“Feeling You” by Adesha from her latest EP Things to Consider is the rare kind of love song that expresses the complexities of daring to love, the yearning, the doubts and the fear that the same depth of feeling isn’t reciprocated with the poetry and assurance of someone who knows herself well. The bright, lush tone of the beat with the detailed but subtle percussion and finely accented synth swells bring to the song a smooth nostalgic tone like a 90s hip-hop and soul artist like Erykah Badu with a more Dilla style lo-fi ambient production. It’s the kind of song to make you feel comfotable with your uncertainties, to quell the anxiety that can botch good decision-making and to enjoy the moment even if you don’t know where everything in a relationship is going to go because you’ll land okay. Listen for yourself below and follow Adesha’s goings on at the links provided.
What:Reverend Dead Eye w/Vic N’ The Narwhals and DJ Rett Rogers When: Thursday, 06.06, 8 p.m. Where: Hi-Dive Why: Reverend Dead Eye now lives in Switzerland and mostly tours Europe but on occasion he graces his old stomping grounds (literally and figuratively) of Denver and treats us to a set of wild-eyed gospel blues post-punk. He will be joined this evening by rock and roll band Vic N’ The Narwhals with a DJ set from Blue Rider and Bad Licks guitarist Rett Rogers.
What:Honduh Daze, Moon Pussy and Demoncassettecult & Junior Deer duo When: Thursday, 06.06, 8:30 p.m. Where: Lion’s Lair Why: Vachco Before Horses is celebrating his birthday doing a duo set as Demoncassettecult and Junior Deer so it’ll be a bit of weirdo hip-hop and ambient soul. Moon Pussy is like Denver’s industrial-esque equivalent of a noise rock band like Shellac but with some on board guitar processing to help sculpt those sounds into the bands already eruptive, angular and cathartic groove.
What:Talib Kweli w/Voz 11, 1-natVson-1 and Time When: Thursday, 06.06, 8:30 p.m. Where: Fox Theatre Why: Talib Kweli is one of the reigning poet laureates of hip-hop, politically charged as his is and otherwise. Check in anywhere in his catalog and you’ll find something vital and thought-provoking and outright compelling whether that’s records under his own name or projects like Black Star. As usual the opening acts for one of his shows is quality including Time whose fusion of underground/experimental hip-hop, humorous and organically intellectual wordplay and socio-political insight is never less than mind-expanding and fun. Voz 11 is kind of an industrial rap artist who will be joined for this show by Wesley Davis of Symbolic Insight Records and ambient solo project Bios+a+ic.
Friday | June 7
Spearhead, photo by Jay Blakesberg
What: Michael Franti and Spearhead w/Snarky Puppy and Victoria Canal When: Friday, 06.07, 6:30 p.m. Where: Red Rocks Why: Whether you prefer his time in industrial rap groups The Beatnigs and The Disposable Heroes of Hiphoprisy or his current work in conscious reggae fusion folk band Spearhead, Michael Franti has been aiming his creative compass toward critiquing the dominant paradigm with the goal of creating a better, more nurturing and healthier world. As per usual, prior to the concert proper there will be a yoga session at Red Rocks starting at 4:30 p.m.. May seem quaint to some but at least Franti isn’t giving mere lip service to self-improvement. The band is currently touring in support of Stay Human, Vol. II which came out in January. Also on the bill are jazz fusion prog stars Snarky Puppy.
What:Instant Empire w/Anthony Ruptak and Post Paradise When: Friday, 06.07, 8 p.m. Where: Syntax Physic Opera Why: It’s been a minute since we’ve heard from Instant Empire. The indie rock band has been through some changes but has endured to give us Cathedral, a set of the usual thoughtful songwriting and evocative music from the band. Read our interview with Scotty Saunders from the band soon.
What:Amygdala, Caffeine, Euth, Sore Eyes and Herse When: Friday, 06.07, 7 p.m. Where: Seventh Circle Music Collective Why: A show that proves that current hardcore is not all the same or trying to mimic the sound or style from something 35+ years ago while not skimping on the energy and sense of danger that made that music exciting in the first place.
What:Pete Tong When: Friday, 06.07, 9 p.m. Where: Bar Standard Why: Pete Tong is an influential figure in modern electronic music and EDM. Early in life he was something of a soul music DJ on radio in the UK and then as the 80s moved on, a pioneering DJ of Acid House and the Balearic beat that his friend Paul Oakenfold helped to popularize. Oakenfold, joking, coined the expression “It’s all gone Pete Tong” in 1987 to indicate things have gone a bit wrong. Through his ongoing electronic music shows at the BBC (Essential Selection and It’s All Gone Pete Tong) and his efforts at curating and making accessible electronic dance music in the USA. Tong has done big shows in Ibiza and all around the world but this night he’s doing his thing at a small club like Bar Standard.
What:My Life With the Thrill Kill Kult w/Curse Mackey and Church Fire When: Friday, 06.07, 7 p.m. Where: Marquis Theater Why: My Life With the Thrill Kill Kult is not just the horror carny pioneering industrial dance band but also, on most nights, one of the greatest, most fun live bands of all time. Denver’s Church Fire is not nearly as camp but there is an element of playful theatricality to its performances of its own brand of industrial music that is really more a kind of politically-informed synth pop. No down side.
What:Altas w/Plume Varia and Voight When: Saturday, 06.08, 7 p.m. Where: Rhinoceropolis Why: With its new album All I Ever Wanted Was, Denver-based instrumental rock band incorporated the electronic/synth side of the band more completely with keyboard player Meghan Lillis contributing full in the songwriting and arranging process with the core and founding trio of Enrique Jimenez, Israel Jimenez and Juan Carlos Flores. The group’s 2014 album Epoca De Bestias lived up to its name and the cinematic scope the band has always conjured with its songwriting. But there is an even greater cohesion and focus this time out with some tongue in cheek titles from a band whose membership has always been on point with the humor. “Cosas Nunca Dichas” is Spanish for “Things Never Said.” The dual meaning including the fact that there are no lyrics in an Altas song is pretty good. “Glasgow Smile”? Surely a significance beyond suggesting it’s a nod to Mogwai exists but that’s also pretty choice as Mogwai use plenty of inside jokes and humor for songs that need no spelling out of meaning. “Valentin Trujillo (An Unsung Hero)” is presumably a reference to the famous Mexican actor who was a major star in the 1980s and whose films often dared to make thoughtful commentary on the politics and culture of his home country and beyond. The final song on the album “Rattenkönig,” or “Rat King” in German. There’s got to be a story there and we hope to bring that to you at some point. The more you delve into the new record and its gorgeously expanded dynamic and sonic palette the more there is to discover as with all great albums. And hey, you get to see the great dream pop band Plume Varia and industrial post-punk soundscapers Voight while you’re at it.
What:Get Your Ears Swoll 7: Sliver, Married a Dead Man and Hate Minor When: Saturday, 06.08, 8:30 p.m. Where: The People’s Building Why: Hate Minor is an artsy prog duo with former Nightshark and Aenka saxophonist Becca Mhalek on drums. Married a Dead Man is a death rock/post-pun/darkwave four-piece that came out of hardcore. Sliver, how a band that mapped out and deconstructed and reconstructed “Break Stuff” as inspiration for all their songs is on a bill like this it’s difficult to say. Good thing singer/guitarist Chris Mercer’s bandmates are patient, understanding, indulgent people and when he, as promised, he gets around to writing the next album around “Sick of Life” because it “nearly got [him] to join the Navy, dude,” some people can join in on the intervention.
What: Gun Street Ghost album release w/Jeff Cramer and New Mexican hi-dive.com/event/1855201-gun-street-ghost-album-release-denver When: Saturday, 06.08, 8 p.m. Where: Hi-Dive Why: In calling the new Gun Street Ghost album Battles it seems as though the band is preparing us for a record brimming with great stories of the struggles we’d rather avoid or skip but which we fight every day without knowing it. Thinking person’s pop written in the language of honky tonk Americana.
What:Johnnascus, Karhlyle, Causer, Kid Mask, HXCMIDI and Henny Graves When: Saturday, 06.08, 8 p.m. Where: Thought//Forms Gallery Why: Austin’s Johnnascus is an industrial rap artist whose videos are not only interesting but borderline scary in the way Creepy Pasta videos can be. It’ll be a good pairing with Detroit’s Karhlyle and his downtempo techno/hip-hop, Kid Mask’s own genre bending noise/industrial hip-hop beatmaking and the electronic/breakcore hardcore of HXCMIDI.
What: Bobcat Goldthwait and Dana Gould gothictheatre.com/events/detail/372302 When: Sunday, 06.09, 7 p.m. Where: Gothic Theatre Why: A lot of people probably remember Bobcat Goldthwait as that crazy guy with the piercing whine from the Police Academy movies. But he never would have got there if not for his brilliant work as an alternative comedian in the 1980s when he would pierce hypocritical pieties with confessional and surrealistic observations and bits that helped to push comedy in a more interesting direction at arguably the early peak of the popularity of stand-up. He has gone on to be a noteworthy filmmaker whose movies (e.g. Shakes the Clown, God Bless America and World’s Greatest Dad) not just darkly humorous but which shine a light on aspects of our culture that are often ignored and if we stopped doing so we might have a healthier society. Dana Gould has been performing his own brand of borderline surreal comedy since the early 80s as well and coming to be known by a more mainstream audience though a comedian of choice for those with a taste for left field humor for decades.
What:Fuck Your Birthday w/Those Darn Gnomes, Narcissa and Galleries When: Sunday, 06.09, 7 p.m. Where: Thought//Forms Gallery Why: Fuck Your Birthday is an American and Chinese, noisy math/garage rock band. That means it has elements of early 90s emo and harder-edged garage rock but doesn’t really fit in with either to well. More like Rainer Maria or Japandroids than some post-hardcore or screamo band. Those Darn Gnomes are somewhere betwixt a free jazz performance art band, grindcore and art folk. Narcissa is a like-minded band from Denver and Galleries is sort of a psychedelic hard rock band.
Possume, photo courtesy the artist
What:Slugger w/Possum, After the Carnival and more When: Sunday, 06.09, 7 p.m. Where: Seventh Circle Music Collective Why: Toronto’s Possum is a fuzz-toned, heavy psych band. And while that sound is basically old hat at this point except to later comers to modern psychedelia, Possum’s version of that is not the kind that comes off like neo-Laurel Canyon vibe worshipping indie rockers discovering the use of a Memoryman and a Big Muff with a tiny bit of wah. It’s mind-melting epics take a deep dive into drawn out melodic grooves that take some chops and commitment to sonic exploration to craft. Also the band has a song called “Wizard Beard” so it’s not all without a sense of humor. Sharing the bill is a band with a tentacle or two in 70s hard rock and psychedelia with Slugger. But as with Possum, Slugger’s strength is in the songwriting and being of that world rather than wearing it like a trendy outfit.
Tuesday | June 11
Emma Ruth Rundle, photo courtesy the artist
What:MONO w/Emma Ruth Rundle When: Tuesday, 06.11, 7 p.m. Where: The Marquis Theaterthos Why: Tokyo’s MONO makes post-rock with a classical music sensibility that makes a lot of other bands working in that realm of music seem safe and quaint. Emma Ruth Rundle’s heavy, dark, doom folk is somehow both intimate and majestic. Her latest album On Dark Horses is a trip to, as the title suggests, the shadowy places of the psyche in search of an inner truth that can be elusive unless you’re willing to go all in and face the buried pain and your dark side with compassion and acceptance. It’s her heaviest record to date and her most daring to date.
The shimmering Casio-esque synths in Jeremy Winter’s “Construct” strike a nostalgic, melancholy tone as buoyed gently by accented low end. But the romance of the song is in the honoring of the very real need of all people to have an emotional, often physical as well, space in order to be able to develop in a healthy way undistracted by the pull of others on your psyche and a world that demands you be on for machinations that have little to do with your internal life and identity. We’re encouraged to construct our lives to adapt to arbitrary standards all the time and in this song Winter encourages himself and others to awaken to what we really want and need and to make the space to discover what that is and in doing so maybe it’s possible to have genuine and positive relationships and engagements with the world on mutual terms without burying ourselves in the process. For fans of Neon Indian, Future Islands and John Maus. Listen below and follow Winter’s work further at the links provided.
The music video for Blocktreat’s “Slow Burn” allows the lo-fi experimental electro-post-punk song to convey the mixed and shifting feelings of a new relationship in words and the pulsing insistence of the anxiety of the early stages thereof. Is this right? What’s really going on? The sense of wandering in the dark landscape of uncertainty, the attractions and the surprises difficult to fully interpret like a dream sequence, like the dog walking in seemingly out of nowhere and the splashes of color to represent the memories that stay with us and the washed out, almost black and white, other visuals that stand in for the things we’d like to forget or which don’t seem as significant in the moment. It’s like a surreal, short, borderline supernatural horror short where the horror feared in the bottom of your heart never fully manifests but tugs at your psyche all the same along with the excitement and hopefulness, which Brandon Hoffman expresses well with the song that has a quality as raw and seemingly unrefined as the footage, as our experiences and memories themselves can be. The song is taken from Blocktreat’s latest album After Dark and after checking out the video you can further explore Blocktreat’s music through the links following.
Ever since at least the time C.W. McCall making his body of truck driving songs immortal with his 1976 hit “Convoy,” various musicians have tried their hand at the same but mostly succeeded at articulating life on the road in a band. But Doc Fell & Co. with “End of the Line” have written a song that might be a great accompaniment on a road trip but lively enough to make hundreds of miles delivering loads from town to town for weeks and months at a time living out the cab of your truck at times and spending nights in the curious world of truck stops and maybe “jack-knifing in Denver” in winter. In short, the song captures the essence and appeal of that life but also how it can fool you into thinking it can go on forever and time and culture stand still. The song has an undeniable energy without being too rambunctious and the jaunty pedal steel tastefully frames it all in the sonic mythology of one important strand of country music. Check out the song and the rest of the band’s excellent full-length Heaven, Hell or Oklahoma and follow the band at the links below.
“Animal Attack,” the fifth single from Dallas-based multi-genre band Grand Commander, is sort of a futuristic prog funk song that is reminiscent of an idiosyncratic fusion of Trans Am, The Rapture and mid-80s Peter Gabriel. The song is about the lengths some people will go to in our social media obsessed age to garner attention despite how twisted, destructive and misguided those actions might be, so long as it’s “documented” and goes viral with the ephemeral reward of dubious fame only to be ditched off when the next new, warped and demented, action trends sometimes inspiring the discarded “content creator” to do something more drastic. The song is catchy enough with a tasty bass line throughout but clearly songwriter Sam Damask is rightfully repulsed by this dynamic in society and rather than write/record some overblown, borderline nihilistic blog/vlog post about his horror at it all, he wrote a song to help us process and put in its proper place this most modern of phenomena. Listen below and follow Grand Commander’s work at the links underneath the song.
Don’t be fooled by the introduction to Melanie Jay’s “WannaBe.” Yes, it is a kind of indie pop song that begins with a sound that may be familiar in form but it quickly becomes a flow of recursive echoes out of a chorus that spirals off into the distance before coming back like Jay is singing with herself in the round and it resolves into the sound of an answering machine with the beep to the message trailing off in some delay or reverb. But it all suits the theme of the song in which the narrator contemplates the intricacies of identity and desire and feeling lost in a sea of voices, one’s own and those of the messages we receive each day from different sources telling us what we should be and what we should want. Jay exorcises it all into the wisp of a ghost that may haunt us again but with a diminishing capacity to do so. A truly unusual pop song that works because it uses classic form in a completely original and experimental way. Take a deeper dive into Jay’s work at melaniejay.bandcamp.com.
London-based Moscow Youth Cult’s music has been making its way into your subconscious through various routes including placements in Portlandia and the video game Saints Row IV. Its deep soundscape pop with unusually dynamic ambient elements more than captures the moment perfectly, it takes you on a journey through a psycho-tonal-emotional space that cleanses the dark places of your mind by the end. The duo’s third single “Low Vision” is like so much of the material found on the 2018 album Brutalist an engulfing listen that puts you through so many of the feels of this modern life from the peaceful to the intensely disorienting. Much as the architecture movement after which the album was named the music reflects the mood of looming totalitarianism that is more than creeping across the world and the utterly natural instinct to resist that tide with spirited creativity. Apparently the song was inspired in part by the writing of Arthur Machen, the literary figure whose fantasy and decadent fiction of the late 1800s proved influential on Lovecraft, Clark Ashton Smith and Stephen King. In the rush of sounds after passages of sonic reverie one perhaps hears the musical cognate of Machen’s epochal The Hill of Dreams. Fans of Boards of Canada and Sinoia Caves will truly appreciate the imaginative use of layered atmospheres and informal beats as well as the heightened sense of otherworldliness grounded in the ineffably familiar that informs this track in particular but also in the work of Moscow Youth Cult in general. Listen for yourself and delve further into the band’s compelling body of work at any of the links below.
Brandon Hoogenboom was born in southern California, went to high school in Monument, Colorado, started indie rock band Set Sail in Sydney, Australia but ended up back in California before discovering through friends an active music scene in Denver where he spent some time before settling back in Los Angeles. And his new song “Damn Good” reflects some of that worldliness often spent in sunny places. Its bright, lush guitar work is the backdrop to a song about peer pressure to conform to mainstream normalcy but rejecting that in favor of what feels good and right and following one’s instincts and wanderlust because staying too still is how you can be convinced to stop living a life less normal.
In a world where drab mundanity and comfort in arbitrary measures of stability and placing a premium on what constitutes good sense and long term happiness have turned out to be a built on the crumbling edifice of an international economic system that favors only the ultra-wealthy with diminishing returns for those lower down the economic ladder, why bother aspiring to fitting in with such a destructive and soul crushing paradigm for the good life when you have your own vision of where you want to be? Though the song is based on a joyride in Nashville, much as the hippies and other counterculture types in the 60s created a parallel social and to some extent economic milieu in opposition to a corrupt and oppressive society, Hoogenboom is rejecting the offered future in favor of one that seems good by comparison. Listen below and explore Hoogenboom’s solo album and other work at the links after.
Ryan Jantz’s “Younger” is raw and lo-fi and a bit ramshackle but it suits the effusive spirit of the song and the sense of mild confusion. That there are a couple of major changes in tone and pace in a song less than a minute and a half long is interesting on its own. The song shifts twice in mood from one of a kind of Beat Happening-esque inspired amateurism to a Siltbreeze-period Times New Viking frantic, fractured melody. Which is to say it might be off-putting to someone looking for their bedroom pop to sound safer and more conventional but anyone with a taste for the indie pop noise punks from around the turn of the last decade will find this a pleasant surprise at a time when a lot of bands are trying to sound pro, imitating a popular production style rather than aiming to sound utterly like themselves.
Queen City Sounds and Art 
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