Hot Robots, which is preparing to release its new album, All Alone Together, this week, comprises members of a number of well-regarded Denver acts past and present, such as the Christines, the LaDonnas, the Inactivists and Local 33. You can hear the quintet’s collective love of power pop and guitar-driven…

Ode to the Marionette’s previous album, 2009’s Uncomfortable Situation, was a kind of dusky pop album with jazz underpinnings. Since then, the band has tightened its arrangements a bit while expanding its atmospheric palette. On “Disappear for a While,” low-end swells hover at the edges, then give way to a…

Over the course of 21 releases since its inception in 2001, Brooklyn’s Japanther has evolved its hybrid of noise rock, punk and garage rock into a mutant form of music all its own. Throw in the performance-art aspect of Japanther’s shows, and you have a unique live experience often only…

When Bon Iver won a Grammy for Best New Artist earlier this year, most people who bothered to watch the awards ceremony had probably never heard of the band. But for the past six years, Justin Vernon has been touring and releasing albums with a small group of collaborators. Bon…

A few years back, a promising act called Makeout Point put out a couple of noteworthy releases that evoked a fascinating combination of Throwing Muses and Fire Party. Unfortunately, that group parted ways in early 2011, before it could really capitalize on the hints of greatness in the handful of…

MANCUB @ LARIMER LOUNGE | 5/25/12 With a perforated, paneled structure as its backdrop with lights shining through and strung along the top edge, ManCub started things off with a forceful flood of low end, and both Alex Anderson and Ethan Converse seemed to push themselves headlong into the music…

Reno Divorce (due tomorrow night at the Marquis Theater) began in the middle ’90s when frontman and guitarist Brent Loveday founded the outfit while still living in Orlando, Florida. Some early, glowing press came the way of the band’s 7-inch. But it wasn’t until Loveday relocated to Denver and discovered…

From the beginning of “Across the Ocean,” the opening track of Galaxies’ Letters From Sea, it sounds as though Dillon Groeneman recorded the album while on a ship. And it’s not just the sound samples that make it feel that way, but also the sense of peace and isolation that…

Starting as the punk-rock solo act of Tom Gabel, Against Me! has embodied the best end of every recent punk-rock cliché. Gabel is a vegan who early on played acoustic punk protest music. He lived in a communal house, got by dumpster diving, worked with Food Not Bombs and has…

As the versatile and hyper-talented guitarist in Hot White, Kevin John Wesley (due at Rhinoceropolis on Wednesday, May 30) showed how thrilling abrasive and jarring guitar gymnastics could be. But even before that band went on indefinite hiatus, Wesley played solo shows during which he never quite did the same…

Starting things off with two pop-punk anthems, “Where Hope Lives” and “Rooftops,” the Hate strikes a triumphant note on Authors, like a statement of purpose from a group of vital, snarling hellraisers, simultaneously channeling bits of the Sweet and Bad Religion and mixing them with a touch of Hot Rod…

After a handful of years spent experimenting with a broad spectrum of psychedelic music while based in Newark, Delaware, two of this band’s founding members relocated to Los Angeles. There they found like-minded musicians, and for a while, Spindrift included members of Psychic TV, Brian Jonestown Massacre and Warlocks. The…

Anyone who stuck around for the final act of the second night of 2011’s Titwrench Festival got to see something very different when Tulip Wars took the stage. At times the music felt like straight-ahead pop with a lot more depth; at others the band sounded like mid-’90s alternative-rockers who…

Plants and Animals (due tonight at the hi-dive) began life as an all-instrumental band in Montreal that made sprawling rock epics informed by an improvisational sensibility. But by the time the band was ready for its 2008 debut full-length, Parc Avenue, it no longer seemed to feel the need to…

THE LUMINEERS @ BLUEBIRD THEATER | 5/11/12 Wesley Schulz announced that the band was going to perform a Sawmill Joe song and it was obvious much of the crowd knew what was coming, as The Lumineers started the song and brought Joe back on stage. Between pretty much all the…