Music

Had you walked into Bardo Coffee House last Sunday afternoon, you would have seen four dudes — one wearing a shirt with cats on it — crammed onto a couch, trying not to spill tea on themselves or the one female member of their group, who perched comfortably in the…

David J is scheduled to DJ at Lipgloss on Friday, July 31. Born David J. Haskins, David J is perhaps best-known to music fans as the bassist and sometime singer in influential post-punk bands Bauhaus and Love and Rockets. Haskins is also an accomplished author whose plays have garnered critical…

Hunting hot new local music takes commitment – many of us devote our otherwise worthless lives to it — but not everyone has that kind of time. Now, as it turns out, there’s an app for that. Or at least there will be. “We’re very, very new,” says Matt Cannata,…

Atlanta-based jam-band pioneers Col. Bruce Hampton & the Aquarium Rescue Unit spent a lot of time on the road in the early ’90s, and plenty of it was in Colorado. “I guess we played about thirty cities in Colorado,” says Bruce Hampton. “We covered it. We would stay up there…

Since debuting with the beautifully eccentric An Awesome Wave in 2012, Alt-J (which has described its songs as being about “maths and sex”) has become a stalwart at major music festivals around the world, sampling — and befriending — Miley Cyrus, picking up a Grammy nomination for last year’s This…

Perhaps the most unusual act of this past weekend’s Underground Music Showcase was Magic Sword. This mysterious trio hails from Boise, Idaho and the two musicians perform incognito while a third member handles the projections in a way that is far from obvious. “I try to set up in a way…

Jana Hunter has helped make some of the most fascinating music of the past decade. Having joined in numerous collaborations — including a peripheral involvement playing with the legendary Houston noise/psych band Indian Jewelry as well as Sharon Van Etten and CocoRosie – she’s contributed considerably to the world of…

There are some big shows at the Pepsi Center (Imagine Dragons, and Chicago and Earth Wind & Fire). Also this week: Alt-J and TV on the Radio, and HARD Red Rocks at Red Rocks, Fall Out Boy and Wiz Khalifa at Fiddler’s Green and Charli XCX and Bleachers at the…

When the UMS line-up was first coming together, I had no intention of attending. There were so many reasons not to go. The last two years’ shows have been diabolically crowded, and there are always other, less packed places to see local bands. Besides, summer in Denver of late has…

This past weekend, I made a joke on Twitter that the hardest part about attending UMS isn’t trying to see as many bands as you can fit into your schedule, but actually getting from one venue to another without running into (and talking to) 2,500 people along the way. As…

Watching Street Fever feels like going to a dance party in the Mad Max universe. The DJ, in a tight leather jacket and a heavy-metal mask with eyes that glow and change colors with the beats, looks like an alien. In front of him, standing on a chair, is a…

Melt-Banana brings its manic and disorienting noise punk back to Larimer Lounge this Friday, July 24. Melt-Banana is pretty much impossible to forget — its shows are such an electrifying barrage of sounds and dynamics. To the group’s credit, it looks like it’s unleashing personal demons on stage as well…

To say that High Fiction is a relatively obscure pop duo that has yet to release a record would be strictly true, but its members — Gary Grundei and Amy Shelley (who, turns out, is distantly related to the Mary Shelley who wrote Frankenstein) — have had a pretty atypical career,…

Sometimes a geographical change is necessary for a band to find its own path. For Cassie McNeil and James Wayne, the Pacific Northwest felt like the right part of the country to re-root the duo’s work as Force Publique. Both musicians grew up in different parts of Colorado, eventually landing…