Dark, begins with an appropriately downcast note of confused emotions riding on a repetitive, dynamically textured riff. There are two vocalists on “Nowhere but Down,” and the song creates a sense of isolation that has yet to turn into the sadness you know will…
MUDHONEY @ UMS | 7/19/13 Mudhoney didn’t spend a lot of time joking with the audience between songs at this show, but after the borderline cartoonish menace of “Judgment, Rage, Retribution and Thyme,” Mark Arm said, “I feel like Colorado and Washington are sister states. There’s no reason to play…
40TH DAY @ LARIMER LOUNGE | 7/20/13 The whole 40th Day set felt a bit like me traveling and a creative resurrection at the same time. For whatever reason, it just didn’t feel like a reunion show. The felt show felt like the five members of the band were playing…
In 1986, 40th Day, reconvening for a show this weekend at the Larimer Lounge, came together when drummer Sid Davis and then guitarist Todd Howell formed the project in the D.U. area, where many of the band members over the years lived. That’s also where the band’s practice space was…
Born Stuart Goddard in London, Adam Ant was the bass player for a band called Bazooka Joe, an outfit that opened for the Sex Pistols for its first live gig. In 1977, he formed Adam and the Ants, and while early on the group was coming out of punk, after…
On his latest album as Ancient Mith, Braden Smith has more fully integrated the synthesizer and the noisier end of his beats than he did on previous efforts. “They’ll Always Call at Nine” has the same stark but spine-tingling sound that Wendy Carlos used in her compositions for the Clockwork…
I told somebody at the kitchen that I work in that it was a ‘mind-over-matter situation,'” says Caleb Tardio, talking about how his band, I Sank Molly Brown, came up with the name for its new EP, Mind Over Mothra. “She was like, ‘Did you say ‘mind over Mothra’? That’s…
PETER MURPHY @ SUMMIT MUSIC HALL | 7/16/13 Near the end of his set last night, Peter Murphy paused a moment as the last echo of “She’s In Parties” rang out and the repetitive yet urgent bass line for “Stigmata Martyr” rolled in for a measure or two. Then the…
Mudhoney formed around the same time as Sub Pop, the record label its sound became synonymous with; Mark Arm and Steve Turner had recently left Green River and teamed up with former Bundle of Hiss drummer Dan Peters and ex-Melvins bassist Matt Lukin. The band crafted an exhilarating and influential…
Melvins have been an influence on some of the most sonically forward-thinking rock bands and other musical experimentalists of the last three decades. Impossible to consistently pigeonhole as simply punk, or metal, or even rock, Melvins have set a high bar for integrity, both as a live band and as…
Peter Murphy co-founded the influential post-punk band Bauhaus in 1978 with Daniel Ash, David J and Kevin Haskins. Over the course of four full-length albums, Murphy and company creating an experience of heightened reality with its music that broke from convention, not just sonically but with lyrics informed by the…
DAVID BYRNE & ST. VINCENT @ DENVER BOTANIC GARDENS | 7/13/12 When Annie Clark noted how the first time she had heard David Byrne’s music was when she saw Revenge of the Nerds, we thought we knew what was coming next. Instead, though, Clark played “Cruel,” one of her own…
