Game time! Are you ready for the hottest party of the summer? We are! Of course, we’ve been planning, laboring and looking forward to the 2012 Westword Music Showcase since the final strains of Chromeo’s set faded last year. Maybe you have, too. If so, well, let’s just say your…

MINISTRY @ OGDEN THEATRE | 6.17.12 When the ominous chorus of “Psalm 69” rang out during the first song of Ministry’s encore, everyone cheered louder than they had the rest of the night. The chilling music, the sort of thing you’d expect to hear in a movie about a misguided…

Greencarpetedstairs (due tonight at Rhinoceropolis) is the hip-hop/experimental electronic/IDM project of Neil Ewing. He was part of the loose cadre of students that attended Rocky Mountain College of Art and Design in the first half of the last decade that were at the core of the scene around Rhinoceropolis, including…

Ministry started in Denver at a time when synth-pop was just starting to get off the ground in a meaningful way. But Al Jourgensen wisely moved to Chicago when the Wax Trax label was starting up and more or less creating the influential Chicago electronic and industrial sound that would…

You can hear Breathe Carolina’s music pretty much everywhere you go these days. You’ll find it in all the expected places, of course — on alternative radio; on TV, on shows such as The Tonight Show With Jay Leno and MTV’s The City — but it’s also managed to infiltrate…

THE DANDY WARHOLS @ Gothic Theatre | 6/12/12 “I Love You” by the Dandy Warhols, which came just after midset, is already a hypnotic song with its fuzzy edges, but last night the Dandys took a four minute song and stretched it into a mind-bending journey with strobes to accent…

Neil Ewing has long created some of the most innovative and adventurous hip-hop around. This self-titled album (due for release this Friday, June 15, at Rhinoceropolis) on Ceschi Ramos’s Fake Four imprint probably wouldn’t sound like a hip-hop album to most people. But Ewing’s synthesis of noise, hip-hop, electronic pop,…

Since 2006, Vancouver’s Japandroids have been purveyors of a raw post-punk. Not the kind that became de rigueur in New York at the turn of the century, but rather the sort that is more sonically resonant, with the spiky, urgent melodies of Hüsker Dü and the free-flowing catharsis of the…

Glass Delirium (due at Moe’s Original BBQ on Thursday, June 14) has been through some changes over the past few years, taking on both a new lead vocalist and a new drummer. Even so, the group has not forsaken its approach to melodic, progressive hard rock. Immediate and apt comparisons…

Wymond Miles (due tonight at Twist and Shout and tomorrow night at The Gothic Theater) hails from Denver’s completely unglamorous suburb directly to the east, Aurora. In the mid-’90s Miles started to become involved in the underground music scene in Denver, initially, and most notably, for his experimental rock band…

THE SAY SO @ HI-DIVE | 6/9/12 The Say So ended its release for show for The Romantic last night at the hi-dive with one of the best songs from its previous release, Something Like Wild. “Fools” was replete with the melodic, triumphal tone that is part of the band’s…

Fire Season (due tomorrow at Wax Trax) is best described as a power- pop band with a singer who sounds like he retired from a decade or two of serving as a drill sergeant — or might have been raised by wolves. Sam Braakman’s voice has character, a Scott Kelly-esque…

Lemonade (due Sunday, June 10, at the Larimer Lounge) started off as three friends from the hardcore and punk scene in San Francisco who stretched their interest in sound far beyond the music of their youth. Trying to pigeonhole the band’s music is an exercise in futility, but a quick…

“Mirrored Minds,” the opening track on The Distance We’ve Created, the debut EP from Fire Season (due for release at a free all-ages show this Saturday, June 9, at Wax Trax), recalls that era of rock music in the ’90s when the lines were blurred between emo, indie rock and…

Lemonade started in San Francisco and then moved to New York, but you’d never know it from listening to the band’s music. With its synthesis of ’80s club music, the trio recalls the sound of bands coming out of Miami — if those bands were clued into Afro-Cuban rhythms without…

While it’s true that nearly every corner of folk-inspired music has been explored ad infinitum, Patrick Dethlefs (due at Swallow Hill on Friday, June 8) doesn’t sound like he’s trying to be Bob Dylan, Townes Van Zandt, Richard Thompson or Nick Drake.Maybe he worked his way through those influences early…