Veronica Falls formed in 2009, when Roxanne Clifford and Patrick Doyle moved to London from Glasgow and hooked up with the like-minded James Hoare and mutual friend Marion Herbain. The urgent melodies of the band’s breezy twee sound drew immediate comparisons to C86 acts like the Vaselines and the Pastels,…

With his old band, the Mint Chicks, Ruban Nielson experienced some degree of success in the underground in Auckland, New Zealand; the group had releases on the respected Flying Nun imprint by the time it moved to Portland. But when the Chicks split up, in 2010, Nielson wasted no time…

Il Cattivo is a band that’s made up of various veterans of the punk and hard-rock scene in Denver. When Matthew Bellinger got back to Denver after a stint in Phoenix spent reassessing his life, he hit up one of his favorite lyricists and frontmen, Brian Hagman of Black Lamb,…

Samantha Donen came to Denver from British Columbia several years ago and has played bass for various outfits during her time here. From the alien blues rock of Hexen to the indigo-hued psych-tinged rock of Overcasters to her own performance-art project, Samantha Doom Blows Up the Band, Donen has brought…

GATHERING OF THE CLOUDS @ WALNUT ROOM |3/8/13 Despite Victoria Cecilia’s illness, Gliss managed to put in a solid performance at Gathering of the Clouds last night at the Walnut Room. If she indeed needed the cough drop she had half-jokingly solicited from the audience, you couldn’t tell from her…

Composed entirely on vintage analog electronic instruments and rendered directly to tape for a vivid and robust sound, this album has to be considered something of a modern classic of electronic music. “The Cold Wave” sounds like something Berlin would have killed to have as a backing track on its…

Bobby Hecksher has been the central figure of this band since its founding, in 1999. In 1994 Hecksher played bass on Beck’s Stereopathetic Soulmanure, and he also contributed to the Brian Jonestown Massacre’s 2001 album, Bravery, Repetition and Noise. But in his own work with the Warlocks, he’s explored a…

Thao Nguyen started writing songs with her acoustic guitar in middle school in Falls Church, Virginia. While attending William & Mary, she met her current bandmate, Adam Thompson, at a coffee-shop show in Richmond. And while that may be a bit of a cliché, Nguyen’s songs are not the tentative…

Dragondeer, the long-running side project of Swayback frontman Eric Halborg, has always been something you got to see once in a great while — like if you happened to be at the JINXED! jam night at Rockbar a few years back. In contrast to the Swayback, Dragondeer (due at the…

Almost a decade ago now, Matson Jones was a humble band from Fort Collins with no real illusions about commercial success. But just like that, it seems, the band went from playing small shows to drawing hundreds of people. “It was insane,” recalls Martina Grbac, who fronted the act. “It…

There’s a wide range of metal on tap this month that will appeal to an equally wide range of metal fans, from doom and grindcore to death metal and industrial, from local heroes to renowned international acts, in big and small venues. Keep reading to see what shows should be…

With a diverse collection of sounds and styles, often within the same song, the Constant Tourists have captured a warm, organic vibe on Carry On, especially with regard to the recording itself, which feels like it was done live, in a room with great natural acoustics. You can hear small…

For the better part of the past fifteen years, this band from Kalamazoo, Michigan, has toured like it was a life mission. True to its name, its roots are in bluegrass — but there’s also an improvisational side to the music that recalls the more interesting guitar work of Jerry…

Okalahoma band Broncho — the name is a term used for a mustang that has yet to be broken — plays back-to-basics rock and roll with an unvarnished sound that bears no affectation or appropriation of style. Frontman Ryan Lindsey is also the keyboard player and guitarist for experimental indie-pop…

Bart McCrorey is probably best known for his skate-punk outfit Frontside Five. Throttlebomb (due Saturday, March 2, at the hi-dive) isn’t a quantum leap from that, but it’s more a synthesis of speed metal and glam. It’s a bit like Motörhead, but with more of a focus on melody: A…

MOUSE ON MARS @ SUMMIT MUSIC HALL |2/23/13 As visuals flashed, streamed, scrolled, blinked, increased in luminosity and otherwise conspired to reflect the jittery, glitchy, sometimes manic and always dynamic flow of sounds being produced by Mouse on Mars, Andi Toma and Jan St. Werner stood behind a bank of…