Zola Jesus (due tomorrow night at Larimer Lounge) started as the solo project of Nika Roza Danilova. Shortly after she released her earliest recordings, she came to the attention of Caleb Braaten of Sacred Bones Records who has since been a champion of her singular creative vision. Danilova’s 2009 album,…
John Popper seems stunned by the fact that Blues Traveler boasts a longer lifespan than a legal drinker. Popper, who helped launched the band as a quartet in a New Jersey garage in the mid ’80s, has seen the outfit go through fundamental changes. The commercial success of the album…
Let the comparisons to the late Whitney Houston begin. As of yesterday, Adele, the vocal powerhouse and people’s champ of 2011, has broken Houston’s record for number of weeks atop the Billboard 200 albums chart. As 21 logged 21 nonconsecutive weeks at the top yesterday, 365 days after being released,…
See Also: Megadeth live review at Fillmore and interview with David Ellefson When Megadeth plays the Fillmore next Tuesday, February 28, it will be a homecoming for guitar prodigy Chris Broderick, a Lakewood native and alumni of the University of Denver, where he studied classical guitar. A onetime member of…
The Jealous Sound (playing tonight at the Marquis Theater) came together when former Knapsack guitarist and singer Blair Shehan got together with some of his friends who had also been members of melodic punk bands of the ’90s, including Padro Benito of Sunday’s Best, John McGinnis of Neither Trumpets Nor…
Okay, after hearing the full version of Rihanna’s “Birthday Cake (Remix),” featuring Chris Brown, we’re in utter shock. If Tina Turner heard this damning pop, which essentially gives Brown a pass for what he did to Rihanna three years ago, we’re pretty sure she’d be shaking her head like us…
It’s unfortunate that so many people assume that U.K. punk was all about politics. When Bill Maher interviewed Green Day’s Billy Joe Armstrong on his show Real Time with Bill Maher last year, he questioned the singer’s punk credibility for working to help elect Barack Obama in 2008, referring to…
Update: Chris Brown’s “Turn Up the Music” remix featuring Rhianna added below. Happy 24th birthday, Robyn Rihanna Fenty. We remember your first record, “Pon De Replay.” Nice, disposable dancefloor pop. It was urban enough to get people dancing in high school, but not sexy enough to fertilize anything — that…
Over the last two years, Soulive has set up shop at Brooklyn Bowl for the band’s annual Bowlive residencies, which have also featured guest appearances from heavies like by Maceo Parker, John Scofield and Ivan Neville. With this weekend’s Snowlive, Soulive will be at the Fox Theatre for a three-night…
Breathe Owl Breathe (due tonigh at the Hi-Dive) is from East Jordan, Michigan, a relatively remote place that forced the members of the act to turn inward for inspiration in its music. This explains the unique sound of its albums including its most recent, 2010’s Magic Central, which falls somewhere…
When we wrote on this week’s cover that local slammer Suzi Q. Smith is “poetry in motion,” we weren’t kidding. In addition to owning one of the boldest voices in Denver’s prolific poetry scene, Smith and her poet peers have also breached the world of music. In local tribute band…
Both Katy Perry and Nicki Minaj used their Grammy performances on Sunday to premiere new singles from their forthcoming albums, Teenage Dream: The Complete Confection and Pink Friday: Roman Reloaded, respectively. However, there was only one pop star that emerged the victor from the night’s new-music battle…
Happy Valentine’s Day! In this heart-shaped edition of That’s a Rap, we have a ton of local hip-hop goodness for you to fall in love with, including a DJ Chonz mixtape entirely dedicated to Valentine’s Day, new joints from Mane Rok, Iman S., Myke Charles, A. Fox and Boy Davey,…
Molly Zackary’s Growler Record Distro is changing the way we talk about music in Denver. More than just another storefront box of commerce, Growler is actively engaging the music community with new events and programs. “I have an agenda,” says Zackary. “I think artistic movements and scenes are created because…
Stephen Malkmus and the Jicks (due tomorrow night at the Fox Theater in Boulder) formed after Malkmus’s influential band, Pavement, went on indefinite hiatus at the end of the ’90s. Initially, it was something of a solo project, but Malkmus ended up recruiting his friend John Moen, as well as…
The year 1972 saw the death of the hippies — or, at the very least, the decline of the movement from idealistic young go-getters playing with the fire of radical social change to an out-of-control inferno of hard drugs and failed dreams. Neil Young’s Harvest wasn’t the first to comment…
As anyone and their mother could have (and, ahem, did) predicted, it was Adele’s show at last night’s 54th Grammy Awards. The singer, who absolutely swept the awards, took home six Grammys — meaning she won in every category in which she was nominated, including the big three: Song of…
See also: Interview with Lauren Larson of Ume, sharing the bill this Sunday. Cursive (due this Sunday at Larimer Lounge with Ume) was one of the most popular and influential bands to have come out of the underground scene in Omaha, Nebraska, the same one that spawned Bright Eyes, the…
Harry Tuft, slated to be inducted into the Colorado Music Hall of Fame this Sunday, February 12, opened the Denver Folklore Center in 1962 and started promoting concerts a few years later, bringing in Joan Baez to Denver for the first time in 1964 and later bringing her to Red…
From power pop to power ballads, rock anthems to rap staples, the nominees of the 54th Grammy Awards, which airs this Sunday night, sees no dearth of great music. There’s little doubt that it will be Adele’s night, but others, like Kanye West and Mumford & Sons, could win big…
Spatula (due this Friday, February 10, at the Climax Lounge) was a band you often heard about between 2004 and 2005, if you did not actually see it. The band was musical, but more to the point, it was always a ridiculous spectacle with simple but effective props, elaborate homemade…
See Also: Q&A with Ted Stevens of Cursive, sharing the bill this Sunday. At this point, much has been mythologized about the badassery of Ume (due at the Larimer Lounge this Sunday, February 12). The heavy-rocking Texas trio is fronted by an almost precociously petite blonde, but Lauren Larson has…
