Shamarr Allen has been a professional musician in his hometown of New Orleans since he was a teenage member of Rebirth Brass Band. Allen grew up playing trumpet in a musical family and steeped in the rich and diverse musical traditions and legacies of the city as reflected across his varied and active career. Allen has cited Willie Nelson as his favorite songwriter and Prince, Pharrell Williams, Stevie Wonder and Quincy Jones as influences. Allen calls his style “bridge music” because it brings together a variety of sounds and musical leanings. He has collaborated with Harry Connick, Patti LaBelle, Lenny Kravitz, Willie Nelson, Big Freedia and Galactic. In 2009 he released his debut solo album and performed the National Anthem for President Barack Obama in New Orleans which lead to an invitation to play at the Governor’s Ball at the White House and serving as a musical/cultural ambassador for the United States to Brazil, Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan, Azerbaijan and Congo. In 2020 Allen established Trumpet Is My Weapon, a gun exchange program following the death of a nine-year-old and the wonding of two other children in a shooting in New Orleans. In 2023 Allen released his latest album True Orleans 2 (due August 18, 2023), a sonically inventive set of songs that is at times reminiscent of a great southern hip-hop album but one informed by pop songcraft, R&B, soul and jazz and long on wit and sharp social observation.
Listen to our interview with Allen on Bandcamp and follow the master musician at the links below. Shamarr Allen is currently on wide-ranging national tour with a stop to perform at Dazzle in Denver, Colorado on Wednesday, August 16, 2023.
Since 2007 Everything Is Terrible! has mined the detritus of media cultural artifacts from thrift stores, garage sales and the like in the form of VHS tapes and in more recent years some streaming video for content to recontextualize clips of the most absurd and awful videos into informative and hilariously disturbing new forms. EIT helped to propel trash media culture into the mainstream of meme-making with its now nine found footage documentaries that shine a light on what our culture has produced and often decided to forget the way it does the rest of disposable media that reveals often uncomfortable truths about the submerged aspirations and dreams of our collective, modern civilization. Since 2009 the artist collective has toured with screenings of its films and have incorporated a puppet variety show and music to add just that special little layer of the surreal and weird to enhance the viewing experience of the people that show up. Perhaps the collective’s most infamous project is its goal of collecting thousands of VHS copies of the 1996 film Jerry Maguire with the goal of building a pyramid from the tapes in the desert. As of May 2023, the collection has reached 40,000+ copies and counting. In 2022 EIT released perhaps its greatest and most coherent creation to date, Kidz Klub! The film draws on the sheer dreck of the most misguided and misconceived television and home video programming made for children designed to educate and in many cases indoctrinate the nation’s youth. Even a casual viewing of the movie reveals recurring themes that edited together seem to be a continuous narrative with a touch of hypnotic reputation. For this iteration of the collective’s creative output the soundtrack pulled both from the original source material and original composition establishes the perfect air of the hyper real and otherworldly at once. In the live setting the movie is split up into roughly 5-10 minute sections interspersed with the puppet show and dance and song routines giving it the air of a psychedelic variety show in real time. It’s the kind of thing no one was asking for but which we all needed as a dose of sanity in a world in which we are increasingly bombarded with random content disconnected from the endless stream that is life itself.
Listen to our interview with Commodore Gilgamesh on Bandcamp and for more information on Everything Is Terrible!, to purchase merch and copies of the videos, and for information on live performances, please visit everythingisterrible.com. EIT is currently on tour now with a stop at Meow Wolf Convergence Station in Denver on August 15, 2023 and for tickets click this link.
BIG|BRAVE is an experimental music trio based in Montreal, Québec, Canada. Formed in 2012 the group has taken the approach of utilizing instruments on hand to craft sounds and explore musical expressions that suited a style of musical storytelling that is widely dynamic with a tranquil center. Its early forays into minimalist folk and ambient music transformed as the group of necessity adopted new equipment in the making of its sounds resulting in a blend of high and low volume that served its core of vulnerable minimalism. During the course of the band’s existence it has been embraced by a wider heavy music community and its songwriting often considered within the realm of doom when its performances and compositions don’t fit neatly into a specific genre even the large umbrella of post-rock though fans of both of those styles will find much to appreciate about BIG|BRAVE’s output. In 2021 the group released a collaborative album with The Body, a duo often associated as well with doom and extreme metal generally but whose own musical roots are broader as well, called Leaving None But Small Birds, an eclectic work of experimental folk music that probably no one outside of the bands would have expected coming out of a collective work. In 2023 BIG|BRAVE released nature morte, a collection of six songs that seem to have the quality of folkloric tales about the perilous and precarious state of the world around us, “the consequences of trauma” and interconnected themes of “the subjugation of femininity in all its pluralities.” It is a challenging record but not one without an element of catharsis and the beauty of stark truths manifested in creative expression.
Listen to our interview with Robin Wattie and Matthieu Ball of BIG|BRAVE on Bandcamp and go see the trio at Ghost Canyon Fest in Denver at the Hi-Dive on Sunday, August 13, 2023. Ball also performs a solo set the afternoon prior on August 12 at Mutiny Information Café for the matinee section of the festival. For more information on BIG|BRAVE please visit bigbrave.ca.
Many Blessings is the long-running, solo noise project of Ethan McCarthy. The latter is perhaps best known to the world outside of Denver as the vocalist and guitarist of extreme metal band Primitive Man. But McCarthy has long been one of the pivotal figures in Denver underground going back a couple of decades. He first came to prominence as a member of grindcore outfit Clinging to the Trees of a Forest Fire and he ran the DIY space that was the downtown location of Monkey Mania that transitioned into Kingdom of Doom under his stewardship. McCarthy has always exerted a benevolent influence in the Denver scene as someone who hosts shows, books events and as an ambassador within and beyond the Mile High City who not only ran Kingdom of Doom but spaces like Funhouse and Aqualung’s Community Music Space in addition to booking shows at Blast-O-Mat before it turned into Seventh Circle Music Collective. His musical output has bridged the worlds of metal, noise and experimental music of various kinds including one-off noise projects, death doom bands Vermin Womb, Death of Self and Keep. Many Blessings represents an evolution of McCarthy’s exploration of a more harsh noise end of that musical leaning with processed vocals and electronic components that allow him an outlet of self-expression not dependent on anyone else’s input or timeline or availability. It is also his most prolific musical endeavor to date with dozens of releases. In contrast to his more ambient solo noise concern Spiritual Poison, Many Blessings has gritty texture and a darkly cathartic reflection of the brutal and ugly aspects of our civilization. McCarthy has also made a bit of a name for himself as a visual artist and these days releasing that work through his Hell Simulation moniker with his evocative creations gracing flyers, album art, tour posters and more.
Listen to our interview with Ethan McCarthy of Many Blessings on Bandcamp and catch him live at Ghost Canyon Fest this weekend at the matinee show at Mutiny Information Café on Saturday, August 12, 2023. Many Blessings also tours internationally so there’s a good chance you’ll be able to catch a performance sometime down the line if you’re not able to make it to Denver for the fest. For more information on McCarthy and his visual art and other projects the best portal of contact is likely via hellsimulation.com.
Heet Deth is a noise punk duo of drummer/vocalist Julia Bard and guitarist/vocalist Laila Eskin from Chicago that formed in 2018. Its musical style, as manifest on its 2021 album Heet Deth HOORAY! might be described as an unhinged and noisy, mutant garage rock infused with a deep sense of play and informed by sharp social commentary. Expect a raw, unvarnished, righteous clamor but not without its own sophistication of self-cultivated style that taps into camp science fiction for the content of its lyrics and its live performances. Fans of the reckless and scuzzy, lo-fi glory of Royal Trux, Lost Sounds and The Cramps may truly appreciate what Heet Deth is doing.
Listen to our interview with Heet Deth on Bandcamp and follow the group at the links below. Catch Heet Death live at Ghost Canyon Fest on Friday, August 11, 2023 at The Skylark Lounge for the first night of the festival. For more information on the band and to keep appraised of its doings, please visit heetdeth.com.
Thursday | 08.03 What:Weapönizer w/Abhoria and Belhor When: 7 Where: Hi-Dive Why: Weapönizer is a band from Denver that has been obliterating the line between classic thrash and black metal with songs that seem to be tales of a near future dystopia. Think something like Venom soundtracking a film that’s a collision of Mad Max and a grimy cyberpunk universe. Abhoria from Los Angeles is of a similar vintage but with more atmosphere and groove to its blunt abrasion. The group recently added local Denver metal and grind scene veteran Ben Pitts to the lineup. Belhor is a long-running, blackened death metal band that doesn’t play live as much these days but its corrosive sound and haunting songs have an undeniable visceral impact.
The Front Bottoms, photo by Jimmy Fontaine
Friday | 08.04 What: The Front Bottoms w/Say Anything and Kevin Devine & the Goddamn Band When: 7 Where: Red Rocks Why: Depending on where you check in with New Jersey’s The Front Bottoms their brand of raw and emotional songwriting might be described as folk punk early on and an electro-acoustic form of emo later on as Brian Sella and Matthew Uychich have fully adopted a variety of sounds and styles as suited their evolving songwriting. Early material sounds like the duo listened to a lot of The Moldy Peaches, Andrew Jackson Jihad and Pat the Bunny. And yet established their own sound that brought a tender sensibility and personal insight to impassioned punk songs. For this show the group is doing something fairly unorthodox by having the album release show for You Are Who You Hang Out With, which releases this day, at Red Rocks with some like-minded friends. The latter includes Los Angeles-based emo legends Say Anything whose heartfelt anthems are a distillation and evolution of its 90s post-hardcore and pop punk influences. And yet Say Anything has never been limited to that realm of music and its songwriting reflects a focus on songwriting over style and Max Bemis’ lyics and intense live delivery comes across as the kind of honed poetry that comes from pulling directly from the essence of the emotional resonance of what inspired the outpouring of words. Its new single “Psyche” contains all of that as well as a confessional, unvarnished spoken word section like pages from an unedited diary entry and that’s what you get from the band—a direct line to some personal truth.
Say Anything, photo by Nicole MagoIlluminati Hotties, photo courtesy the artist
Saturday | 08.05 What: Boygenius w/illuminati hotties https://www.redrocksonline.com/events/boygenius-475298/ When: 7 Where: Red Rocks Why: Boygenius is the indie rock supergroup comprised of three of today’s most gifted songwriters formed by and comprised of Julien Baker, Phoebe Bridgers and Lucy Dacus. Their 2018 self-titled debut EP made a splash for its evocative amalgamation of the members’ unique gifts as artists and lyricists. In 2023 the group released its debut full-length, the somewhat cheekily titled The Record. Its fusion of delicate melodies and wide emotional range from the tender and introspective to the expansively cathartic, its tightly crafted, experimental atmospheric elements and rhythmic melodies proves not just that the debut Boygenius release wasn’t a fluke but that a collaborative record by three songwriters whose individual efforts are remarkable can be just as impressive. Opening the night is illuminati hotties fronted by music producer, mixer and studio engineer Sarah Tudzin. The band started out as a showcase of Tudzin’s technical skills outside of songwriting but the project’s 2018 album Kiss Yr Frenemies made it clear that her obvious talents behind a studio desk were equaled by her knack for crafting an ear worm indie rock/soft punk hook with slyly observational lyrics reminiscent of Liz Phair.
Kelly Garlick, photo courtesy the artist
Saturday | 08.05 What: Listening Lawn III: David Castillo & Silt, Snowflyer, Kelly Garlick, Entrancer, H-Lite, Combart Sport and DJ Ursa When: 5-8 pm Where: Carpio Sanguinette Park, Denver Why: Denver-based experimental electronic music label Multidim is hosting its now so far annual event showcasing some of the most forward thinking, left field artists in the Denver area including new ambient star Kelly Garlick, modular synth genius Entrancer, dance glitch IDM experimentalist H-Lite, free jazz and dub mutant David Castillo and crafter of luminous, rhythmic ambient Snowflyer.
Temple of Angels, photo from Bandcamp
Monday | 08.07 What: Temple of Angels, Polly Urethane, Cherished and H Lite When: 7 Where: Seventh Circle Music Collective Why: Temple of Angels formed in Austin in 2017 among hardcore and punk musicians Avery Burton, Patrick Todd and Cole Tucker who recruited Bre Morell as lead singer to explore more atmospheric sounds and more expansive sonics. After two EPs and a single the band released the Cocteau Twins-esque debut full-length Endless Pursuit on July 8, 2023. Joining the group or this show is modern classical/electronic pop/experimental industrial ambient-sample manipulation performance artist Polly Urethane whose shows always seem to be significantly different than the one before. As well as local shoegaze pop group Cherished who recently recorded their new record out of town and H Lite whose minimal techno glitch compositions are a playful progression beyond the usual blend of live hardware DJ sets and beatcrafting.
Gov’t Mule at Salvage Station in Asheville, NC on June 3, 2022, photo by David Simchok
Monday | 08.07 What:Gov’t Mule’s Dark Side of the Mule w/Jason Bonham’s Led Zeppelin Evening When: 6 Where: Red Rocks Why: Gov’t Mule began life as a The Allman Brothers Band side project with current leader and gifted guitarist Warren Haynes and then bassist, the late Allen Woody. But even early on though the music is rooted in the kind of improvisational blues rock that the Allman Brothers made famous Mule has established itself as the kind of jam-oriented band that has taken the format and style in fascinating directions. Even if you were never into jam band music or modern blues or Southern rock in general Gov’t Mule is one of the few bands out of that milieu that has injected imaginative arrangements into the masterful musicianship to craft songs that have a widely emotional resonance and its detailed compositions aren’t merely a showcase for technical prowess, which is of course there, but making insightful commentary on life and the ways in which we make and find meaning. On the group’s new album Peace…Like A River finds Haynes and company weaving in introspective melodies and touches of a funky fluidity that truly expands the group’s already impressive songwriting range and includes guest performances from Billy Gibbons and Ivan Neville. As the name of this particular concert suggests, this is a performance of Gov’t Mule’s excellent interpretation of Pink Floyd’s 1973 masterpiece The Dark Side of the Moon. As well as choice cuts from across the band’s career. Jason Bonham, son of John Bonham of Led Zeppelin fame, will open the show with a selection of the songs of his father’s band.
Dear Nora, photo from Bandcamp
Thursday | 08.10 What: Dear Nora w/Elaine When: 7 Where: Seventh Circle Music Collective Why: Dear Nora is the long-running musical project of Katy Davidson. Formed in 1999 in Portland, Oregon, Dear Nora was one of the definitive bands of the turn of the century indiepop underground. With songs that offer a tender and perceptive observations of the quiet moments in life when you have time to consider what your feelings are really about beyond the immediate demands of a work world and the like, exposing a world where you have the time and emotional space to really live unburdened by the expectations of a commodified existence. In 2008 the project was sunsetted but re-emerged in 2017 for a tour and in 2018 Dear Nora started releasing new records once again the latest being 2022’s human futures. This will be a solo appearance by Davidson with local opener Elaine.
CXCXCX, photo by Tom Murphy
Friday | 08.11 What:Lower Tar (LA), K129, Precious Blood, Modern Devotion and CXCXCX When: 8 Where: Hi-Dive Why: This will be an all techno and noise show headlined by Los Angeles based industrial techno artist Lower Tar with sets from Denver-based, beat inflected harsh noise artist CXCXCX as well as Voight’s Adam Rojo putting in a rare performance with his techno solo side project Modern Devotion.
Quits, photo by Tom Murphy
Friday | 08.11 What:Ghost Canyon Fest Night 1: Ghost Canyon Fest: GPR, Heet Deth, Quits, Moon Pussy, Shiny Around the Edges When: 7 Where: The Skylark Lounge Why: The inaugural Ghost Canyon Fest kicks off with a slate of prominent bands in the noise rock and experimental rock world with the demented psychedelic noise of GPR, garage industrial psych group Heet Deth from Chicago, Denver noise rock legends Quits, Moon Pussy, the band that somehow combines sharp, absurd humor with harrowing and thrilling blasts of noisy not-punk and noisy shoegaze group Shiny Around the Edges from Loveland, Colorado.
The National, photo by Josh Goleman
Friday and Saturday | 08.11–08.12 What: The National w/The Beths When: 7 Where: The Mission Ballroom Why: The National is one of the most prominent bands out of the modern indie rock era that has somehow managed not to slide into a creatively rote niche. Its latest album First Two Pages of Frankenstein has a title that should appeal to literature nerds but it’s not merely clever rhetoric. It is an album that came together during a time of great uncertainty and personal turmoil for the band once its tour for I Am Easy to Find (2019) was canceled when the whole live music world shut down for an extended time and the aftermath of that time of imposed performance exile. Frontman and lyricist Matt Berninger, according to a January 2023 article in Clash, struggled to come up with lyrics and melodies for a ninth album and things seemed up in the air but when taking some different songwriting approaches and writing from what feels like a raw and vulnerable place the resultant record seems much more introspective and reflective than usual even for a band not short on those qualities. Like a big reassessment of life and what has helped define it for you and the foundations of your identity. The single “Eucalyptus” contains references to The Cowboy Junkies and The Afghan Whigs and searching through the things in your life that you don’t notice until you’re forced to look at them and these disparate details embodied in the things in your possession and what they represent or represented and the memories they stir and the conflicted swirl of emotions that can sink you except the song, like the rest of the album, feels like a gentle, personal reckoning and returning to find what makes life meaningful all over again on a new basis, a process which can be rough and make you feel like you’ve not found your footing but The National has give us music to perhaps ease this process with a spirit of solidarity that has in many ways always been a hallmark of its songwriting. Also, don’t miss The Beths from Auckland, New Zealand whose eclectic indie rock is in the grand tradition of Kiwi Rock in which all the bands sound different from each other and all manage to write incredibly catchy and clever music that could have come from nowhere else with an idiosyncratic style that can be easy to miss because the groups are so energetic and charming. The Beths’ fusion of fuzzy psych pop and shoegaze soundscaping at times in equal measure will take you by surprise even if you’ve seen them before.
New Standards Men, photo by Tom Murphy
Saturday | 08.12 What:Ghost Canyon Fest Matinee Show: Mat Ball (BIG|BRAVE), Many Blessings, New Standards Men/Sex Funeral and ABANDONS When: 1 Where: Mutiny Information Café Why: This afternoon matinee edition of Ghost Canyon Fest includes a solo performance from Mat Ball of BIG|BRAVE, the industrial noise stylings of Ethan McCarthy for his Many Blessings project, a collaborative set from post-rock/avant-garde rock band New Standards Men and free jazz weirdos Sex Funeral and heavy post-rock group ABANDONS from Denver.
Pleasure Venom, photo by Ismael Quantinillailliq
Saturday | 08.12 What:Ghost Canyon Fest Night 2: Pleasure Venom, Rick McGuire (Pile), Big’N, Endless, Nameless, Hoaries and Almanac Man When: 7/7:30 Where: Hi-Dive Why: The second night of Ghost Canyon fest will feature sets from avant-garage post-punk group Pleasure Venom, a solo set from Rick McGuire of noisy guitar post-punkers Pile, Chicago noise rock legends Big’N performing a rare live set after recently reforming, post-hardcore/post-shoegaze/post-rock heroes Endless, Nameless, fuzzy, angular post-punk group Hoaries from Texas and Almanac Man’s amplified noisy attitude and heavy riffs.
Mary Gauthier, photo by Alexa King Stone
Saturday | 08.12 What: Mary Gauthier w/Jaimee Harris When: 8-10 Where: Swallow Hill – Daniels Hall Why: Mary Gauthier lived a whole life before launching her professional music career at age 35 in the late 90s. As an orphan Gauthier started life in challenging circumstances and struggled with alcoholism, drug addition and emotional and physical abuse, particularly as a gay woman in the 60s and 70s. But she weathered these storms and tried college as a philosophy major before going to culinary school and opened a Cajun restaurant in Boston called Dixie Kitchen after which she named her 1997 debut album. Her latest record is 2022’s Dark Enough to See the Stars and she is currently touring a series of career retrospective shows that feature her songs, steeped in folk and country styles, that seem to fuse a hardened resolve with a raw vulnerability to produce a particular resonant body of work. If Tom Waits and Bob Dylan are fans of your music you’re probably doing something right. Gauthier is also a published author whose fiction has appeared in numerous books and magazines and her memoir and statement on art and a peek into her craft of songwriting Saved by a Song: The Art and Healing Power of Songwriting appeared in 2021 to great acclaim.
BIG|BRAVE, photo from Bandcamp
Sunday | 08.13 What:Ghost Canyon Fest Night 3: BIG|BRAVE, Masma Dream World, Church Fire, Dug, Flooding, Only Echoes, Abandoncy When: 6:30/7 Where: Hi-Dive Why: This final night of the Ghost Canyon Fest will be an opportunity to witness the thorny and elemental grandeur of BIG|BRAVE’s soundscapes, Masma Dream World’s unique sonic vision part spiritual performance art and part ambient composition, Church Fire bringing the heavy dance beats and catharsis of political commentary, Dug’s grindy noise rock, Flooding’s dark dream pop and post-punk, the post-metal and soaring melodies of Only Echos and Abandoncy’s riotous collision of guitar splinter and broken rhythms.
Bully, photo by Sophia Matinazad
Monday | 08.14 What:Bully w/Bev Rage & The Drinks When: 7 Where: The Marquis Theater Why: Alicia Bognanno helped to usher in the modern period of the fusion of grunge and modern indie rock with her band Bully in 2013. The singer and songwriter had earned a degree in audio recording and interned with Steve Albini’s Electrical Audio studios where she recorded demos before moving to Nashville to work at Battle Tapes Recording as an engineer and at the music venue The Stone Fox. The early Bully records sure sounded like what might be dismissed as “neo-grunge” but Bognanno’s songwriting shined through the superficial comparisons and live Bognanno has an authenticity and command of the stage that’s mesmerizing and from there the music seems fresh and powerful and not like a throwback. The new Bully album Lucky For You is peak songwriting for Bognanno with her signature use of sonic bombast to contrast with an unvarnished introspection and emotional honesty. Some critics have described it as darker and perhaps moodier but the record’s candid observations and confessional quality is without doubt a great degree of its appeal.
Tuesday | 08.15 What: Everything is Terrible Kidz Klub! 2023 Summer Tour When: 6 Where: Convergence Station Why: Since 2007 Everything Is Terrible! has mined the detritus of media cultural artifacts from thrift stores, garage sales and the like in the form of VHS tapes and in more recent years some streaming video for content to recontextualize clips of the most absurd and awful videos into informative and hilariously disturbing new forms. EIT helped to propel trash media culture into the mainstream of meme-making with its now nine found footage documentaries that shine a light on what our culture has produced and often decided to forget the way it does the rest of disposable media that reveals often uncomfortable truths about the submerged aspirations and dreams of our collective, modern civilization. Since 2009 the artist collective has toured with screenings of its films and have incorporated a puppet variety show and music to add just that special little layer of the surreal and weird to enhance the viewing experience of the people that show up. Perhaps the collective’s most infamous project is its goal of collecting thousands of VHS copies of the 1996 film Jerry Maguire with the goal of building a pyramid from the tapes in the desert. As of May 2023, the collection has reached 40,000+ copies and counting. In 2022 EIT released perhaps its greatest and most coherent creation to date, Kidz Klub! The film draws on the sheer dreck of the most misguided and misconceived television and home video programming made for children designed to educate and in many cases indoctrinate the nation’s youth. Even a casual viewing of the movie reveals recurring themes that edited together seem to be a continuous narrative with a touch of hypnotic reputation. For this iteration of the collective’s creative output the soundtrack pulled both from the original source material and original composition establishes the perfect air of the hyper real and otherworldly at once. In the live setting the movie is split up into roughly 5-10 minute sections interspersed with the puppet show and dance and song routines giving it the air of a psychedelic variety show in real time. It’s the kind of thing no one was asking for but which we all needed as a dose of sanity in a world in which we are increasingly bombarded with random content disconnected from the endless stream that is life itself. Listen to our interview with Commodore Gilgamesh of Everything Is Terrible! on the Queen City Sounds Podcast here.
Sir Chloe, photo by Grant Spanier
Tuesday and Wednesday | 08.15 and 08.16 What: Beck, Phoenix, Japanese Breakfast and Sir Chloe When: 5/5:45 Where: Red Rocks Why: This duo of concerts features three generations of the best alternative/indie rock bands of the past 30 years. Beck made great waves in the mid-90s as alternative rock was flaming out as a movement by not being limited to narrow genres of rock. He went beyond the more creative singer-songwriter and folk rock sound of his early music into more and more sonically adventurous records throughout the 90s and beyond establishing an idiosyncratic vision that connected with an audience that wasn’t ready to embrace a mediocre creative conformity. Phoenix from Versaille, France, launched in 1995 the same time as labelmates Air. Whereas the latter perfected atmospheric, experimental lounge pop, Phoenix went on to a career of different kind of sophisticated synth pop. Most American audiences probably first heard the group, at least those with a taste for arthouse cinema, in the soundtracks of Lost in Translation and Shallow Hal. But the group broke out of cult band status following the release of 2009’s Wolfgang Amadeus Phoenix and undeniably appealing singles like “Lisztomania” and “1901.” 2022’s Alpha Zulu proved that Phoenix wasn’t out of ideas and had absorbed recent production ideas and utilized that in the songwriting itself. Japanese Breakfast started as a side project for Michelle Zauner then also of indie rock band Little Big League. But with the new band Zauner had the full freedom to use it as a vehicle for not only writing songs about the tragedies in her personal life but also to transform her creative expression completely and after the first album Zauner proved herself entirely capable of writing ambitious art rock as well as heartfelt synth pop as well as evocative soundtrack work. Sir Chloe is at the beginning of a similar arc of development with the 2023 release of its debut album I Am the Dog with its knowing songs exploring identity and the roots of one’s yearnings and how that can shape the course of lives in ways both unexpected and seemingly inevitable. The songs are a mixture of the ethereal and introspective and more thorny and gritty that might be favorably compared to the early albums of St. Vincent.
Shamarr Allen, photo by B Dragon
Wednesday | 08.16 What: Shamarr Allen When: 6 Where: Dazzle Why: Shamarr Allen has been a professional musician in his hometown of New Orleans since he was a teenage member of Rebirth Brass Band. Allen grew up playing trumpet in a musical family and steeped in the rich and diverse musical traditions and legacies of the city as reflected across his varied and active career. Allen has cited Willie Nelson as his favorite songwriter and Prince, Pharrell Williams, Stevie Wonder and Quincy Jones as influences. Allen calls his style “bridge music” because it brings together a variety of sounds and musical leanings. He has collaborated with Harry Connick, Patti LaBelle, Lenny Kravitz, Willie Nelson and local legends Galactic. In 2009 he released his debut solo album and performed the National Anthem for President Barack Obama in New Orleans which lead to an invitation to play at the Governor’s Ball at the White House and serving as a musical/cultural ambassador for the United States to Brazil, Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan, Azerbaijan and Congo. In 2020 Allen established Trumpet Is My Weapon, a gun exchange program following the death of a nine-year-old and the wonding of two other children in a shooting in New Orleans. In 2023 Allen released his latest album True Orleans 2 (due August 18, 2023), a sonically inventive set of songs that is at times reminiscent of a great southern hip-hop album but one informed by pop songcraft, R&B, soul and jazz and long on wit and sharp social observation.
Dead On A Sunday, photo by Tom Murphy
Friday | 08.18 What: Dead On A Sunday w/Haunt Me and Hex Cassette https://www.bluebirdtheater.net/events/detail/476291 When: 8 Where: Bluebird Theater Why: Denver-based post-punk band Dead On A Sunday is headlining this hometown show ahead of its extensive tour in September and October. As for the variety of post-punk think somewhere between darkwave and alternative hard rock depending on the song and release. But however the style might be described these people have a sense of rock theater in a way that seems taboo among local bands in general more like an L.A. band with a glam rock/art rock attitude. Haunt Me is a darkwave duo whose fog enshrouded live show does nothing to hide the joyful energy of its songwriting that seems to contrast with the melancholic subject matter of its lyrics. Hex Cassette is the one man EBM blood cult whose wickedly humorous stage presence, often cajoling and goading the audience, is all part of a delivery system for well crafted industrial dance music that he often says is about death but which is more often than not stories with actual poignancy or at least melodramatic fictionalizing of real life events to highly entertaining effect.
Sunday | 08.20 What:Jess Williamson w/Snakes and Patrick Dethlefs When: 7 Where: Globe Hall Why: Acclaimed songwriter is making an appearance in Denver in support of the July release of her new album Time Ain’t Accidental. The latter allows for subtle musical interplay to frame and accent Williamson’s expressive voice and allowing it to guide the rhythm and pace in an almost intuitive fashion as she sings vulnerable and open songs about heartbreak and personal rediscovery and self-reconciliation coming to terms with missteps and coming out of a prolonged period of isolation and stasis. While Williamson’s frustrations are on display on the album it always seems, even when painfully honest, to be rendered in terms that undisguised but gentle and never simplistic. Williamson has never been one to mince words as a songwriter but on this new record her approach seems to be one anchored even more in rich personal detail that seem immediately relatable and which resonate widely.
Vision Video, photo courtesy the artists
Tuesday | 08.22 What: Vision Video w/Urban Heat and Redwing Blackbird When: 7 Where: The Bluebird Theater Why: Vision Video is the unabashedly Goth and New Wave-inflected post-punk band from Athens, Georgia. They look the part. They act the part. Singer/guitarist Dusty Gannon even has a hilarious yet endearing and engaging “Goth Dad” persona in his social media presence with videos of advice and information about the subculture for younger Goths everywhere. But the songs are incredibly thoughtful, well crafted and not a cliché and the live show is impassioned and commanding. Urban Heat from Austin, Texas is also a post-punk band whose focus appears to be the more electronic end of that with soul style vocals but with a sensibility akin to that of Sisters of Mercy but more synth pop. Redwing Blackbird from Denver has similarly-minded aesthetics but with a robustly, shoegaze-inflected guitar style to bolster the electronic side of the songwriting.
W.I.T.C.H., photo by Tom Murphy
Wednesday | 08.23 What:W.I.T.C.H. w/Metius (Jacco Gardner) When: 7 Where: The Bluebird Theater Why: W.I.T.C.H. is the legendary Zamrock band making its second appearance in as many years in Denver bringing its fun-loving psychedelic rock that threads seamlessly together blues and garage rock and more traditional African popular musical forms.
Troller, photo courtesy the artists
Thursday | 08.24 What:The Body w/Troller and Dead Times When: 7 Where: Lost Lake Why: The Body is the experimental metal duo originally from Providence, Rhode Island but now based out of the opposite end of the country in Portland, Oregon. Since 1999, Chip King and Lee Buford have pushed the boundaries of extreme music by switching up the content of the music and tweaking the subtleties of tone and rhythm all while often still sounding like one of the most monolithic and elegantly punishing bands around. The Body has also worked in collaboration with numerous bands over the last two and a half decades and one of the most fascinating of these partnerships yielded the 2021 album with BIG|BRAVE called Leaving None but Small Birds, a haunted folk album. But whatever the configuration, The Body brings the intensity and catharsis at every show. Troller from Austin, Texas lets the weightiness of its lyrics and the deep mood of its compositions provide the heaviness of the music. Before it became a trendy underground style Troller was crafting evocative darkwave songs led by melodic bass lines provided by vocalist Amber Star-Goers and enshrouded in transporting electronics from synthesist and rhythm programmer Adam Jones (also of S U R V I V E, the band that wrote the theme music for Stranger Things) and guitarist/engineer Justin Star-Goers. The sound design approach to the songwriting lends it a cinematic quality that has always set the band apart from other groups that might be put under that darkwave umbrella. In 2023 Troller released its latest opus Drain via Relapse. There are a few bands calling themselves Dead Times but this one is the melodic hardcore/noise punk band from Austin.
My Life With the Thrill Kill Kult, photo by Tom Murphy
Thursday | 08.24 What: My Life With The Thrill Kill Kult w/ADULT. and Kanga When: 7 Where: The Oriental Theater Why: My Life With The Thrill Kill Kult is currently touring celebrating its 36 years as a band with a set list that focuses on the group’s first decade. The band’s campy, industrial disco sleaze has always demonstrated a more fun and lighthearted side of industrial culture while offering a distinctive visual and musical style in its bombastic live shows. By the time Thrill Kill Kult appeared in The Crow (1994), the band had already been staples of the more underground end of alternative rock write large but its performance in the film was the perfect embodiment of the aesthetics of the movie. ADULT. is the great industrial post-punk duo from Detroit whose music of the past few years has really been the musical reflection of the conflicted and dystopian times we’ve been going through with a world on the brink of domination by authoritarian regimes and the already unfolding disastrous consequences of climate change with little to no vision and action by world leaders. ADULT.’s music is an act of human solidarity and a catharsis of ambient despair. KANGA is a Los Angeles-based producer whose dusky pop music is darkwave adjacent but also adjacent to a more dance beat infused chillwave and vaporwave with sultry vocals. It might be more apt to compare KANGA to the likes of Charli XCX and Jessie Ware than an artist out of the Goth world.
Oxymorrons, photo by Tommy Vo
Friday | 08.25 What: Corey Taylor w/WARGASM and Oxymorrons When: 6 Where: Fillmore Auditorium Why: Slipknot and Stone Sour frontman Corey Taylor is headlining this show and touring in support of his 2023 album CMF2. The solo stuff is more melodic hard rock and serviceable enough for what it is proving the singer/musician is capable of more than the screamy and more extreme vocals for which he’s known in his other bands. UK-based post-hardcore/electronic duo WARGASM is one of the opening acts and its sound is like an update on 90s industrial rock but with much more interesting production akin to hyperpop club music. The other opener is Oxymorrons from NYC. Rap rock deservedly got a bad name in the 90s and 2000s and Oxymorrons’ mix of rock and roll attitude and musicianship and cloud rap style vocal production shouldn’t work but it somehow does because the performance fuses the swagger of both styles of music seamlessly and because it songs combine earworm melodies with a brashness of spirit. The band’s debut album Melanin Punk drops October 20 via Mascot Records.
Remi Wolf, photo courtesy the artist
Friday – Sunday | 08.25-08.27 What:Vortex When: Friday doors 4:30, Saturday and Sunday doors 1:30 Where: The Junkyard Why: This second annual Vortex festival at Meow Wolf will feature over this weekend performances and sets from international stars of techno, house, and various other branches of electronic music as well as indie rock and pop that may not yet be household names but are certainly rising talents. Headlining Friday night is renowned indie rock/bedroom pop phenom Remi Wolf who quickly went from high school contestant on American Idol to signee to Island Records and Virgin EMI a handful of years later and in 2023 Wolf performed at Coachella. Her funk and soul-flavored songs are a new interpretation and fusion of modern pop songcraft and classic R&B style vocals with conviction and idiosyncratic vision. That same night Denver experimental indie rock stars Kiltro will perform its own brand of Latin flavored IDM indie folk psychedelia.
Headlining Saturday and Sunday night is internationally beloved producer and musician GRiZ who incorporates live saxophone performance with electronic production fusing dubstep, his self-styled future funk and glitch. Sunday is a special showcase of his mixtape series called Chasing the Golden Era. Rumor has it these may be GRiZ’s last live sets. That same night is also a chance to catch TOKiMONSTA and her widely eclectic set of electronic dance music that runs that gamut of hip-hop, IDM, house, R&B, pop and beyond.
TOKiMONSTA, photo courtesy Meow WolfPortrayal of Guilt, photo by Addrian Jafaritabar
Saturday | 08.26 What: Portrayal of Guilt, Fearing, Spine, Gag, Edith Pike, Cloakroom, Royal Drug, Raw Breed and Candy Apple When: 5 Where: D3 Why: This mini-festival will include sets from some of the best bands out of modern hardcore and experimental music. Portrayal of Guilt has long mingled noise rock, black metal, grind and post-hardcore with live shows that are caustic and forceful. Its latest album is Devil Music which released on Run For Cover in April 2023. The darkly cast tones and harrowing lyrics have been part of Portrayal of Guilt’s aesthetic from early on but this time the music seems a tad spookier and reaching to genuinely more pained places in the psyche. Edith Pike and Raw Breed are noteworthy hardcore bands from Denver but whose music isn’t cookie cutter and more with flavors of noise rock in the mix. Same with Candy Apple whose music is like a highly energetic cross between Hüsker Dü and one of those early straight edge bands. It shouldn’t work but it does. The bands that will be very different from the rest are deathrock band Fearing and heavy shoegaze band Cloakroom but they’ll also help to give this show a nice break from all groups with a decided root in hardcore.
The Dendrites, Lateralus Photography
Saturday | 08.26 What: The Dendrites 20th Anniversary Show w/The Repercussions, Potato Pirates and Denver Vintae Reggae Society When: 7 Where: The Skylark Lounge Why: The Dendrites have been arguably Denver’s most prominent ska band for decades at this point and its seven members deliver a high energy show that redeems a modern form of a style of music that nearly got ruined by some of its 90s cognates. Same with The Repercussions whose own history with the music goes back to the 90s. Potato Pirates are one of the great ska punk bands of today who went from emerging from early street punk origins into a tight and popular band. And of course a night like this wouldn’t be complete without Denver Vintage Reggae Society.
Fear in 2013, photo by Tom Murphy
Saturday | 08.26 What:Fear w/CH3, Frontside Five and Sack When: 6 Where: The Oriental Theater Why: Fear is one of the first wave of Los Angeles punk bands that was captured so dramatically by Penelope Spheeris’ 1981 punk documentary classic The Decline of Western Civilization. Notorious for misanthropic lyrics but really irreverent and dark yet sharply observed humor, Fear has nevertheless written some of punk’s most recognizable anthems in “Let’s Have a War,” “Beef Bologna,” “I Don’t Care About You” and “I Love Livin’ in the City” from its 1982 landmark The Record. Channel 3 were an early hardcore band also from Southern California that helped establish the sound and ethos of that early hardcore era and joined for this show by Denver street punk greats Frontside Five.
City and Colour, photo by Vanessa Heins
Tuesday | 08.29 What:City and Colour w/Jaye Jayle When: 7 Where: Summit Music Hall Why: Dallas Green performing as City and Colour is one of the most acclaimed singer-songwriters of the last couple of decades. But before his current arc of songwriting, Green sang and played rhythm guitar for melodic post-hardcore group Alexisonfire (which he rejoined in 2015 when that group reconvened). But it was that level of detailed songcraft and passionate vocals that he has brought to City and Colour. The songs for the project Green had been writing and honing since his mid-teens and when Sometimes released in November 2005 its vulnerable and personally insightful songs cast in a folk-adjacent style struck a chord with fans. For the next some eighteen years Green has developed his sound and used City and Colour as a vehicle for his more introspective and atmospheric musical expressions and in March 2023 he released his latest album The Love Still Held Me Near. It’s a Green’s most sonically rich and widely expressive record to date and delves into the depths of loss and how to move through low points in the heart while honoring the connections you had with people you won’t be seeing around anymore. The subject matter is weighty but the album in its delicacy of sentiments and soaring melodies embodies a perspective that embraces human imperfection and limitations without being sunk by them. Opening the show is Jaye Jayle aka Evan Patterson who releases his own more acoustic and experimental singer-songwriter-oriented material. Patterson too has had his own past in acclaimed post-hardcore music as a former member of the influential mathcore band Breather Resist and later as the more heavy noise rock group Young Widows. His recently released Don’t Let Your Love Life Get You Down is cosmically pastoral and tinged with spectral fuzz and electronic sounds like a brooding, post-punk, psychedelic country record.
Poppy, photo by Le3ay
Tuesday | 08.29 What:Poppy and Pvris w/Tommy Genesis When: 6 Where: Ogden Theatre Why: Poppy and Pvris bring their Godless/Goddess co-headlining tour to Denver. Both artists have made a career of genre-bending and breaking music that incorporates a strong visual element in both performance and in creative and innovative music videos. Poppy with a background in dance brings a real sense of choreographed movement to the stage show with music that is simultaneously a sort of hyperpop and heavy metal. Her song “Bloodmoney” garnered her a 2021 Grammy nomination for Best Metal Performance, a first for a solo female artist. For this show you’ll probably get a preview of the forthcoming album Zig, due to drop on October 27, 2023. Pvris dropped its own new album Evergreen on July 14, 2023 and its lead single “Goddess” with its refreshingly racy music video is a little like a Charli XCX song gone industrial rock.
Guerilla Toss, photo by Ebru Yildiz
Wednesday | 08.30 What:Guerilla Toss w/DJ Bhodi When: 7 Where: Lost Lake Why: Guerilla Toss is flying into Denver for this one-off “Day Zero Party” to perform two sets of its brilliantly entrancing fusion of Krautrock, psychedelia, improvisational pop and art rock. Its latest album Famously Alive (2022, Sub Pop) bubbled up out of the stasis of the early pandemic as a statement of vitality and an expression in defiance of the political and cultural impulse toward austerity. From its early days Guerilla Toss has brought a rich tapestry of colorful sonics to the music and live show and with two sets of music, who can say exactly what that will look like, for this event you’ll probably get to see a vibrant representation of what the band has done before and where it’s going next.
Monday | 07.03 What: Glare, Alien Boy, Roseville, Face Ghost, Broken Record When: 7 Where: Seventh Circle Music Collective Why: Glare is a heavy shoegaze band from Austin, Texas whose sound swings elegantly between dream pop, the moody delicacy of late 90s, atmospheric emo and slow burn distortion. Alien Boy from Portland, Oregon has long been evolving out of its early more pop-punk origins into a Cure-esque post-punk and emo powerhouse with emotionally rich vocals and heartfelt lyrics. Broken Record is a band from Denver whose own sound might have a touch of shoegaze tonal incandescence but its melodic songcraft hints and the influence of late 90s Midwestern emo and noise pop bands.
Destroy Boys, photo courtesy the artists
Monday | 07.03 What:Blink-182 w/Turnstile and Destroy Boys When: 6:30 Where: Ball Arena Why: Blink-182 is a popular band that helped push pop punk into the mainstream with a string of 90s and 2000s hits and it’s either your thing or not. But the openers for this one point to the fact that someone in the Blink camp isn’t divorced from what’s vital and cool in the realm of music that isn’t already stadium big from the neo-nü metal phenoms Turnstile and Destroy Boys. The latter has been evolving its thrillingly arch socially critical punk rock since forming in 2015. Its ferocious mix of hardcore and garage rock has given us songs like “Locker Room Bully” and its music video that pretty much spells out and dismantles a genre of misogyny in connecting historical parallels between the witch hunts of the middle ages to the early modern era (and depending on what part of the world you live in, even now) and the various linguistic tricks used to dismiss women in the current era. But Destroy Boys has really delivered on exciting songs with heady content all along. The group’s video for its new song “Beg For Torture” looks like a cross between a really wrong ARG mixed with recovered police footage from an abuser’s dungeon and paired with the lyrics that point to casting off the effects of gaslighting and reclaiming one’s power upon coming into full awareness of the situation infuses the song with welcome originality of concept.
Josephine Foster, photo from Bandcamp
Wednesday | 07.05 What:Josephine Foster w/Advance Base When: 7 Where: Hi-Dive Why: Josephine Foster is a singer-songwriter from Colorado whose musical path has been as varied as it has been inventive and imaginative. Her vocals recall those of folk singers from the first half of the Twentieth Century but with some background in opera there is always something different and otherworldly to her delivery. Her music is pretty much impossible to easily classify with elements of freak folk, Americana and ambient throughout her idiosyncratic career as an artist. Her latest album Domestic Sphere is like a musical chapterbook of haunted places and people, an homage and gentle celebration of the neglected and forgotten cast in pastoral moods and tones of fragile elegance. Sharing the bill is Owen Ashworth who for over a decade (1997-2010) wrote some of the most tenderly heartbreaking outsider pop recorded in recent years with his project Casiotone For the Painfully Alone. Since retiring that moniker and a bit of the ideas and aesthetics of that music, Ashworth has been building another respectable and affecting body of work under the name of Advance Base with its slowcore folk pop sound and emotionally resonant atmospherics.
Stinking Lizaveta, photo by Singletary John
Thursday | 07.06 What: Telekinetic Yeti w/Stinking Lizaveta, Somnuri and Hashtronaut When: 7 Where: Hi-Dive Why: Telekinetic Yeti is a psychedelic doom band from Dubuque, Iowa in that post-Sleep/Baroness mold but at least its 2022 album Primordial lives up to the title with a set of songs that humorously reference cannabis, supernatural entities, esoteric knowledge and a more liberated future. Stinking Lizaveta is a trio from Philadelphia that formed in 1994 creating instrumental rock with roots in prog, jazz and cinematic music. The style the group has developed from the beginning has been summed up with the descriptor “doom jazz” because its sound has often combined heaviness with a musical complexity and elegance. Stinking Lizaveta establishes a mood early in its songs and its compositions vividly express ideas and emotional nuance that engages the listener’s imagination. Read our interview with the group here.
REZN, photo courtesy the artists
Friday | 07.07 What: REZN w/Oryx https://hi-dive.com/event/rezn-grivo-oryx When: 8 Where: Hi-Dive Why: Oryx is the respected doom band from Denver whose majestic yet scrappy songs break out of the tropes of the genre by helping to redefine it with more inventive rhythms and creative crafting of colossal, atmospheric guitar riffs. REZN is a heavy psych band from Chicago whose forays into evocative and haunting music incorporate the aesthetics of doom, shoegaze and cinematic ambient to create dynamic soundscapes that capture a sense of the cosmic and of the deep mystery of nature. The group recently released its new album Solace. The record’s cover looks like something one might have expected on an old Rainbow or Hawkwind record of windswept mountains and the sunlight breaking through a raging storm. The music within is not unlike that expectation set of epic journeys and existential catharsis through finely sculpted and orchestrated volume and majestically accented rhythms. If Lovecraft and Michael Moorcock had somehow collaborated on a dark science fantasy trilogy in the modern era this is the music for that story—menace, spiritual contemplation and transcendence. Listen to our interview with bassist Phil Cangelosi below.
Friday | 07.07 What: FOANS album release w/Taylor Bratches, ALX-106 and Scarien When: 9 Where: Glob Why: Andrew Dahabrah meant to dump a hard drive of nearly six hours and 100 tracks of his diverse body of techno, house and ambient music in 2018 when he posted it to Bandcamp and then retire his long running project FOANS. Times change and now a carefully curated 11-track selection of those recordings is coming out as Selected Classics on digital and vinyl with a release show this night. Respected Denver and now international DJ and electronic music artist Taylor Bratches will perform as will downtempo techno artist ALX-106 and his nature inspired compositions and minimal techno/house artist Scarien.
The Beets at Rhinoceropolis in 2010, photo by Tom Murphy
Saturday | 07.08 What:Juan Wauters w/Los Narwhals, Flora De La Luna, Movete Chiquita Vinyl Club When: 8 Where: Hi-Dive Why: Juan Wauters was born in Montevideo, Uruguay but moved to New York City in 2002 and within the decade formed one of the better of the then nascent modern garage rock revival bands The Beets. The group toured regularly throughout America often at DIY spaces and dive bars and made an impact with its lively performances and its three records and a handful of singles and EPs. But the singer-songwriter set forth with a project under his own name and a sound that wasn’t so terribly separated from what he’d done in his previous band but often with more of a folk sensibility. This is particularly true of his deeply introspective 2023 album Wandering Rebel which was written like many recent albums partly or wholly during the extended period of the early pandemic when no one was performing many shows and a lot of people had to take stock and stew in their own frustrations and anxieties and reassess life at least a little. Too bad America as a nation didn’t seem to learn much from the experience and got right back to the business and business and crushing the working class under the weight of spiraling income inequality and unaffordable cities with little relief in sight while the harbinger of fascism looms across the world including the USA where the call has been coming from inside the house for years. But Wauters definitely took the experience to heart and dove deeper into the potential lessons of those aforementioned times and gleaned some personal and social insights that he casts forth in arguably the best set of songs of his solo career thus far.
Sparks on the FFS tour in 2015, photo by Tom Murphy
Sunday | 07.09 What: Sparks When: 7 Where: Boulder Theater Why: With the 2021 biographical documentary The Sparks Brothers following the 2015 collaborative supergroup FFS with Franz Ferdinand, Sparks has become more than a relatively obscure cult band once again and deservedly so. Forming as Urban Renewal Porject in 1966 in the greater Los Angeles area the core duo of brothers Ron and Russell Mael renamed themselves Sparks in 1972 and finding little support or interest in America relocated to the UK in 1973 for a few years. During that time Sparks hit its first creative peak as evidenced by its classic, weirdo art pop masterpiece Kimono My House (1974) and its highly underrated follow-up Propaganda (1974). Though the brothers eventually returned to America that time left an impression in the UK with Sparks exerting a bit of influence on the nascent punk scene with its irreverent attitudes and disdain for dull nonsense. Over the years the group’s unique creative vision has occasionally made waves in the mainstream but mostly among connoisseurs of visionary, idiosyncratic pop music. Its music influenced artists as diverse as Joy Division, Siouxsie and the Banshees (who covered “This Town Ain’t Big Enough for the Both of Us” on its 1987 covers album Through the Looking Glass), Sonic Youth and Björk. Sparks worked with Giorgio Moroder on its 1978 album Nº 1 in Heaven and secured its place as a direct influence on the direction of synth pop and its 1982 song “I Predict” cracked the Billboard Hot 100 as a “New Wave” hit. Whether you know it or not you’ve heard music by Sparks in multiple movies and television shows and its infectious melodies have become an underappreciated part of music culture. And now you can see the legends touring in support of their new album The Girl Is Crying in Her Latte, another respectable entry with forward thinking, innovative, creative music throughout. The live show is theatrical, informed by genuinely clever humor, self-aware cultural references and commentary and surprising moments from the brothers Mael who don’t skimp on bringing a sense of the spontaneous and often unpredictable to the proceedings.
Bring Me the Horizon, photo by Jonti Wild
Sunday | 07.09 What: Fall Out Boy w/Bring Me the Horizon and Royal & the Serpent When: 6:30 Where: Fiddler’s Green Why: Fall Out Boy has been for years the go to band for teen angst in the form of pop punk emo and if you’re of a certain age it’s definitely part of your cultural zeitgeist with its long string of hits going back to the early 2000s. Royal & the Serpent is the project of Ryan Santiago whose music is an unlikely but effective fusion of electronic pop and pop-punk with songs that are real, raw and vulnerable and delivered with an immediate accessibility. Maybe it’s because the band is from Sheffield, England where most of the bands have a leg in the experimental but Bring Me The Horizon though known for its explosive, emotionally vibrant and expansive metalcore sound also seems to be able to freely associate other styles of music into the mix as well as a wide array of artists brought in for collaborations that mutate its sound even more. The results may not be for everyone particularly if you’re not on board for the band’s current core aesthetic of scream-y post-hardcore and electronic/industrial rock fusion. But at least Bring Me the Horizon is trying not to get stuck in outdated notions of the good old days and other impulses that undercut creative growth.
Plague Garden, photo by Tom Murphy
Monday | 07.10 What: Creux Lies w/Plague Garden and Redwing Blackbird When: 7 Where: HQ Why: Creux Lies is a post-punk band from Sacramento whose sound is completely fused with a more dream pop and shoegaze sound rather than the spindly post-punk noodling that has been popular in those circles in recent years. Plague Garden is a post-punk band from Denver whose pure fusion of electronic and rock blurs the line between deathrock, dream pop and neo-New Wave. Redwing Blackbird is a post-punk duo whose sounds are steeped not just in the gloom pop of The Cure but of psychedelic rock in the vein of The Legendary Pink Dots and Pink Floyd.
Bonnie “Prince” Billy, photo by Natasha Via
Tuesday-Friday | 07.11-07.14 What: Bonnie “Prince Billy” w/Faun Fables When: 7 (07.11 and 07.12), 6 (07.13), 7 (07.14) Where: Soiled Dove (07.11 and 07.12), The Armory (07.13) and Lulu’s Downstairs (07.14) Why: Ahead of the August 11, 2023 release of his new album Keeping Secrets Will Destroy You on Drag City, Bonnie “Prince” Billy aka Will Oldham is touring with a string of shows in Colorado in Denver, Colorado Springs and Fort Collins. Maybe you’ll get to hear more of the new material than has already been revealed online but either way, Oldham’s singular voice and creative vision as a songwriter and artist who pushes the boundaries of the kind of freak folk, country and and lo-fi rock that has been the hallmark in his career from the various Palace projects, the prolific releases under the Bonnie “Prince” Billy moniker to Superwolves and other collaborations. He has a knack for making the cosmic intimate and the profane profound both on the recorded format and as a live performer.
Final Gasp, photo by Tyler Hallett
Wednesday | 07.12 What: Final Gasp w/Weathered Statues, Victim of Fire, Merry and Maintainer When: 7 Where: Seventh Circle Music Collective Why: The members of Final Gasp came out of hardcore (Antagonize, Wound Man) but with its 2019 debut Baptism of Desire and its follow-up Haunting Whisper from 2021, that kind of energy and intensity is channeled into a moodier deathrock sound that incorporates that hardcore sensibility with metal and post-punk. The group is currently touring ahead of the September 22, 2023 release of its new record Mourning Moon. Joining them for this show are local bands across the spectrum of hardcore (Victim of Fire) and post-punk (Weathered Statues) and sounds outside of that direct spectrum of rock.
Wallice, photo by Le3ay Mar
Friday | 07.14 What: Wallice w/Nitefire and Card Catalog When: 7 Where: Globe Hall Why: Wallice was born and raised in and is now based out of the Los Angeles area. Since 2017 she has released a series of songs and EPs noteworthy for their self-aware wit and sharply articulated sociological observations and commentary on modern life and relationships. Though her output might be loosely described as bedroom pop there is a level of production and songcraft that elevates her songs into the realm of indie pop more often associated with the likes of Snail Mail and Soccer Mommy. Directly off a Australian dates with The 1975, Wallice is touring in support of her new EP Mr. Big Shot, her most fully realized and set of compositions to date.
Isadora Eden, photo by Tom Murphy
Saturday | 07.15 What:Isadora Eden album release w/Pink Lady Monster and Deth Rali When: 7 Where: The Marquis Theater Why: Isadora Eden started as a solo project in a more indie singer-songwriter vein but even the early releases were imbued with an imaginative flair and an ear for deeper emotional coloring. As Eden brought on board collaborators to help flesh out the sound in the newer songs she was writing the music evolved into a darker, more sonically rich sound that was a bit more like something one might expect to hear from a songwriter like PJ Harvey or Mary Timony but more darkwave, more flourishes of atmospheric sounds both guitar-rooted and electronic akin to the stranger end of shoegaze. This creative period has resulted in one of the more fascinating records of 2023 in forget what makes it glow, the debut full-length for the project. Eden’s deeply evocative voice guides you through an introspective set of songs that are melancholic, reflective and in the end cathartic. Like the kind of dream pop record with some grit and edge, willing to wax noisy in moments as if to embody the way life and our subsconscious experiences are analog and meaningful, intimate, in a way pristine digital and curated experiences rarely are. The album will be available on vinyl and digital and for more information on finding group’s releases, social media and upcoming shows please visit the band’s website.Pink Lady Monster is one of the most interesting bands out of Denver or anywhere now because it incorporates elements of experimental dream pop, experimental jazz and noise rock for a sound that is entrancing and challenging at once.
Volk in 2021, photo by Tom Murphy
Saturday | 07.15 What:The Goddamn Gallows w/IV and The Strange Band and Volk When: 8 Where: Globe Hall Why: The Goddamn Gallows are a band that has picked up musical ideas and styles in its meandering journey as a band since beginning in the early part of the 2000s. These days the group is a raucous and charming mish mash of punk Americana and metal with an wisacre sense of humor long on irony. Volk is a rambunctious, psychedelic honky tonk duo from Nashville that recently released its latest EP, Stand the Test which reveals its knack for pop songcraft as remixed and reinterpreted by friends into new territory for the band. Volk’s spirited and sometimes surreal live show is proof positive that plenty of weirdos exist in the realm of country music in Tennessee.
Chaepter, photo from Bandcamp
Sunday | 07.16 What: Chaepter w/Specific Ocean and Jeremy Mock When: 7 Where: Mutiny Information Café Why: Chaepter is an artist from Chicago whose music is the kind of bedroom pop that blurs the borders between slowcore, dreampop and indiefolk. Specific Ocean is an indie rock band with a strong undercurrent of jazz sensibilities. Jeremy Mock was the frontman and guitarist of the great and now defunct Denver post-punk band Antibroth. He is playing a rare solo show before moving to New York City and this will be the last chance to catch his idiosyncratic music styling for some time to come.
d4vd, photo by Aidan Cullen
Tuesday | 07.18 What:d4vd w/Scott James When: 7 Where: The Bluebird Theater Why: d4vd is the performance and songwriting moniker of David Anthony Burke who got his start making music composing pieces for his montage videos of Fortnite and he’s been a member of esports group Team Limit. But his July 2022 dark dreampop single “Romantic Homicide” was his breakthrough with its horror short-esque music video paired with the poignant lyrics of heartbreak and the intense feelings that can ensue following a romantic split. In March 2023, the debut d4vd album Petals to Thorns dropped collecting his singles and adding new music to the artist’s growing repertoire of melancholic and soulful bedroom pop songs articulating feelings of loneliness, love lost, romance gone wrong, self-doubt and yearning for redemption.
Pardoner, photo from Bandcamp
Wednesday | 07.19 What:Pardoner w/American Culture, Supreme Joy and Fishlegs When: 7 Where: Hi-Dive Why: Imagine the unlikely combination of Superchunk and a hardcore band and you’ll have some idea of what you’re in for with Pardoner. The band from San Francisco recently released its latest album Peace Loving People which sounds like the above if that band also dipped into the more angular and intense end of Circle Jerks/OFF. American Culture is what happens when an indie pop rooted band rediscovers its love of punk and The Cure in equal measure. Supreme Joy is like a garage rock band with chops and a taste for psychedelia.
Wednesday | 07.19 What:X w/James Intveld When: 7 Where: The Oriental Theater Why: X is the influential and well-known Americana punk band from Los Angeles whose body of work is among the most literate rock and roll ever written but without losing the punk rock and beat poetry spirit that inspired it from its inception. Live still a little off the cuff and occasionally unhinged.
Caamp, photo courtesy the artists
Wednesday and Thursday | 07.19 and 07.20 What: Caamp w/Carsie Blanton and Zach Nytomt (07.19) and Lady Wray and Tucker Gill (07.20) When: 6 Where: Red Rocks Why: Caamp is an indie folk band from Columbus, Ohio that has built a steady following over the past near decade and not so long ago you would have caught the group playing small clubs. But its 2019 album By & By garnered Caamp critical accolades and its first appearance on commericial charts. For the group’s latest album, Lavender Days, Caamp enlisted Nathaniel Rateliff and Katie Crutchfield (of Waxahatchee fame) on vocals and the resultant album is one that expands the core sound of elegantly pastoral pop with incandescent warmth and an introspection that is also forward looking.
Gorilla Biscuits, photo from Bandcamp
What:Gorilla Biscuits w/H2O Direct Threat and Time X Heist When: 7 Where: The Oriental Theater Why: Gorilla Biscuits were part of that final period of the first era of hardcore that emerged in the mid-to-late 80s in New York City before the movement all but imploded by the early 90s before many of those early bands re-formed in the 2000s as a new era of hardcore was beginning to gather steam and transform and redefine the sound. Gorilla Biscuits benefited from having formed in the wake of crossover and its sound was more in line with a more modern style. Also on the bill is H2O, a NYC melodic hardcore band that got going in 1994 and Direct Threat and Time X Heist from Denver who are carrying that torch of hardcore’s era of blunt, unvarnished sonic aggression.
Glass Spells, photo courtesy the artists
Friday | 07.21 What:Glass Spells w/Tepid and DJ Tower When: 8 Where: HQ Why: Glass Spells is a post-punk band whose sound is more in line with synthwave and minimal techno, like it took some inspiration from both early Ladytron and ADULT. Its 2021 album Shattered released during the late period when live shows weren’t happening and so the duo didn’t get a proper showing of its music until later and no more wide national tour until now. Tepid is the solo minimal techno project of Nick Salmon of industrial post-punk band Voight from Denver.
Julian St. Nightmare, photo by Tom Murphy
Friday | 07.21 What: Julian St. Nightmare, Sell Farm and Dream of Industry When: 9 Where: Glob Why: A showcase of some of the better post-punk adjacent bands out of Denver with the more darkwave Julian St. Nightmare whose commanding live shows are a well kept secret of the Mile High City for now. Sell Farm is more in the realm of dub-inflected Godflesh. Dream of Industry infuses its own dark, post-punk flavor with shoegaze highlights.
Mainland Break in 2019, photo by Tom Murphy
Saturday | 07.22 What:Mainland Break w/Kiwi Jr. and Candy Chic When: 8 Where: Hi-Dive Why: Mainland Break is a jangle pop/power pop band from Denver whose latest album One Way Ticket to Midnight is being celebrated at this show. It’s sparkling melodies and intricate guitar work recall the simple charm of early 2000s indiepop and that era of 80s underground rock best represented by the Paisley Underground, early Flying Nun acts and C86.
MF Ruckus in 2011, photo by Tom Murphy
Saturday | 07.22 What:MF Ruckus w/The Blind Staggers and Ipecac When: 7 Where: The Bluebird Theater Why: MF Ruckus is releasing its latest album The Front Line of Good Times Vol. I through Glory or Death Records. The long-running Denver hard rock band has a style that bridges any gaps between bluesy hard rock and melodic thrash with a high energy and entertaining live show.
Caterina Barbieri, photo from Bandcamp
Monday | 07.24 What:Caterina Barbieri — CANCELED When: 7 Where: Central Presbyterian Church Why: Caterina Barbieri is an Italian composer now based in Berlin whose fusion of analog synthesis and generative/algorithmic method of crafting her idiosyncratic electronic soundscapes has garnered her wide acclaim. Her 2017 breakthrough album Patterns of Consciousness on Important Records introduced her efforts at breaking down the barriers between dance music, pop and the avant-garde to the larger world of fans of experimental electronic music. On both sides of the pandemic lockdowns of 2020 Barbieri has released two, remarkable sister albums with 2019’s Ecstatic Computation and the 2023 opus Myuthafoo both now on digital and vinyl through her own light-years imprint. Think of her as a kind of creative and spiritual descendant of Suzanne Ciani, Laurie Spiegel and Jean-Michel Jarre in terms of innovative technique and accessibility.
The Mighty Missoula, photo from Bandcamp
Monday | 07.24 What: The Mighty Missoula w/Abandons and Only Echoes When: 7 Where: Seventh Circle Music Collective Why: The Mighty Missoula is an instrumental post-rock band from Portland, Oregon whose body of work waxes more into the realm of ambient. At least its most recent EP Virga named for the falling rain that evaporates before hitting the ground has a pastoral drift not unlike what it might be to meditate on a late afternoon and early evening in mid-spring in the Pacific Northwest observing the movements of clouds as they course toward forming days of drizzle punctuated by sunlight bursting through unexpectedly. Abandons and Only Echoes are also post-rock bands but from Denver. Abandons is somewhere between post-metal and the kind of experimental noise rock that has been blurred into more abstract structures whereas Only Echoes sculpts from a heavier sonic palette with more in common with the riff focus of acts like Pelican and Agalloch.
Braid, photo from Bandcamp
Tuesday | 07.25 What: Braid w/despAIR Jordan https://www.bluebirdtheater.net/events/detail/485237 When: 7 Where: The Bluebird Theater Why: Braid were (and are) one of the most influential bands out of Midwestern emo with its 1998 album Frame & Canvas one of the absolute classics of the genre. What perhaps separated Braid from some of its peers was its clear roots in the kind of angular post-hardcore of Discord bands and expanding on melodic hooks and raw emotionalism of the likes of Embrace and of course Fugazi. Denver’s despAIR Jordan is comprised of veterans of the punk and post-hardcore scene that emerged in the wake of the foundation laid by Braid, Mineral and Christie Front Drive with its own moody, melodic fusion of shoegaze and emo.
Middle Kids, photo by Michelle Grace Hunder
Tuesday | 07.25 What:Jimmy Eat World w/Manchester Orchestra and Middle Kids When: 5:30 Where: Red Rocks Why: Jimmy Eat World was one of the bands whose amalgam of pop punk and emo helped take those sounds into the mainstream following Green Day and NOFX paving that way earlier in the 90s. With the 2001 release of its album Bleed American and the ubiquitous and now classic single “The Middle” Jimmy Eat World with an album of undeniable hooks proved it could transcend preconceptions of its roots. At a time when a lot of generic pop punk was flooding airwaves and mediocre, trend hoppers were forming and playing festivals and occupying the same lane as cookie cutter grunge bands had less than a decade prior somehow Jimmy Eat World stood out because of the quality of the songwriting. Opening this night at Red Rocks is Middle Kids from Sydney, Australia who have been delivering poignant and introspective indie rock since its 2016 inception. The group’s self-titled debut EP seemed to be filled with songs of unlikely sophistication and advanced songcraft so early in the trio’s career. Its sweeping and delicate mini epics on the EP were both delicacy of feleing and shot through with a exuberant and charismatic energy. The band is set to release its new album in the none-too-distant future and its lead single “Bootleg Firecracker” with its acoustic sounds and intimate mood hints at yet another shift in musical direction for talented pop group even further into turning a personal storytelling style into something with a wide appeal.
Janet Feder and Fred Frith in 2017, photo by Tom Murphy
Tuesday | 07.25 What: Janet Feder and Ian Argys When: 7-9 Where: Broadway Roxy Why: Denver based avant-garde composer and guitarist Janet Feder is performing a rare set this evening with solo and duo sets with accomplished jazz and experimental guitar player Ian Argys. Sounds like it could be a little too cerebral but Feder’s humor and warmth as a performer is always engaging and she is able to make heady, technical music accessible.
(L-R): Cavetown, Ricky Montgomery and mxmtoon, photo by Lauren Tepfer
Wednesday | 07.26 What: Bittersweet Daze: mxmtoon w/Cavetown, Ricky Montgomery and grentperez When: 4:30 Where: Levitt Pavilion Why: Bittersweet Daze is a tour featuring three stars of modern bedroom pop with mxmtoon, Cavetown and Ricky Montgomery. The three artists recently collaborated on and released the single “Nobody Loves Me,” a song about love and yearning and a vulnerable self-awareness seemingly written from a place of existential angst yet channeled into a tenderly earnest pop song. Individually mxmtoon and Cavetown got started writing music during their middle school years starting their own YouTube channels as an outlet for sharing their songs. But those fledgling efforts blossomed into an internet phenomenon through various social media platforms including TikTok. Cavetown produced mxmtoon’s 2019 single “Prom Dress” which went viral and has been used in tens of thousands of TikTok videos. Montgomery had pursued a more traditional indie rock band route with his group The Honeysticks but nearly quit music entirely by 2020. But during the early COVID-19 pandemic of 2020 he released singles that too went viral on TikTok with “Mr. Loverman” and “Line Without a Hook.” In 2021 he saw mxmtoon perform on Twitch and discovered she’d been a fan of his Vine clips before that platform took a dive in the mid-2010s. All three artists excel at blending intimate folk pop with modern electronic and hip-hop production to craft songs that speak to the aspirations and anxieties of a younger generation while navigating communicating with potential fans through savvy and creative use of online platforms that bypass traditional forms of music distribution.
Tedeschi Trucks Band, photo by David McClister
Friday and Saturday | 07.28 and 07.29 What: Tedeschi Trucks Band w/Vincent Neil Emerson When: 6 Where: Red Rocks Why: Susan Tedeschi was already hailed as one of the most gifted modern blues guitarists and songwriters of her generation before she married another such luminary in Derek Trucks who had been a part of The Allman Brothers Band, the group one of his uncles had helped to found. Their band together, Tedeschi Trucks Band, launched in 2010 when each put their solo efforts on indefinite hiatus and these days the twelve members of the band seem to have an intuitive connection that gives what might be considered an established blues Americana sound a vibrant energy. Tedeschi’s passionate and expressive vocals and both her and Trucks’ masterful guitar interplay syncing with a group of ace musicians on horns, bass, percussion and is orchestral in scope with layered vocal harmonies boosting the impact of the songs truly elevates this bands performances beyond where many other artists aiming at similar musical leanings are able to achieve. It’s not a jam band though there is plenty of off the cuff improvisation, it’s not simply blues or Americana or rock and roll but its own thing with those roots blended together.
Overcalc, photo from Bandcamp
Monday | 07.31 What:Overcalc (Nick Skrobisz of Multicult and The Wayward) w/Equine and Fungus Panel When: 8/9 Where: Bar Bar aka Carioca Café Why: Overcalc is the solo project of Nick Skrobisz of Multicult and The Wayward Fame. The music of Overcalc combines guitar experiments with layers of electronic elements to produce texural tones and rhythms akin to something one might have heard on an old Faust record. The latest album from Overcalc is 2022’s Fruits of the Decision Tree recently issued on Sleeping Giant Glossolalia. Opening the show is Equine, the solo guitar soundscaping project of former Motheater and Epileptinomicon member Kevin Richards whose experiments in rhythm and feedback sculpting with unique guitar chords and arrangements of amps bridges the gap between drone and the avant-garde.
Big Thief, photo by Noah Lenker
Monday | 07.31 What: Big Thief w/Lucinda Williams https://www.redrocksonline.com/events/big-thief-466494/ When: 6:30 Where: Red Rocks Why: Big Thief has been evolving its idiosyncratic brand of indie folk since its 2015 inception in Brooklyn. Its 2022 album Dragon New Warm Mountain I Believe in You contained aspects of field recordings within its pastoral, deeply atmospheric, delicate pop songs grounding what could be ethereal faire especially given Adrianne Lenker’s introspective tones that seem to be a little like getting to hear what it’s like to sit inside a reflective, cinematic daydream. Lucinda Williams is opening this show but the country rock and folk singer is an influential and pioneering legend in her own right and the headlining status could have gone either way on a bill like this. Her latest album Stories From a Rock n Roll Heart dropped at the end of June and reflects her sharp ear for crafting not just strong personal stories but bluesy rock songs in a way that teems with life rather than a retread of a well worn musical path.
Yeah Yeah Yeahs perform at Red Rocks on 6/5/23, photo by Jason Al TaanKiltro, photo by Julian Brier
Thursday | 06.01 What:Kiltro w/Nina De Freitas When: 7 Where: Mercury Café Why: Kiltro started as the solo acoustic project of Chris Bowers Castillo who as a Chilean-American, had moved to the port city of Valparaíso where he worked as a walking tour guide. And that job not only afforded him the time to learn the city and take in its richly diverse cultural influences but also the opportunity to write a body of work as a songwriter. After returning to Denver Kiltro formally came to life in 2017 and Bowers Castillo developed his acoustic songs with loops, pedals and percussion elements. But in 2018 the project expanded into a trio with Will Parkhill on bass and drummer Michael Devincenzi and later with Fez Garcia on board as a percussionist for live shows.
Kiltro’s 2019 debut album Creatures of Habit had been recorded after the material had been performed live and getting feedback from audiences and friends before being committed to an easily transmitted and shareable form. But the group’s new album, 2023’s Underbelly, is the product of crafting music in quarantine and working in the studio, following whatever creative paths sparked the most inspiration in the moment resulting in a more experimental set of songs which incorporates aspects of shoegaze, ambient, South American folk, psychedelia and a literary yet spontaneous form of storytelling that feels like a deeply personal experience in the listening. The record is a hypnotic and transcendent work of surprising immediacy that one might compare with the likes of Devendra Banhart, Hermanos Guitérrez and more locally to the work of artists like Midwife American Grandma. It fuses the aesthetics of electronic music with the intimacy of mythical folk music around the campfire for a truly unique record refreshing in its originality.
Kiltro is following up the release with a tour throughout the USA in June and July with other live dates in support of the album in August and September with an appearance at VORTEX festival at The JunkYard at Meow Wolf on August 25. Listen to our interview with Bowers Castillo on Bandcamp linked below.
Quits in 2023, photo by Tom Murphy
Thursday | 06.01 What:Reptoid w/Quits and Endless, Nameless When: 8 Where: The Skylark Lounge Why: Reptoid is a one man, industrial noise rock freakout from Oakland. His most recent album WORSHIP FALSE GODS (2020) is a borderline, or not so borderline, nihilistic set of songs like a series of trainwrecks about how we’re all pretty much screwed in face of likely developments in the history of our species and its impact on the environment. If you’ve been into Buck Gooter or Author and Punisher this is your thing. Quits is a crushing noise rock juggernaut of a four piece from Denver whose incisive songs and eruptive energy can be startlingly scathing and heavy at once. Endless, Nameless erases the line between progressive metal, post-rock, post-hardcore, black metal and shoegaze with a forceful elegance. Its 2023 album Living Without should end up on the more discerning year end best lists.
Thursday | 06.01 What:Sorted: Surgeon & John Templeton When: 9 Where: Black Box Why: Surgeon is a DJ and electronic music composer from England whose labels Counterbalance and Dynamic Tension has been issuing some fine techno records for over 20 years. John Templeton is based in Denver whose own techno music has made a bit of a splash in the Mile High City and his Great American Techno Festival brought some of the most innovative practioners of that style of music to town for several years.
ACxDC, photo from Bandcamp
Friday | 06.02 What: ACxDC w/No/Más and Berated When: 8 Where: Hi-Dive Why: ACxDC is the infamous powerviolence/grindcore band from Los Angeles whose 2020 album Satan Is King is a seethingly uncompromising run of anarchistic political sentiment set to blast beats and oddly anthemic antiestablishment shout along songs.
M. Sage, photo by Lynette Sage
Saturday | 06.03 What:M. Sage Paradise Crick release show w/Zander Raymond When: 3 p.m. Where: TBA in Boulder Why: M. Sage has been a prolific and evolving songwriter and composer going back to at least far back as when he was based out of Fort Collins and doing early indiepop groups. But when he started writing and releasing music as M. Sage and often through his now defunct label Patient Sounds (2009-2019) it became obvious that Sage was thinking beyond standard songwriting even in the more experimental folk vein. His latest release, and first for RVNG Intl., is Paradise Crick, a collection of meditations on communing with nature as a route to a sustainable relationship with the world we all share. The pure fusion of acoustic and electronic aesthetics resonates with some of the more avant releases on the ECM label and its intuitive rhythms and informal structures ease the mind out of the standard pathways of being within one’s own mindset. This show is at unique venue and one must purchase a ticket at the link provided to get the address.
Saturday | 06.03 What:Danceportation – Justin Jay and others When: 9:30 Where: Meow Wolf Convergence Station Why: Danceportation is an immersive dance party pulsing through the worlds of Convergence Station. Be immersed in the full exhibition while stunning live performances on several stages with psychedelic projections and sentient universes welcome you. Danceportation on June 3rd will feature a takeover from Justin Jay’s Fantastic Voyage, the Los Angeles-based electronic dance music imprint now celebrating its seventh year of exisence.
This lineup features multiple sets from Justin Jay, along with performances from Ardalan, DJ Swisha, Juliet Mendoza, Todd Edwards, Adrian More, B Goody, Blake, Coldsweat, Danny Goliger, DJ Parqués, Don Jamal, Ed Hoffman, Gusted, Keefe, Lipgloss, Massii, Mick Jeets, Mizzmegan, The Other Jon, Planet Bloop, and Taylor Bratches.
Korine, photo from Bandcamp
Sunday | 06.04 What:Korine w/CD Ghost, Voight and DJ Niq V When: 7 Where: Hi-Dive Why: Philadelphia-based dream pop band Korine plays a headlining show in Denver for the first time in support of the release of its 2023 album Tear. The group’s sound is somewhere between 80s New Wave groups like, yes, Tears For Fears, late 90s emo’s earnest emotional release and punk attitude. Voight will bring the dark industrial intensity with its scorching shoegaze/techno concoctions CD Ghost from Los Angeles released a set of lush pop songs called Night Music in 2022 that sounds like a a more synth driven and more ethereal Black Marble.
Yeah Yeah Yeahs, photo by David Black
Monday | 06.05 What:Yeah Yeah Yeahs w/Perfume Genius When: 7 Where: Red Rocks Why: Yeah Yeah Yeahs have been delivering scrappy, uplifting pop music with punk attitude since forming in 2000 and as first put into recorded form with its 2001 self-titled EP. But the band comprised of three art school kids from New York never rested on its laurels and immediately its creative ambitions drove the band to explore new sounds and expressions to match its emotional growth as well. Its spirited live shows turn even its more melancholic songs into epic anthems that sweep you up in its always deep mood. In 2022 the band released its first album in 9 years, Cool It Down, a record that showcases the group’s gift for richly evocative songwriting and ability to surprise with its willingness to explore new directions in sound and subverting the tropes of pop lyrics while offering new ways of thinking about and feeling timeless themes of human experience with a thrilling immediacy. You also get to see Perfume Genius whose own career in crafting meaningful and engrossing synth pop isn’t short on reinvention and re-envisioning core artistic impulses.
Clan of Xymox in 2018, photo by Tom Murphy
Monday | 06.05 What:Clan of Xymox w/Curse Mackey, A Cloud of Ravens and The Siren Project When: 7 Where: The Oriental Theater Why: Clan of Xymox is the pioneering dutch darkwave band whose early post-punk songs has been foundational to the modern version of that music with its icily melodic synths and deep, mysterious yet emotionally resonant vocals from Ronny Moorings. Curse Mackey has been involved in a variety of electronic industrial bands of the past few decades including My Life With The Thrill Kill Cult and Pigface and the music under his own name has been more in the vein of synth pop end of darkwave. The Siren Project is a Denver band that has persisted since the old local Goth scene of the 1990s but has never been a fashion victim group in sound or appearance. Its downtempo music and dream pop guitar sound with Malgorzata Wacht’s soaring vocals and emotional power has set it apart from most bands in the Denver Goth scene so its music has aged well and its excellent and so far only official album Denouement should appeal to fans of Dead Can Dance and Faith & The Muse.
The Cure at Riot Fest in Denver, September 20, 2014, photo by Tom Murphy
Tuesday | 06.06 What: The Cure w/The Twilight Sad When: 5:30 Where: Fiddler’s Green Why: The Cure is of course the foundational post-punk band whose gloomy, darkly melodic songs has exerted a lasting influence not just on what one might presume in the realms of Goth and darkwave but also shoegaze, pop music and even certain corners of hip-hop. Singer Robert Smith’s sensitively and sharply observed lyrics embody poetically a sensibility that takes in the possibilities and harsh realities of the world and casts dreams for the best against the odds. Though the band’s music has a reputation for melancholy sounds and sad songs its rich body of work is quite varied and not short on expressions of joy, amusement, romance and hope. Its music conveys the broad human experience like few popular bands get to with the level of power and nuance The Cure has brought to bear across decades and as a live band there is an uplifting warmth and sense of human solidarity to the performances. Scottish post-punk band The Twilight Sad is cut from a similar artistic cloth with songs that are both vulnerable and ferocious.
King Gizzard & The Lizard Wizard, photo by Jason Galea
Wednesday and Thursday | 06.07 and 06.08 What: King Gizzard & The Lizard Wizard w/Kamikaze Palm Tree When:6 p.m (06.07) and 12 p.m. and 6:30 p.m. (06.08) Where: Red Rocks Why: With a name like King Gizzard & The Lizard Wizard you might imagine some acid head RPG nerds making psychedelic metal with lyrics based on an epic fantasy story arc. And other than maybe the RPG part and maybe the doing LSD bit you wouldn’t be wrong in essence. The group from Melbourne, Victoria, Australia has steadily built a large cult following with a prolific career (in both 2017 and 2022 King Gizz released five albums each year with other years yielding at least one if not two records) with sounds from psychedelic pop to prog, to synth pop and groove metal, thrash and psych power metal. With album titles like Flying Microtonal Banana, Nonagon Infinity, Butterfly 3000, Fishing for Fishes and the 2023 album so far PetroDragonic Apocalyp; or Dawn of Eternal Night: An Annihilation of Planet Earth and the Beginning of Merciless Damnation you’d expect bizarre concept albums worthy of Emerson, Lake & Palmer’s Tarkus or Genesis’ The Lamb Lies Down on Broadway or at least unclassifiable songs like Pink Floyd’s “Several Species of Small Furry Animals Gathered Together in a Cave and Grooving with a Pict.” And King Gizz delivers just that. The kinds of albums and songs and shows that take you on a mind-bending, genre-bursting musical journey worthy of Hawkwind or Gong at their self-indulgent best.
Thursday | 06.08 What:Alphabet Soup #61: Machu Linea, Dub FX, Savage Bass Goat, Yung Lurch, Furbie Cakes and Skyfloor When: 9 Where: Black Box Why: This monthly showcase of some of the most forward thinking/experimental producers in Denver includes some of the usual suspects like Furbie Cakes and Skyfloor and their brand of glitch and melodic ambient but this time out also Machu Linea whose avant-pop R&B/techno fusion has long crossed over into the realm of the indie scene.
Antibroth, photo by Tom Murphy
Friday | 06.09 What: Endless, Nameless and Antibroth tour kickoff w/Rose Variety and Polly Urethane When: 7 Where: D3 Arts Why: Antibroth and Endless, Nameless are embarking on a tour to the East Coast and back through the Midwest after which Antibroth and its weirdo, experimental, angular form of post-punk and confrontational surrealism will effectively come to an end though during the tour the trio will release its final EP, Satan and the Dying Baby. This is the band’s final show so don’t miss it. Endless, Nameless is a multi-genre band crossing the boundaries of post-hardcore, death metal, math rock and shoegaze. Rose Variety from Boulder came out of a time in local music that had recovered from that wave of really cookie cutter psychedelic and garage rock but took that raw material and made a pop band out of it with some real punk kick. Polly Urethane always reinvents her show with every performance so maybe you’ll get a gorgeously classical vocal show with some vinyl sampling or backing track or raw noise and signal processing or a pure performance art piece or all of it. Always worth coming to check out.
The Sisters of Mercy, photo by Lara Aimee
Friday | 06.09 What: The Sisters of Mercy w/A Primitive Evolution When: 7 Where: Fillmore Auditorium Why: The Sisters of Mercy will probably fill the venue with a thick fog and you’ll get some colored murk in which to experience its foundational political post-punk but maybe this time the fog won’t be so thick and you’ll get to see Andrew Eldtrich and his band clearly delivering the kind anthemic, dark rock that launched a thousand Goth bands without directly being that music itself.
Elizabeth Colour Wheel, photo from Bandcamp
Saturday | 06.10 What:Jerome’s Dream and Elizabeth Colour Wheel and Only Echoes When: 8 Where: Hi-Dive Why: Jerome’s Dream is the influential screamo/powerviolence band from Sacramento that started out in the early heyday of that music in the late 90s and early 2000s and during its first run of 1997-2001 the trio made a major impact on the kind of music that would later be associated with modern hardcore and extreme metal and where those two fuse. The band has been reunited since 2018 and its latest album The Gray In Between is a fine example of the kind of cathartic extreme music that is has had a popular resurgence in the last handful of years. Elizabeth Colour Wheel is of similar sound but its fusion of noise rock and shoegaze but delivered like a hardcore band has made it a wonderful musical mutant of the past several years. Only Echoes is an instrumental post-metal band from Denver that has been honing its imaginative soundscapes on the road and around Denver whose 2022 album Sunsickness is both melancholic and fiery, reconciling both musical impulses.
Bayonne, photo by Eric Morales
Saturday | 06.10 What: Bayonne w/Mmeadows When: 8 Where: Globe Hall Why: Bayonne is the project of producer and composer Roger Sellers who started off releasing music under his given name but beginning with 2016’s Primitives he adopted his current moniker. The latest Bayonne record Temporary Time (2023) is an entrancing, orchestral electronic pop record of spacious melodies and melancholic yet summery moods. At another time some critic might have lumped Bayonne in with the “hypnogogic pop” of John Maus or even Dean Blunt but his style is more in the vein of downtempo ambient of Tycho but more grounded in texture and strong, organic rhythms.
Drowse, photo by Lula Asplund
Monday | 06.12 What:Drowse w/Agriculture, Sprain and Palehorse Palerider When: 7 Where: Hi-Dive Why: Kyle Bates is a composer and multi-instrumentalist whose work has most often been heard as his musical project Drowse. Founded in 2013 in Portland, Oregon, Drowse has released a few albums and numerous EPs and split releases. The music could be considered in part ambient, slowcore, shoegaze, drone, experimental folk and perhaps even transcendental black metal. But all categories aside, each Drowse recording is a journey into unique and nuanced emotional spaces exploring and living within a flow of emotions and thoughts that open the mind to new ideas and interpretations. And more so the moods, frequencies and textures on a Drowse recording, or really any of the releases in which Bates is involved, express a state of mind that one enters after having moved past a peak of anxiety or personal darkness and contain that tenderness and rawness one often needs to pull oneself out of a place of acute pain and psychological paralysis. The gentleness of the music is part of its power and appeal as Bates seems keenly aware of what it’s like to experience that period in life where you don’t feel like you can push or strive any further and you need an experience that is the opposite of that very modern and American internalized urge to keep at things to the extreme and prove yourself endlessly more and more. The core sound of Drowse is that of the musical equivalent of acceptance of one’s human limitations and of being open to what will nurture your well being and spark your imagination into nudging you toward fulfilling experiences.
Throughout his work as Drowse Bates has collaborated with Maya Stoner (Floating Room), Thom Wasluck (Planning for Burial), Madeline Johnston (Midwife), Taylor Malsey, Amulets, Daniel Schmidt and others. In 2023 Bates released an album as Kyle Bates and Lula Asplund called A Matinee that expands upon the format of his songwriting and production with two extended tracks that sound like an improv session one might have stumbled into in cutting room floor recordings of Alan Hankshaw and/or Brian Bennett had they been asked to provide music for a forgotten and mystical place. While it may sound like Bates’ work sets your mind into a different place than where it began upon listening to it, it does, but it is not escapist. Like the work of Grouper or Tim Hecker, Bates’ music has delicate immediacy that engages as it soothes and it stirs the emotions and the imagination.
And you’ll get to see the great Los Angeles black metal band Agriculture which will release its feral self-titled album on The Flenser on July 21, the Unwound-esque noise rock/post-punk group Sprain on its first time in Denver and the Mile High City’s own Palehorse/Palerider whose desert drone and cosmic shoegaze will add more than a touch of the epic and mysterious to the evening.
Earth, photo courtesy the artist
Tuesday | 06.13 What: Earth w/Burning Sister When: 7 Where: Globe Hall Why: It is indeed the foundational doom and post-rock doom legends Earth bringing their extended mystical blues to Globe Hall which mostly gets more indie and Americana fare most nights. Its languorous psychedelia somehow manages to be dreamlike and weighty at once for a contrast that allows for a wide-ranging dynamic driven by a sense of wonder and self-discovery.
Harriette, photo by Muriel Margaret
Wednesday | 06.14 What:Joan w/Harriette When: 7 Where: Larimer Lounge Why: Brooklyn based pop artist Harriette recently released her debut EP i heart the internet and a music video for the title track that features a bevy of older computer technology (including a flip phone of all things as well as old CRTs and is that an iMac in there?) as a celebration and send-up of internet culture for a song that takes a whimsical and self-aware approach to the phenomenon of people living perpetually online. The EP of upbeat and gentle melodies is a collection of songs as snapshots of modern life with free association of cultural signifiers and artifacts like mentioning listening to an “Folsom Prison Blues” on the appropriately titled “Johnny got it right.” Its genre-bending songwriting in the realm of indie pop and sharply and poetically observed descriptions of everyday life. Joan is a pop duo from Little Rock, Arkansas whose EPs over the past six years have established it as band that is gifted at crafting the heartfelt, expansive pop song as manifested most fully on its 2023 debut album superglue.
Metric, photo by Justin Broadbent
Thursday | 06.15 What:Garbage w/Noel Gallagher’s High Flying Birds and Metric When: 5:30 Where: Levitt Pavilion Why: Metric’s 2022 album Formentera has all the creative ambition, dream-like atmospherics and lush soulfulness that has has been the hallmark of the band from the beginning. But this time around Metric takes aim at some of the serious facing the human species as a collective and on the personal level. Also in 2022 the group headlined what it called the “Doomscroller Tour” after the song on the album about the habit of scrolling through social media and online taking in the news as a steady feed of the host of terrible things seeming to occurring every day and at a seemingly more rapid and dense pace than at any point in historical memory. And taking in this horror as a kind of act of soporific disassociation that Metric has sought to disrupt with its music and performance even if for just a little while and to get people to reconsider this habit and perhaps do something about these issues rather than be a passive actor in the human experiment. Metric is in good musical company with legendary alternative rock band Garbage whose own advocacy for social causes is obvious from its own social media presence and its way of discussing its work in the context of living as a human connected with the world. And Noel Gallagher is the former songwriter, singer and guitarist of Oasis and his new band High Flying Birds has been his musical outlet since 2010 following the 2009 final split of his old group. In 2023 the project released its latest album Council Skies perhaps as a reference to Gallagher’s having come up poor in Manchester and his own aspirational daydreaming as a youth, imbuing an album out in his mid-50s with some of that sense of wonder and looking forward.
Legs. The Band in 2022, photo by Tom Murphy
Thursday | 06.15 What:Legs. The Band EP release w/Hen & The Cocks, The Ephinjis and Gila Teen When: 8 Where: Hi-Dive Why: Legs. The Band is releasing its new EP. The group that combines rockabilly blues with proto-punk sounds has been one of the more charismatic rock bands out of the Denver scene of the past couple of years and really sounds like no one else with a commanding and raw stage presence. The Ephinjis are a Boulder-based punk band whose own sound seems to borrow liberally across decades and manages to make a kind of pop-punk that manages not to sound stale because the band’s songwriting is steeped in a diverse sound with eclectic roots. Gila Teen is the Goth emo band everyone should get to experience at least once in their lives because their music is heartfelt and mysterious at the same time informed by a playful and surreal sense of humor but not one that distracts from the poignant emotional moments that clearly inspired so much of the songwriting.
Atmosphere, photo by Chris Fiq Colclasure
Friday | 06.16 What:Dirty Heads & Atmosphere & Stick Figure w/DENM, The Grouch and Mike Love When: 4:20 Where: Fiddler’s Green Amphitheater Why: Atmosphere is a hip-hop duo from Minneapolis, Minnesota comprised of rapper Slug aka Sean Daley and DJ/producer Ant aka Anthony Davis. Slug and Ant have been influential well beyond their own remarkable work as artists as co-founders of the respected Rhymesayers Entertainment imprint which has long been one of the torchbearers of underground and alternative hip-hop going back to the mid-90s and releasing not just the work of Atmosphere but that of Aesop Rock, Brother Ali, Eyedea & Abilities, Dilated Peoples, Grayskul and others. Including its debut album Overcast! (1997), Atmosphere has released thirteen full albums and ten EPs up through the new record So Many Other Realities Exist Simultaneously (2023) making the project one of the more prolific acts in hip-hop. In its various lineups and incarnations Atmosphere has consistently paired sensitive and thought-provoking lyrics with a sonically rich and diverse production ranging from some more classic hip-hop sounds to the clearly experimental and avant-garde all to deliver powerfully evocative music that engages the imagination and the heart. In the live setting Atmosphere create an intimate and inviting energy that creates an environment of the shared experience as Daley’s lyrics aim to not just tell relatable stories with roots in his own direct experiences but with resonances for common experiences and emotional spaces we’ve all known. On the new record the songs take us through a journey through un rest and hope, the latter the primary feeling Daley hopes to convey to everyone that shows up to an Atmosphere show because it is hope that lingers and can carry you through trying times into those that are better.
Allison Lorenzen in 2022, photo by Tom Murphy
Friday | 06.16 What:Allison Lorenzen, Openly Weep and Bell Mine When: 7:30 Where: Leon Gallery Why: Allison Lorenzen has for several years made the kind of transcendent indie folk that seems to combine a mystical sensibility with ambient soundscapes and tender yet emotionally powerful songwriting and performances. Openly Weep is the debut musical project of Ryan Hall who is one of the founders of the Whited Sepulchre imprint which releases some of the most fascinating experimental music out of the underground on physical and digital formats. His own music is the kind of ambient music that combines beats and the sensibilities of house music. One might call it IDM but it bridges various electronic musical worlds for a sound that feels tribal, primal and completely modern. Listen to his 2021 EP Overpass here. Bell Mine is a Denver-based avant-electronic pop artist whose entrancing and darkly downtempo music is reminiscent of the work of Laurel Halo and Jenny Hval.
Dirty Few at 2013 original album release show for Get Loose Have Fun, photo by Tom Murphy
Friday | 06.16 What:Dirty Few 10 Year Anniversary of Get Loose, Have Fun w/White Lightning Co., The Sickly Hecks and host Matt Cobos When: 8 Where: Hi-Dive Why: Dirty Few were stars of the local garage punk scene in Denver in the early 2010s with a rightfully earned reputation for raucous shows that for better or for worse depending on your perspective and the show you caught embodied the so-called “Denver party rock” attitude. What was perhaps less obvious from the revelry is that Seth and Spencer Stone were talented songwriters whose music had real heart and undeniable hooks as perhaps best heard on the 2013 album Get Loose, Have Fun which the group is reuniting to celebrate with this show.
Sour Magic, photo courtesy the artists
Friday | 06.16 What:Sour Magic album release of Forbidden Fruit w/The Crooked Rugs, Fly Amanita and Chaarm When: 7 Where: Lost Lake Why: Sour Magic is a psychedelic rock and pop band from Denver that’s releasing its debut album Forbidden Fruit. At first listen maybe you’ll think you’re in for the kind of post-Tame Impala and Temples music but Sour Magic takes that sound into different directions with inventive tempo changes perfectly synced in with the way the melodies flow and unfold. The shimmery sound alongside that more gritty and the way the music allows all elements to shine immediately sets the band apart from much of the psych rock that came out of Denver in the 2010s. Fans of Beach Fossils’ shoegaze pop will appreciate the way Sour Magic often lets the rhythm section lead the music and how that lends the songwriting a weight even as its midnight hued atmospheric elements indulge in blissing out into the moonset. Also, not since Sunboy has a Denver psych band seemed to have such a strong command of the aesthetics of electronic music and rock fused as a unified whole.
The Blue Stones, photo by Nick Fancher
Saturday | 06.17 What: The Blue Stones w/Compass & Cavern and JACK When: 7 Where: The Bluebird Theater Why: Canadian blues rock band The Blue Stones has turned its musical roots into an expansion of the sound especially on its 2022 album Pretty Monster. Even a cursory listen through the album reveals a band that takes solid melodic lines and strong rhythms and employs modern production methods that give a tried and true formula and gave it some expansive mood in a psychedelic sheen and modern pop accessibility. It’s a shift in direction for The Blue Stones but Tarek Jafar and Justin Tessler seem to realize that taking chances and not being defined completely by one’s artistic past is more key to longevity than getting stuck doing the exact same thing for an entire career.
Child of Night, photo from Bandcamp
Sunday | 06.18 What:Child of Night w/Dream of Industry, Teller and Kill You Club DJs When: 7 Where: Hi-Dive Why: Child of Night is a darkwave dance band from Columbus, Ohio whose ethereal duskiness is driven by strong rhythms and robust low end. Its 2021 album The Walls at Dawn has an alluring moodiness like the soundtrack to a near future, urban techno thriller that is the missing link between TR/ST and Actors.
Temples, photo by Molly Daniel
Monday | 06.19 What: Temples w/Post Animal When: 7 Where: The Bluebird Theater Why: UK psychedelic rock band Temples has been one of the leading lights of the modern manifestation of that music. And its own sound informed by the aesthetics of synth pop has given its music a different trajectory and greater longevity than some of the bandwagon artists of the 2010s. Its music flows with layers of luminous melody and hits with a dream-like resonance that sounds like a quick trip to a sun dappled vacation destination in a beautiful and exotic place. Thus the title of its 2023 album Exotico seems entirely appropriate as each of its sixteen songs is like an immersive sampling of a place you’d like to visit long enough to soak in its uniquely affecting environment. Post Animal are like the younger creative cousin to Temples and its 2022 album Love Gibberish is nine transporting meditations on the glories and foibles of love and a myriad of perspectives on a perennial theme of rock music with the band moving a bit beyond its more hard rock early era into what is often lush 1970s pop-flavored, hazy psychedelia.
UPSAHL, photo by Aubree Estrella
Tuesday | 06.20 What:Oliver Tree w/UPSAHL, Tai Verdes and Little Ricky ZR3 When: 6 Where: Red Rocks Why: Oliver Tree got his break in the music industry proper making presentations for the likes of Skrillex and Zeds Dead though he’d long been a musician and songwriter who has pursued a variety of styles before finding his greatest success making the kind of pop music that is eclectic and informed by the kind of irony that serves to express the sincerity of feeling that is the core content of his songwriting. The eccentric stage performance style and drily and absurdly humorous music videos might give the impression of his music being a put on but songs aren’t. UPSAHL is an up-and-coming pop artist whose spirited and eclectic sound borrows liberally from various genres of music and fuses them into music that is somehow both deeply witty and amusing and thought-provoking. At least if her 2021 album Lady Jesus is any indication not to mention her 2022 EP Sagittarius (Taylor Upsahl being a Sagittarian herself). In 2023 the singer/songwriter announced the release of THE PHX (Phoenix) TAPES which will pair two songs as (SIDE A/SIDE B) to showcase her evolving interests as an artist and producer and so far singles like “GOOD GIRL ERA” (SIDE A) and “CONDOMS” (SIDE B) as well as “WET WHITE TEE SHIRT” (SIDE A) have demonstrated Upsahl’s range as a vocalist and gift for genre-morphing into whatever style suits her always sharp and sassy yet sensitive observations.
Moon Walker, photo by Madison McConnell
Tuesday | 06.20 What:Moon Walker w/Annabel Lee When: 7 Where: Larimer Lounge Why: Moon Walker is a duo from Denver comprised of Harry Springer and Sean McCarthy whose music is a mix of ’70s glam rock and power pop in a modern flavor. The project came out of the early pandemic when Springer’s and McCarthy’s band The Midnight Club couldn’t play out and Springer started writing music for song libraries until he wrote stuff he didn’t want to give away that way and the new band had its roots. It’s a little kitsch, it’s a lot boogie rock but at least the theatrical element is real and it’s not merely yet another couple of people re-re-re-re-discovering classic rock. Opening act Annabel Lee released her debut album Mother’s Hammer on March 8, 2023 and though housed in acoustic guitar, piano, minimal percussion and other traditionally more folk or pop elements, Lee’s vocals are commanding and intense in her expression and at times one is reminded of a peer like Grace Cummings or obvious touchstones like PJ Harvey in the orchestral arrangements and willingness to unmoor the emotional expression from the tethers of pop convention.
Elf Power, photo by Jason Thrasher
Wednesday | 06.21 What: Elf Power w/The Tammy Shine When: 7 Where: Lost Lake Why: Elf Power was one of the early Athens, GA bands affiliated with the Elephant 6 collective and thus one of the bands that helped to chart the musical direction of modern indie rock. The prolific group has reliably put out thoughtful and inventive psychedelic pop up through its most recent record, 2022’s Artificial Countrysides and its dreamlike, fuzzy melodies and transporting electronic shimmer. Sharing the bill is The Tammy Shine, the charismatic and powerful lead singer of Denver indie pop legends Dressy Bessy doing her no less lively and heartfelt solo material.
Bestial Mouths, photo by Katerina Asta
Wednesday and Thursday | 06.21 and 06.22 What: Bestial Mouths w/WitchHands and eHpH on 06.21 and w/Church Fire and DJ Shannon Von Kelly on 06.22 When: 7 (06.21) 8 (06.22) Where:Vulture’s (06.21) and Hi-Dive (06.22) Why: Bestial Mouths began in 2009 as a band that early on might be considered post-punk but even its debut EP, 2009’s Stabile Vices, had elements of noise and industrial set to ritualistic rhythms with tribal percussion. All along, vocalist Lynette Cerezo who has a background in fashion and design brought to performances a striking visual presentation that drew upon the imagery of mythology and dreams in a creative interplay with the music. Cerezo’s lyrics have always explored issues of gender, identity and personal liberation and whether combined with the performance or not, certainly enhanced by the live experience, meant as a conduit for mutual inspiration and uplift by challenging arbitrary societal notions of “proper” social roles and behavior and aesthetics. A Bestial Mouths show and the music embodies aspects of the subconscious and what has traditionally been relegated to artistic darkness and the feminine, the intuitive and the supernatural. Cerezo through the practice of her art reclaims all of that as a source of power and dignity by demonstrating how it isn’t negative, that it is a part of a complete human life and that such things can be harnessed to the benefit of the self and all.
More recent Bestial Mouths records starting with the new arc of music since the project has been mainly headed by Cerezo since 2018 has reconciled the early post-punk and Goth sound and noise completely with the more mystical and non-Western experimental sonic ideas and rhythms that have been a feature if not the focus of the music since the beginning. But in 2020’s RESURRECTEDINBLACK, the first Bestial Mouths record crafted with Cerezo at the creative helm it’s all there for a listening experience not unlike the psycho-mystical depths of a Dead Can Dance album but darker and more harrowing and cathartic. The new album R.O.T.T. (inmyskin), with the acronym standing for Road of Thousand Tears drops on August 11, 2023 and continues the path of its predecessor but with the songs seemingly emerging from the murk that seemed entirely appropriate for a set of songs from a time of great uncertainty and treading new musical paths. Those appreciate Diamanda Galás’ elemental catharsis, psychic fearlessness and avant-garde sensibilities might find a great deal to appreciate about Bestial Mouths as will those with a taste for the political industrial punk of ADULT. and Jarboe’s deeply emotional and unfettered vocal performances but while in Swans and since. Listen to our interview with Bestial Mouths on Bandcamp linked below.
FACS, photo from Bandcamp
Saturday | 06.24 What:FACS w/Wave Decay and Replica City When: 8 Where: Hi-Dive Why: FACS is a post-punk from Chicago that includes former 90 Day Men and Disappears singer/guitarist Brian Case. Its angular, menacing songs create a brooding soundscape of stark moods like the hollowed out facade of modern industrial culture. Its 2023 album Still Life In Decay is perhaps its most focused effort in articulating the telltale signs of a civilization in decay neglectful of itself and detrimental to all life within its sphere of influence.
Graham Nash, photo by Amy Grantham
Saturday and Sunday | 06.24 and 06.25 What: Graham Nash When: 6:30 (06.24) and 6 (06.25) Where: Chautauqua Auditorium (06.24) and Washington’s (6.25) Why: Graham Nash is a singer/songwriter who established for himself a rich and influential legacy in music and culture as a member of The Hollies in the 1960s and later that decade going forward with Crosby, Stills & Nash (and for a time CSN&Y with Neil Young). The socially conscious and poetically resonant rock proved a touchstone for a generation with an iconic body of work that’s still worth exploring and finding some of the classic rock era’s finest material. On May 19, 2023, Nash released his latest solo record Now and at 81 he is still crafting exquisite melodies and imaginative stories that have something to say and the forward looking perspective that has always been the hallmark of his art. He’s playing two shows in Colorado in celebration of the record.
Saturday | 06.24 What:Godflesh w/Sumerlands, Stormkeep, Spectral Voice and Street Tombs When: 5 Where: Gothic Theatre Why: Maybe the extreme metal even of the summer with headliners Godflesh, the influential and always unforgettable industrial grindcore pioneers whose grinding, scorching menace always hits hard and not without a sense of mystique. And Denver, thorny grindcore legends Spectral Voice make a very rare appearance these days.
Sunday | 06.25 What:JK Flesh w/Terravault, Corpsewhale, CXCXCX, Vox Mnemonic When: 7 Where: Hi-Dive Why: JK Flesh is the pseudonym of Justin K. Broadrick of Godflesh who fresh off performing at the Gothic the night before with the latter will treat an audience at the Hi-Dive to a set of some of his more experimental work in the realm of noise, power electronics, dub and industrial along with some local noise scene luminaries.
Moon Pussy in 2021, photo by Tom Murphy
Tuesday | 06.27 What:Moon Pussy w/Porcelain, Quits and Messiahvore When: 7 Where: Hi-Dive Why: This is probably the noise rock show of the month with Denver-based greats Moon Pussy whose borderline unhinged and visceral live show is always a cathartic experience informed by a surreal sense of humor. Porcelain visits from Austin with its own fusion of atmospheric rock and its noisy cousin. Quits reconciles dissonant art rock with post-hardcore intensity. Messiahvore might otherwise be considered a metal band but a little too weird and disregarding of clear tonal sight lines to be that.
The Head and the Heart, photo by Shervin Lainez
Thursday | 06.29 What: The Head and the Heart w/Rayland Baxter and Sera Cahoone When: 6:30 Where: Red Rocks Why: The Head and the Heart has since its 2009 inception become one of the most popular and creatively vital bands under the umbrella of indie folk. The group came together organically through the open mic nights at Conor Byrne pub in Seattle and not long after its 2011 debut album on Sub Pop became a bit of an instant classic of modern folk rock with “Rivers and Roads” becoming a major hit with fans as a typical concert closer. In 2019 “Honeybee” was a bit ubiquitous and may have given the impression that the band was being marketed beyond its ability to deliver but fortunately the group’s earnest performances and orchestral and ambitious songwriting made it obvious that even that song was not just hype. In 2023 The Head and the Heart announced its inaugural festival Down In The Valley to take place at Oxbow Riverstage in Napa, CA on September 2 and 3 to feature not just its own performances but those of Waxahatchee, Faye Webster, Rayland Baxter, Miya Folick, Dawes, Madison Cunningham, Mitch & The Coal Miners, Shaina Shepherd and Josiah Johnson.
Remember Sports, photo from Bandcamp
Friday | 06.30 What:Remember Sports w/Goon and Dry Ice When: 8 Where: Hi-Dive Why: Remember Sports isn’t the typical pop punk band if it can truly be considered that at all. But it has that scrappy spirit and emotional openness that makes for the best of that genre. But the group uses a drum machine rather than a more traditional musician in the role. Its songs unabashedly incorporate left field sounds in the mix and its vocals sound like a childhood subjected to the likes of a now more obscure alternative pop artist like Jane Jensen and the much more famous Alanis Morissette by Gen X parents but the members of the band took a foundation like that and took it in a different direction. The band’s 2022 EP Leap Day is four tracks of lo-fi bedroom punk experiments of undeniable charm.
Skinny Puppy performs at Fillmore Auditorium on May 3, 2023, photo by Emilie Elizabeth and John Kraw, 2014Ruston Kelly, photo by Alysse Gafkjen
Tuesday | 05.02 What: Ruston Kelly w/Briscoe When: 7 Where: Gothic Theatre Why: Ruston Kelly has never been limited by his association with country and Americana and his 2023 album The Weakness even expands what that music can sound like. His earnest and dynamically expressive vocals seem to come from a deep place in his live performances and in music that can have a hushed, introspective quality, Kelly brings a vulnerable fortitude to songs that could work as chamber pop or a cosmic and existential brand of folk informed by a frank self-examination that has an appeal that transcends genre. Best to catch an artist at a time of having transitioned to music that bursts past previous boundaries and fans of his earlier work would do well to see Kelly on this touring cycle.
Wilder Woods, photo by Darius Fitzgerald
Tuesday | 05.02 What: Wilder Woods w/Abraham Alexander When: 6:30 Where: Bluebird Theater Why: Needtobreathe lead singer Wilder Woods aka Bear Rinehart is now touring in support of his new album FEVER / SKY, a collection of spirited neo soul roots rock that sounds like it could have come from the same music scene that spawned Joe Cocker. It’s an album that sounds like the songwriter is coming to terms with who he is as a man and as an artist reckoning with his past and his purpose in life born of a time of isolation during the early pandemic and its impacts on the life of anyone that depended on the world of live music and its associated cultural and economic infrastructure. But Rinehart goes much further and hits deep places in his soul bared self-examination that are more cathartic than uncomfortable.
Skinny Puppy photo by Emilie Elizabeth and John Kraw, 2014
Wednesday | 05.03 What:Skinny Puppy w/Lead Into Gold When: 7 Where: Fillmore Auditorium Why: Skinny Puppy were pioneers of electronic industrial music when it formed in 1982 out of the Vancouver, BC New Wave scene. Taking new technologies like sequencers and samplers and pushing the potential aesthetics of these new tools, Skinny Puppy had as much in common with hip-hop artists of that time and now as it did with underground and experimental electronic and industrial rock acts. Its themes of alienation, environmental destruction, animal rights and left politics, Skinny Puppy innovated musically and challenging convention in musical form as well as content. When early member Dwayne Goettel passed away in 1995 the band ended for several years even as a recording project before reuniting in 2000 for its first live performance since 1992. Four years later the group’s new album, the pointedly titled The Greater Wrong of the Right, released and Skinny Puppy toured again and has remained an active project since but with composition steeped in sound design and even more keen social commentary. Unfortunately this tour has been announced to be its last and will more than likely include Skinny Puppy’s signature high use of theatrical performances and striking visuals and some of the most well crafted, intellectually stimulating and emotionally engaging electronic music ever made. The bonus is the opening act is Lead Into Gold, the long time project of Paul Barker, former bassist of Ministry.
Jason Isbell and The 400 Unit, photo by Danny Clinch
Wednesday and Thursday | 05.03 and 05.04 What: Jason Isbell and the 400 Unit w/Angel Olsen When: 6 Where: Red Rocks Why: Jason Isbell and the 400 Unit is touring ahead of the June 9, 2023 release of the band’s new album Weathervanes so you’ll get plenty of material from the new record for this show. Isbell has become one of the most acclaimed songwriters of his generation for his vivid, sensitive and imaginative storytelling and delicate vocal style that makes it easy to forget what style of music he’s playing as it engages your emotions with an unexpected immediacy. In that way he’s like Neil Young whose own diverse songwriting and performance draw upon a broad array of methods and aesthetics that nevertheless have a comfortable familiarity. For these two dates Isbell will be joined by another of the modern great songwriters of the current era in Angel Olsen who seems to be able to make retro musical sensibilities seem modern and vibrant.
Nuovo Testamento, photo courtesy the artists
Thursday | 05.04 What:Molchat Doma w/Nuovo Testamento and Mothe When: 7 Where: Ogden Theatre Why: Nuovo Testamento is a Los Angeles-based darkwave band whose sound blurs the line between post-punk, italo disco and synthpop. On its 2022 swing through Denver at the Hi-Dive the group’s performance was like seeing Madonna fronting Depeche Mode but with its own distinctive flavor. Its new album Love Lines is filled with gorgeously produced darkwave dance club hits like the soundtrack to a retrofuturist thriller that has yet to be made. Molchat Doma is the cult post-punk band from Minsk, Belarus whose introspective songs of loneliness and alienation have struck a chord well beyond their homeland. Its of necessity thin production style and minimalist guitar sound has proven massive influential in Russia as well as globally in the realm of post-punk and darkwave.
eHpH in 2023, photo by Tom Murphy
Saturday | 05.06 What:I Ya Toyah w/eHpH, Hex Cassette, DJ Nitrogen When: 9 Where: The Broadway Roxy Why: I Ya Toyah is a Chicago-based artist whose dark electronic music has a kind of European flavor in the production and tonal palette. Like a darkwave/industrial Danielle Dax with elements of noise, ambient and breakcore in the mix. ehpH is the evolving, long time project of Fernando Altonago and Angelo Atencio also of post-punk rock band Plague Garden. The blend of EBM and industrial with punk attitude and social commentary always hits harder than expected and for this show more of the industrial side of their songwriting will be featured. Hex Cassette is a one man EBM/industrial cult leader of furiously energetic dance music and confrontational stage performance whose banter unsettles some but the choice and absurd humor value is undeniable.
Fishbone, photo by Pablo Mathiason
Saturday | 05.06 What:Fishbone w/Frontside Five When: 6 Where: Levitt Pavilion Why: Fishbone has been genre bending and bursting since 1979. Its hybrid style of ska, punk, funk and beyond was like the punk side of Afrofuturism. Its songs always seemed to depict a time in the non-too-distant days to come where people could just be who they are and have the normal struggles of life we all face. All along the way the group’s sharp social commentary was couched in a surreal sense of humor and infectious party anthem grooves that didn’t downplay the issues so much as provide a soundtrack for working through them and shining a light on corners of American society that are often swept under the rug. The group recently released “All We Have Is Now” on the Bottle Music for Broken People compilation on Fat Mike’s new NOFX imprint with founding member Chris Dowd performing on a recording for the first time since 1994 and the song has the same irreverent and fun-loving spirit one would hope for with new Fishbone material.
Zealot in 2022, photo by Tom Murphy
Saturday | 05.06 What:Zealot w/Owosso and Loose Charm When: 8 Where: Hi-Dive Why: Zealot is celebrating the release of its new single “Newer Testament” at the Hi-Dive. Its literate yet spirited music is like if an indie rock band got reconnected with the intensity and musical inventiveness of early 2000s New York City rock with a similar level of imaginative songwriting and aim to make music that isn’t background playlist nonsense but which commands your attention. Owosso is a similarly-minded band comprised of local scene veterans who seem to have rediscovered a knack for crafting pop-inflected post-punk noise rock. If Loose Charm can be considered alt-country or post-rock its because its songs seem to be composed with ear for evocative melody and soundscaping that don’t usually go together unless you’re listening to something like Silver Jews or Wilco though Loose Charm doesn’t really sound like either.
Polly Urethane in 2022, photo by Tom Murphy
Sunday | 05.07 What:Munly & The Lupercalians w/Polly Urethane When: 7:30 Where: Ophelia’s Electric Soapbox Why: Munly & The Lupercalians is like a darkly ritualistic, performance art mystical folk version of what Munly has been doing across his career. One might be tempted to compare it to neofolk but it’s more like a musical cognate to cinematic works like The Wicker Man and Kill List including the stage garb but also tied in with the singer’s baroque and stark poetry. Opening the performance is composer and performance artist Polly Urethane who seems to do a different type of performance and while sometimes combining musical elements and methods of previous performance with her new shows she always seems to push the boundaries of where she’s been before. Could be a weird DJ set, a visually striking performance to pre-recorded music with edgy components in presenting the material or who can say but always worth checking out.
Cobra Man, photo by Danner Gardner
Sunday | 05.07 What: Cobra Man w/Starbenders and Stolen Nova When: 7 Where: Gothic Theatre Why: Cobra Man is a self-styled “power disco” duo comprised of Andy Harry and Sarah Rayne and currently touring in support of its new EP New Paradise which releases on May 19, 2023. The lead single “Thin Ice” has all the bombast and gloriously, unabashedly epic sound of something you might have heard on the soundtrack for a Cannon Pictures action movie from the 1980s. And the live band isn’t just a couple of button pushers basically doing karaoke to well-produced tracks. They’re like a post-irony glam rock band that exults in the grand sweep and sonic excess of its music.
Nox Novacula in 2022, photo by Tom Murphy
Monday | 05.08 What:Nox Novacula, Plague Garden and Weathered Statues When: 7 Where: HQ Why: Nox Novacula is a post-punk band from Seattle in the gritty death rock vein. Its moody guitar is shot through with a wiry energy and urgency that pairs well with impassioned vocals and driving rhythms. Its 2021 album Ascension bears obvious comparisons with Xmal Deutschland but with a more punk edge. Opening the show are two of Denver’s best post-punk outfits. Plague Garden’s music has a more electronic, New Wave-esque foundation with brooding lyrics and fiery, twin guitar work. Weathered Statues is a little more stark but with bright and buoyant vocals.
Ringo Deathstarr, photo from Bandcamp
Tuesday | 05.09 What:Ringo Deathstarr w/Pleasure Venom, Cherished and Bloodsports When: 7 Where: Hi-Dive Why: Ringo Deathstarr is the cult shoegaze band out of Austin, Texas’ seemingly vibrant community for that style of music. Its own particular flavor is ethereal, drifty and transporting in that Slowdive and Lush vein but with its own fuzzily psychedelic sheen. It’s been two years since the group’s self-titled full-length so maybe we’ll get to see some newer material for this stop in Denver. For this trip to the Pacific Northwest, Ringo Deathstarr is joined by Austin noise-rock/art punks Pleasure Venom with local support in Denver from Sonic Youth-esque post-punk band Bloodsports and shoegaze/post-punk greats Cherished.
Death Grips in 2015, photo by Tom Murphy
Tuesday | 05.09 What:Death Grips When: 7 Where: Mission Ballroom Why: Death Grips is the now legendary industrial hip-hop group from Sacramento, California comprised of MC Ride, Andy Morin and Zach Hill. The group has become known for its edgy imagery and its disdain for playing along with music industry expectations and doing so with creativity and deep irreverence. But its well-publicized antics perhaps boosted the group’s cachet while its inventive music spoke for itself with artwork and album and track names that demonstrated a keen awareness of internet culture and American social reality. When the band did perform live it was an incendiary and aggressive affair that has been unforgettable.
Pond, photo by Matsu
Wednesday | 05.10 What:Pixies w/Pond When: 6:30 Where: Mission Ballroom Why: Pond from Perth, Australia has been developing and evolving its cinematic, psychedelic art rock since 2008 and its 2021 album 9 sounds like a series of interconnected short films. There’s a spaciousness and dramatic sense of mood and atmosphere that washes around the core rhythms and melodies as they burst with emotion. Like if Pink Floyd hung out with Hawkwind more and ditched their epic sweeps in favor of their more raw rock instincts but infused it with disco and funk. Australia has become known for its popular psychedelic bands but fortunately for the world they’re all very different from each other and Pond is a band whose creative trajectory has left behind some fine listening. Of course there’s also the headlining band, Pixies, who were a choice cult band in its first iteration from the mid-80s through the early 90s and highly influential for its wonderfully eccentric lyrics and brilliantly unconventional, noisy, eruptively energetic alternative rock. But once a younger generation caught wind of the band through the appearance of “Where Is My Mind?” on the soundtrack of Fight Club it became a much more popular band and able to tour on the strength of its older material and bring its sound, foundational to modern rock music, to a much wider audience.
Spike Hellis in 2022, photo by Tom Murphy
Wednesday | 05.10 What:Spike Hellis w/Candy Apple, Moon 17 and Sell Farm When: 7 Where: Hi-Dive Why: Spike Hellis is basically making the kind of modern EBM and industrial that is informed by punk and even hardcore in its raw energy of delivery. In the live show it’s reminiscent of the kind of hard hitting vibe one might hear in early Nitzer Ebb and Meat Beat Manifesto but with the aesthetics of a modern, glitchcore project but with all the extraneous sonics ripped out but with the bombast left in place. One of the most electrifying live bands in the modern realm of darkwave. Sell Farm has lately been dipping deep into sequencing and sampling to create dystopian, politically charged dub dance post-punk. Candy Apple bridges the gap between a hardcore band and shoegaze-tinged noise rock. Moon 17 is a “Sci-Fi Industrial” band from Kansas City helmed by Zack Hames. The genre seems to fit even if it was dropped as slightly humorous but one hopes Nicolas Winding Refn taps these bands for his next movie soundtrack.
Greg Puciato, photo by Jim Louvau
Wednesday | 05.10 What: Greg Puciato w/Escuela Grind, Deaf Club and Trace Amount When: 6:30 Where: The Marquis Theater Why: Greg Puciato is the former lead singer and lyricist for metalcore legends The Dillinger Escape Plan. Outside of the context of that band, Pusciato has been a member of synthwave band The Black Queen with its deep atmospheric, cinematic sounds akin to something you might expect to hear from the likes of Failure. And in recent years his solo records have been a fusion and evolution of his past work into something that reconciles an aggressive sound and energy with introspective sentiments and electronic aesthetics. The 2022 album Mirrorcell sounds like where metalcore should have gone and might be more favorably compared to a project like Author & Punisher or Blacklist. Opening are some heavy hitters as well with noise rock supergroup Deaf Club with Justin Person of The Locust, Brian Amalfitano of AcxDC, Scott Osment of Weak Flesh, Jason Klein of Run With The Hunted and Tommy Meehan of The Manx. And Escuela Grind, the modern grindcore/powerviolence legends from Pittsfield, Massachusetts who are quickly establishing themselves as a live band to catch whose songs are informed by a “intersectional progressive” revolutionary, inclusive fervor.
Metronymy, photo by Hazel Gaskin
Wednesday | 05.10 What:Metronymy w/Glüme When: 7 Where: Summit Music Hall Why: Metronymy has been constantly evolving its experimental pop sound with an early focus on exquisitely alien techno soundscapes to its more recent albums that demonstrate its finely honed songcraft with organic elements that seem to more directly reflect tender human experiences with a startling poignancy. Its 2019 album Metronymy Forever wasn’t the first hint at a shift in sound and style but it is an album full of the kind of songwriting one might expect on a Wilco record or an album by The National. And the group’s 2022 album Small World is fully in that mode with songs that are vulnerable yet rich in subtle production that clears the space for the lyrics and organic textures of the music to shine making Metronymy a fascinating anomaly in the expanded realm of modern indie rock.
Church Fire, photo by Tom Murphy
Friday | 05.12 What:Church Fire w/Calm., Moon Pussy, Sorrows When: 8 Where: Hi-Dive Why: Church Fire is celebrating the release of its new music video. For what song? Who knows? You’ll have to go to find out and maybe it’ll be released online later. But video or not, Church Fire’s emotionally vibrant industrial dance music is best experienced live without the filters of a purely online experience. Calm. is the hip-hop duo of Time and Awareness who have been putting out some of the most literate and politically charged hip-hop out of the Mile High City in recent years and don’t do many shows at venues like the Hi-Dive or similarly-sized venues these days. And hip-hop in generally isn’t getting a lot of traction at smaller clubs in general but Hi-Dive is an exception to that general rule. Chris “Time” Steele will probably crack wise between songs with genuine wit. Moon Pussy is the getting to be known nationally on the underground circuit noise rock band from Denver whose eruptive music and explosive energy always seems to exceed expectation. SORROWS is a downtempo electronic duo of Glynnis Braan and Lawrence Snell whose dark atmospherics and operatic vocals pull from diverse influences.
Friday | 05.12 What: 7038634357, Verity Larsen, Emilie Craig, sleepdial and Polly Urethane When: 9 Where: Glob Why: 7038634357 seems to be a generative ambient noise artist from Arlington, VA whose releases display a knack for signal processing. Verity Larsen combines musique concrète with prepared environmental recordings and ambient soundscapes to produce sonic experiences that recontextualize everyday experiences. French Kettle Station is performing as sleepdial, his more ambient experiments in electronics and sometimes guitar. Polly Urethan you just never know what to expect from how now broad palette of ideas for performance and music and just be prepared to get to witness something unique and potentially challenging.
Friday | 05.12 What: Frontline Assembly and Whorticulture When: 9 Where: Tracks Why: EBM pioneers Frontline Assembly is performing for this “Bladerunner — A Cyberpunk Party” and providing the perfect soundtrack for such an event with its dystopian lyrics and electronic industrial.
Friday | 05.12 What: Crowded House w/Liam Finn When: 7 Where: Paramount Theatre Why: Australian band Crowded House is perhaps best remembered for its outstanding 1986 hit “Don’t Dream It’s Over” with its spare yet orchestral melody. But Crowded House produced some quality folk pop during its initial run of 1985-1996 and when it has since reunited in the 2000s and 2020s still led by singer/guitarist Neil Finn who had a fairly successful career while Crowded House was split.
White Rose Motor Oil circa 2021, photo courtesy the band
Saturday | 05.13 What:Scott H. Biram w/Garrett T. Capps and White Rose Motor Oil When: 8 Where: Hi-Dive Why: Scott H. Biram is the renowned blues punk musician/solo artist whose troubadour country ballads could seem like pure affectation but he’s done his time in punk and metal and bluegrass in crafting his signature gritty, gospel blues sound. Supporting this bill is the great Denver-based alternative country/outlaw rockabilly band White Rose Motor Oil whose own spare line-up as a duo always seems to punch above its weight in its forcefulness and emotional impact.
Indigo De Souza, photo by Angella Choe
Sunday | 05.14 What: Caroline Polachek w/Alex G and Indigo De Souza When: 7 Where: Mission Ballroom Why: Indigo De Souza’s songs have since early on been an expression of a moody vulnerability cast as deeply atmospheric pop songs that are often pointed but never cruel, simply honest and poetic. Her latest album out on Saddle Creek is 2023’s All of This Will End continues the development of her vibrant songwriting filled with stories that take the pain of lived experience and reflecting on the broad expanse of feelings one goes through in life and sitting in them and finding a way to put them into stories that give them a context that makes them something from which to learn and exult in life rather than be overwhelmed by disappointment, bitterness, petty betrayal (by others and by oneself). And she’s a perfect artist in this line-up of other art pop practitioners of note such as Alex G who has taken conceptual psychedelic rock to fascinating new heights and headliner Caroline Polacek who as a member of Charlift (which was founded in Boulder, Colorado while she was attending CU) made some of the cooler indie rock to have emerged out of that decade that produced the foundations of much of what we hear now. But in her solo career she has emerged as an innovative and experimental artist whose pop songs don’t seem beholden to anyone else’s style bending genres and sounds to suit her creative vision of the moment. For her 2023 album Desire, I Want to Turn Into You you can hear the impact of hyper pop and glitch but as elements and not a root.
Salads and Sunbeams, photo by Tom Murphy
Sunday | 05.14 What: Spooky Mansion w/Sour Magic and Salads and Sunbeams When: 7 Where: Hi-Dive Why: Spooky Mansion is a surf-rock inflected psychedelic lounge pop band from Los Angeles making a couple of stops in Colorado including this date at the Hi-Dive. Denver’s Sour Magic sound like they could have come from a similar musical lineage but with more luminous guitar melodies. Like maybe they got deep into DIIV and Mac Demarco and found their own voice as a band. Salads and Sunbeams is the kind of band that has crafted exquisite psychedelic indiepop that might have come right out of an unlikely scene that included the Zombies and The Apples in Stereo. But it works and doesn’t have that throwback yesteryear worship vibe even if to some extent that’s what it is because the songwriting stands on its own and worthy of its obvious and not so obvious influences.
Wednesday, photo by Zachary Chick
Monday | 05.15 What:Wednesday w/Cryogeyser When: 7 Where: Larimer Lounge Why: Wednesday from Asheville, North Carolina has garnered a bit of a cult following among fans of experimental noise rock and shoegaze and whatever one might call Canadian guitar bands like Women, Preoccupations and FRIGS. But then there’s another side of the band’s sound and that’s the more country flavor of some of its songs, unabashed, borderline cosmic honky tonk stuff. And Wednesday makes it work because it’s obvious the group is fully steeped in both creative instincts and its records are a journey for which a variety of sounds make sense. In particular its 2023 record Rat Saw God and its vivid stories of life in the American South told with great nuance, insight and poignancy. At times the songs can take you by surprise with an offhand lyric that’s so real but delivered with the nonchalance that makes it palatable and it all feeds into what’s making Wednesday one of the most fascinating bands of this moment.
Monday | 05.15 What:Yves Tumor w/Pretty Slick and NATION When: 7 Where: Ogden Theatre Why: Yves Tumor is an artist whose genre-bending art rock/hip-hop/electronic dance music/funk seems tapped into a raw, otherworldly energy that is a reflection of the anxieties and nightmares of the world we experience everyday. The 2023 album Praise A Lord Who Chews But Which Does Not Consume; (Or Simply, Hot Between Worlds) is more overtly rock than earlier albums but still like an alien glam rock that feels ahead of the curve. Live, Yves Tumor is a commanding figure with a lot of swagger and electrifying presence.
Narrow Head, photo by Nate Kahn
Monday | 05.15 What:Narrow Head w/Graham Hunt, Public Opinion and Flower Language When: 8 Where: Hi-Dive Why: Houston’s Narrow Head much like Phoenix’s Holy Fawn probably come from a general realm of local scene music but whereas Holy Fawn has transcended black metal into more the realm of a post-rock shoegaze, Narrow Head may have found its origins in a music scene that had or has fine examples of the resurgence of hardcore and emo in the compelling form that emerged all over the country in the past decade. But the band as we hear it on its new album Moments of Clarity is the kind of heavy shoegaze with dynamics like blossoming melodies and soaring vocals that seem to harmonize with the ethereal fuzz and dense low end to give the songs an undeniable uplift.
Tim Hecker in 2019, photo by Tom Murphy
Tuesday | 05.16 What: Tim Hecker When: 7 Where: Boulder Theater Why: Can’t really blame Tim Hecker for expressing in his recent interview in the New York Times his misgivings for having helped to popularize ambient music since it has become such a workhorse of the bland playlist culture of Spotify. Who wants to be handmaiden to that? But to Hecker’s credit he’s always been an artist who has explored new vistas of the art form in terms of form, structure, sound palette, presentation and instrumentation. His new album No Highs is imbued with a textural, intimate quality that feels very much of the body as his music does in the live setting rather than the offensively bland and background quality of generic playlist ambient.
Mr. Bungle, photo courtesy Buzz Osborne
Tuesday | 05.16 What:Mr. Bungle w/Melvins and Spotlights When: 7 Where: Mission Ballroom Why: No matter where you check in on the Mr. Bungle timeline you will find boundary-pushing music that bends and breaks genres from the early death metal-surrealism to the lush and theatrical art rock of its late 90s output. Currently the band is touring with a lineup that includes Mike Patton, Trey Spruance, Trevor Dunn, Scott Ian and Dave Lombardo so who can say what the setlist will sound like whether its more baroque pop stuff or the material from its recently reissued 1986 demo The Raging Wrath of the Easter Bunny. Whatever it might be, the show will be bombastic and mind-expanding. Bonus: Melvins, the sludge rock legends, will bring their always riveting and cathartic performance of its own music that spans various ends of heavy rock with a hard hitting finesse.
Tuesday | 05.16 What: Hoodoo Gurus When: 7 Where: Bluebird Theater Why: Hoodoo Gurus are the legendary Australian garage rock band that was an influence on generations of bands that have been keyed into its particular brand of jangle psychedelia and punk. Currently the band is touring in support of its 2022 album Chariot of the Gods.
Future Islands in 2021, photo by Tom Murphy
Wednesday | 05.17 What:Future Islands w/Deeper When: 7 Where: Mission Ballroom Why: Future Islands has come a long way from playing DIY spaces in Denver to Red Rocks and now headlining Mission Ballroom. But what hasn’t changed is its emotionally gripping synth pop and impassioned live performances. For this night Chicago’s arty post-punk band Deeper will bring its darkly atmospheric and poignant music to the proceedings.
Sparta, photo courtesy the artists
Thursday | 05.18 What:Sparta w/’68 and Geoff Rickly When: 6 Where: Bluebird Theater Why: The 2002 album Wiretap Scars is where Sparta picked up where At The Drive-In, singer Jim Ward’s then most recently prominent band, left off. The angular, Fugazi-esque, anthemic songs that astutely commented on the times without being so topical as to age poorly in the years ahead. Rather, Wiretap Scars today seems perhaps even more relevant than it did when America was in a state of confusion and nascent authoritarianism and misplaced nationalistic patriotism was starting to settle into the swing of public life. There is a passionate coherence of productive outrage on the record and based on the group’s 2022 tour Sparta will deliver on that messaging on this tour as well.
Thursday | 05.18 What: The Mssng w/To Be Astronauts and Tiny Humans When: 7 Where: Hi-Dive Why: The Mssng is a band whose hybrid of styles sometimes comes off like people who were inspired by the agglomeration of 90s alternative rock, post-punk revival and the glam rock end of modern garage rock. To Be Astronauts has generally been sort of a 90s throwback, alternative hard rock band who displayed all the stylistic fingerprints of 2000s stoner rock but with more melody. Lately some of the band’s recordings have included versions of songs, live and otherwise, that reveal that if you strip away some of those hard rock instincts you find a band that has some solid songwriting with nothing to prove. Sure, it’s a bit like a better version of the kind of acoustic and electric alt-rock you might have heard from the likes of Counting Crows which isn’t for everyone but respectable nonetheless. Tiny Humans, what can you say, except that the singer has to stop being carted on stage in a wheelchair and in hospital robes and pretending like he’s doing a Nirvana tribute band when it’s more obvious it’s a strange attempt to fully emulate The Amboy Dukes’ guitarist’s entire solo career. But hey, who doesn’t appreciate such fetishistic performance art?
Friday | 05.19 What:Vast Aire (Cannibal Ox) w/Gee Tee and guests When: 9 Where: Bar Red 437 W. Colfax Why: Vast Aire is the charismatic and enigmatic rapper who is perhaps best known for his work with alternative hip-hop group Cannibal Ox. His forceful delivery and vivid, socially conscious storytelling once encountered sticks with you because his various collaborators like El-P on the 2001 classic album The Cold Vein are able to create a darkly haunting soundscape from which his voice stands out like an urban mystic and mythological poet.
MUNA, photo by Isaac Schneider
Friday | 05.19 What:MUNA w/Nova Twins When: 7 Where: Mission Ballroom Why: Given that the members of MUNA all have academic backgrounds in music or cultural studies one might expect the music to be something more cerebral or conceptual. And initially when developing their own material the trio of Katie Gavin, Josette Maskin and Naomi McPherson experimented with sounds and styles before coming upon exuberant pop songs with earworm hooks and lyrics that are sure about instantly relatable subjects of love and relationships but also with a sensitivity toward issues of identity beyond the usual tropes and which resonate broadly. The group released its 2022 self-titled album to critical acclaim and now MUNA is on a headlining tour of large concert halls with a supporting slot on the upcoming Taylor Swift tour where an appreciative audience for its particularly expansive and upbeat songs will be found.
Friday | 05.19 What: Shady Oaks w/Weary Bones, Fern Roberts and The Picture Tour When: 7 Where: Lost Lake Why: Shady Oaks is a mix of blues and indie rock and Americana. Weary Bones is a bit of an Americana jam band from Louisville, Colorado but more in the vein of Widespread Panic where there are coherent songs that have resonance beyond the genre. It released its latest album Humble Echoes in 2023. Fern Roberts might be described as an indie rock band that seems to be equally influenced by Bright Eyes, 90s alternative rock and the more pop end of Built to Spill. The main reason to go to this show is to see the live debut of former Emerald Siam guitarist Billy Armijo’s band The Picture Tour. Its 2022 album Before the Sound, Before the Light was an audacious debut of introspective, gloomy shoegaze with an ear for interweaving atmospheres and feedback sculpting to produce unique melodies and an enveloping sound.
Fruit Bats, photo by Chantal Anderson
Friday | 05.19 What:Fruit Bats w/Kolumbo When: 7 Where: Ogden Theatre Why: The new Fruit Bats album A River Running To Your Heart seems assembled and composed as a cinematic experience as much as one more musical. When the record gets up and going its intricate guitar arrangements flow with a grace and elegance that one normally hears more in music that operates at a slower pace and yet for this set of songs Eric D. Johnson and the band never sound rushed. The music is just focused even in reflective passages and there is an energy to the music that pulls you in. Fans of early The War on Drugs will hear some resonance here but Johnson’s songs seem to reign in the impulse to psychedelic self-indulgence and one gets the sense that as free as the music feels that it’s been crafted to edit out excesses that don’t contribute to one of the most consistently enchanting pop albums of the year.
Placebo, photo by Mads Perch
Saturday | 05.20 What:Placebo w/Deap Valley and Poppy Jean Crawford – canceled When: 7 Where: Fillmore Auditorium Why: Placebo emerged at a time in the mid-1990s when the alternative rock wave was basically spent and a lot of really dull, beige rock and roll and uninspired pop was peddled as exciting. Placebo offered something that seemed to reinvent the edginess of the darker end of grunge with a more glam rock sense of theater and drama. Its early albums dipped into rock and dance music equally before it became even more of a thing at the turn of the century and in a fashion different than had been done by the likes of New Order, Primal Scream and their storied ilk. Its 1998 album Without You I’m Nothing and its promotional videos revealed a band that seemed to have embraced Goth-like personal darkness in musical style and outward presentation. That the band appeared in Velvet Goldmine, Todd Haynes’ 1998 glam rock fictional biopic of David Bowie and Iggy Pop and that early 1970s era didn’t hurt in establishing Placebo’s cred as a band that embodied the emerging new alternative culture. The band’s 2022 album Never Let Me Go, perhaps a reference to Kazuo Ishiguro’s 2005 tragic novel of of the same name as well as the 2010 film, its first in 9 years has Placebo pushing its own boundaries beyond where it has been before as a band with an unabashed use of saturated synth melodies and a much more creative use of processed guitar in rock music than we’ve heard in awhile. And if you’re going to have an opening acts like mutant garage psych duo Deap Valley and experimental pop/singer-songwriter Poppy Jean Crawford that just hints that someone in your camp has been listening for something different and actually cool which isn’t always the case in the music industry even on accident.
Fenne Lily, photo by Michael Tyrone Delaney
Saturday | 05.20 What: Fenne Lily & Christian Lee Hutson w/Anna Tivel When: 8 Where: The Bluebird Theater Why: The intimate production on Fenne Lily’s new album Big Picture puts her expressive and breathy vocals front and center without pushing the delicate, almost impressionistic, warm and layered guitar work into the background. The songwriter sounds resigned on these set of songs but that seems to come more out of a sense of having to come to terms with how you can never really get too complacent in life nor do you want to and that sometimes getting to used to comfort can be a path antithetical to personal growth but also how feeling like you’re always having to fend off life’s static and unpredictably intermittent challenges can be kind of a bummer even if you’re able to brush them off and move forward. Lily sounds like she understands and has some deep empathy for how in recent years everyday challenges have seemed like a bit much and how that pace isn’t exactly relenting yet we do have to maintain a core of some grace to weather this steady stream of a whole lot of everything. Big Picture, the title alone, points to how stepping back in the moment can give you the pause you need to keep things in perspective even if you have a moment or ten.
Shania Twain, photo courtesy the artist
Sunday | 05.21 What:Shania Twain w/Hailey Whitters When: 6:30 Where: Ball Arena Why: Shania Twain needs no introduction. The “Queen of Country Pop” is one of the best selling artists of all time. Certainly in the realm of country and pop music of the last 30 years. Normally in this show listing these kinds of artists don’t make the cut because they’re just too mainstream and not creatively interesting. But Twain was a pioneer in pushing country music into the realm of pop. She and Garth Brooks, whether you’re into their music or not, paved the way for people like Taylor Swift and Carrie Underwood to find an audience beyond the niche of country. Twain’s humor and charisma made her songs appealing beyond genre and continue to do so. In 2023 Twain released her new album Queen of Me which features current production techniques (even some elements of hyper pop) one might expect to hear on the record of a newer artist but of course the draw is her commanding voice and ability to articulate a range of feelings that seem to capture timeless experiences in new ways that fortunately hint that Twain is keenly aware of not only her place as a country artist that has always embraced new sounds but as one who has also been trying on new ways of having her songs hit with fresh sounds and songwriting that doesn’t sound like she’s stuck in the past.
Sunday | 05.21 What:Violent Femmes w/Jesse Ahern When: 5 Where: Levitt Pavillion Why: Violent Femmes will perform its 1983 self-titled debut album in its entirety for this show. That record was a staple of alternative rock radio and college dorms for decades. Its weird blend of folk, punk, jazz and outsider pop had an undeniable, immediate and enduring appeal with classics like “Blister in the Sun,” “Add It Up” and “Gone Daddy Gone” but the whole record beginning to end is a journey into the essence of youthful angst and frustrations but expressed in a way that somehow remained relevant well beyond anyone’s teen years. The Femmes remain a force in the live setting and always surprisingly powerful yet fun.
Arts Fishing Club, photo courtesy the artists
Tuesday | 05.23 What:Arts Fishing Club w/Homes at Night When: 7 Where: Globe Hall Why: Arts Fishing Club is an indie rock band from Nashville that formed in 2016. Singer/guitarist Christopher Kessenich grew up seeing live music with his father and older brothers witnessing a mix of alternative music, classic rock and jam bands all of which fed into his own eclectic songwriting. The band’s debut album Rothko Sky (due out June 16, 2023) is arranged as a kind of personal journey of a person who in the first half of the record sets out in life idealistic and open to everything only to find out that all of us have limitations both human and of our own unique psychology. On the album’s second half there is a reflection on the nature and impact of love, sex and pain and how that can shape who we are once the shine and novelty of new experiences evolves into appreciating the breadth and depth of life. The songs have a bluesy grit and an often impassioned delivery informed by the flow of its narrative element for a record that sounds like it had to be made by a band a few releases into its career once it has figured out who it is and what it wants to say with intention but with the exuberance of a new band intact. Listen to our interview with Kessenich on the Queen City Sounds Podcast on Bandcamp.
My Life With the Thrill Kill Kult in 2012, photo by Tom Murphy
Monday | 05.22 What:My Life With the Thrill Kill Kult w/ADULT. and KANGA When: 6:30 Where: Oriental Theater Why: My Life With The Thrill Kill Kult is currently touring celebrating its 36 years as a band with a set list that focuses on the group’s first decade. The band’s campy, industrial disco sleaze has always demonstrated a more fun and lighthearted side of industrial culture while offering a distinctive visual and musical style in its bombastic live shows. By the time Thrill Kill Kult appeared in The Crow (1994), the band had already been staples of the more underground end of alternative rock write large but its performance in the film was the perfect embodiment of the aesthetics of the movie. ADULT. is the great industrial post-punk duo from Detroit whose music of the past few years has really been the musical reflection of the conflicted and dystopian times we’ve been going through with a world on the brink of domination by authoritarian regimes and the already unfolding disastrous consequences of climate change with little to no vision and action by world leaders. ADULT.’s music is an act of human solidarity and a catharsis of ambient despair. KANGA is a Los Angeles-based producer whose dusky pop music is darkwave adjacent but also adjacent to a more dance beat infused chillwave and vaporwave with sultry vocals. It might be more apt to compare KANGA to the likes of Charli XCX and Jessie Ware than an artist out of the Goth world.
Martin Dupont, photo from Bandcamp
Tuesday | 05.23 What:Martin Dupont w/Julian St. Nightmare and French Kettle Station and Kill You Club DJs When: 7 Where: Hi-Dive Why: Legendary French New Wave band Martin Dupont, formed in 1982, is playing few shows on this tour through the US and one of those stops is in Denver. The group has a new album out called Kintsugi that with its sweeping synths and darkly melancholic melodies seems to have arrived in time for the current era of appreciation for its particular style of cold wave pop/minimal synth and marking its first album in 36 years. French Kettle Station might be described as a hybrid New Age/glitch/post-Cloud rap/abstract post-rock artist whose stage antics involve some impressive dance moves and prodigious energy. Julian St. Nightmare is one of the best post-punk bands from Denver at the moment whose songs seem to have emerged out of its members having gone through phases of playing garage and psychedelic rock and surf but come through with some strong songwriting skills and the ability to craft moody yet powerful songs that don’t sound like the cookie cutter version of modern darkwave.
Y La Bamba, photo by Jenn Carillo
Tuesday | 05.23 What:Y La Bamba w/Ritmo Cascabel When: 7 Where: Bluebird Theater Why: Ya La Bamba is currently touring in support of its new record Lucha which in its typically exploratory fashion employs folk music of various traditions and an experimental soundscaping aesthetic that allows for a rich expression of themes and the sounds that serve to anchor them in your mind. The album is one about various identities and how they overlap and how we can come to embrace them as a coherent and intermingled part of our existence no matter what those categories might be of gender, sexuality, culture and individual psychology. It’s a gentle record but one that runs deep into the aforementioned subjects and through that more vulnerable approach that encourages patience with self and others is able to more successfully enter into the more tender realms of the heart and mind and comment with an intuitive insight. The psychedelic folk of these songs are ambitious in scope and imagination and the live band always seems to truly render the songs into a vibrant and moving form.
Mareux, photo by Nedda Afsari
Friday | 05.26 What:Mareux w/Cold Gawd When: 7 Where: Marquis Theater Why: Mareux established his cult following as a darkwave artist with singles and EPs over the past few years. What set him apart from some of his peers though are his deeply lush and detailed production with rich low end, his dusky and soulful vocals and his poetic tales of romantic yearning like something out of late night cafe reminiscing about heartbreak and lost loves. Currently the producer/singer/songwriter is touring in support of his debut full-length Lovers From the Past, a record that reveals a dimensionality to Mareux’s gift for conveying sonic depth and emotional nuance. Opening is the Cold Gawd whose 2022 album God Get Me the Fuck Out of Here was one of the records of choice to connoisseurs of shoegaze and music that pushes the boundaries of established styles. With R&B beats and granular guitar melodies in densely expressive layers, Cold Gawd is helping to reshape what both forms of music have to sound like and whether there has to be a separation.
Hot Chip, photo by Matilda Hill-Jenkins
Friday | 05.26 What: Chromeo and Hot Chip w/Coco & Breezy and Cimafunk When: 5 Where: Red Rocks Why: Canadian electro-funk duo Chromeo seems to regularly tour with its bombastic and visually arresting live show and always with an innovative opening act or two along for the ride. For this outing at Red Rocks you will get to see Hot Chip. The UK band came to prominence in the early 2000s for its innovative fusion of synthpop and dance music that sounds like a successor to the kinds of sounds we heard out of Madchester, the Balearic Beat, disco and neo soul. Hot Chip always seems to have a keen ear for use of space in its compositions and how that can have a very powerful emotional resonance that goes beyond the mere us of dazzling, atmospheric melodies and strong beats. Its latest album is 2022’s Freakout/Release which found the band leaning heavy into its alternative pop sound with some nice experimental moments reminiscent of Kraftwerk and perhaps contemporaries it influenced like Cut Copy. It might be the group’s most full-realized album in its long career.
Ganser, photo from Bandcamp
Friday | 05.26 What:Ganser w/Antibroth and The Red Scare When: 8 Where: Hi-Dive Why: Chicago’s Ganser is probably well within the realm of post-punk but artier and with a more interesting palette of sounds upon which it draws. In moments like noise rock math rock psychedelic weirdos with angular flow but with an ear for sculpting the collective soundscape it creates. In this way the band has more in common with other Chicago weirdo post-punk bands like Facs or Dehd or beyond the Windy City and akin to bands like Studded Left, Body Double, Dry Cleaning, Lithics or FRIGS. Whatever the exact nature of Ganser might be for anyone into more experimental post-punk that isn’t being defined by a trendy sound. Opening are confrontational, mathy post-punk band Antibroth and the more noise rock The Red Scare.
Suzanne Ciani, photo by Katja Ruge
Saturday | 05.27 What:Suzanne Ciani w/Colloboh When: 7 Where: Central Presbyterian Church Why: Synth pioneer Suzanne Ciani is doing a rare performance in Denver this night with quadraphonic sound and a projection-mapped light show. Ciani’s long career has seen her work appear in film, television and commercials as music and sound effects and her 1980s and beyond New Age albums have been nominated for a Grammy five times. Her contributions to sound design and music has been a part of popular culture in ways both subtle and overt and her unique achievements as a composer in league with the likes of Morton Subotnick, Wendy Carlos, Laurie Spiegel, Pauline Oliveros and Delia Derbyshire. Don’t sleep on these shows. You may never get another chance to see Ciani live.
Nerver, photo from Bandcamp
Saturday | 05.27 What:Nerver, Almanac Man and Edith Pike When: 8 Where: Hi-Dive Why: Nerver from Kansas City is a rising noise rock band in the vein of the kinds of artists you’d hear from Amphetamine Reptile and Touch and Go. It’s 2022 album CASH was a brutal yet haunting selection of songs that are somehow both melancholic and introspective yet fiery in their cathartic moments. In 2023 Nerver released a split with noise rock legends Chat Pile called BROTHERS IN CHRIST. Edith Pike’s self-titled EP from 2022 may have been pretty lo-fi but you can hear the kind of screamo-noise rock crossover sound that may have its roots in hardcore but has evolved beyond the predictable version of that music. Almanac Man also from Denver has the kind of gristly noise rock that’s feral like Neurosis but with a post-punk angularity that gives its music a vibe like Shellac if Steve Albini had come up in the music world he helped to influence.
Meet the Giant in 2022, photo by Tom Murphy
Saturday | 05.27 What:Meet the Giant album release w/Church Fire and The Mssng When: 8 Where: Enigma Bazaar Why: Meet the Giant is releasing its new album We Are Revolting. The group’s 2018 self-titled debut was the product of several years of woodshedding musical ideas and songs as well as production and its gritty mix of rock and downtempo with emotionally stirring vocals reflected with the then emergent live band. This time around the trio appears to have focused on an even sonically edgier catharsis with songs that express an anger born of frustration and weariness at the political and cultural situation in which we find ourselves in America and really worldwide. As touchstones one might point to the likes of Failure and its own fusion of rock and electronic sensibilities and a sheen of the cinematic. Or Nine Inch Nails in even further implementing sound design elements in the mix. But Meet the Giant’s songs tend to be more melodic and its sound having more in common with a modern shoegaze band with a bit more rock and roll kick to its songwriting. Church Fire is also on the bill bringing its own reinvented amalgam of political, electronic industrial dance music and are rock touches.
Sarah Shook and the Disarmers, photo by Harvey Robinson
Sunday | 05.28 What:Sarah Shook and the Disarmers w/Porlolo and Wheelright When: 7 Where: Hi-Dive Why: Outlaw country, country-punk, whatever designation fits Sarah Shook and the Disarmers, Sarah Shook is one of the most distinctive voices in modern country music on the still fairly underground level where a great deal of the best of that and other musical styles are found. Shook’s voice has enough of a rough edge to be interesting but their melodic resonance serves well stories of every day life written in a way that seems so specific yet relatable in spirit and substance. Speaking of, Pololo is more an indie rock band but Erin Roberts has a gift for turning a sense of humor into music with a sharply observational and existential bent.
Yob, photo courtesy the artists
Sunday | 05.28 What:Yob w/Cave In and Dreadnought When: 7 Where: Gothic Theatre Why: Yob is an influential doom band that began in 2000 before splitting in 2006 and reconvening in 2008. Its sound is definitely in that realm of mining what Black Sabbath, Saint Vitus, Sleep and Earth had done before but seeing Yob live it seems obvious that Mike Scheidt is injecting a sense of fun into the music and its flows of heavy rock is tinged with psychedelia. This coming year the group is re-issuing its debut album Elaborations of Carbon so perhaps the set list will favor that record but either way, Yob is a fun live band that makes music that is both cosmic and deeply human. Cave In is the influential post-hardcore, foundational metalcore band from Massachusetts. Dreadnought is the doom band from Denver whose rhythmic style has a tribal sensibility and whose overall sound is more atmospheric, psychedelic and more rooted in dark folk than many of its heavy music peers.
Djunah, photo from Bandcamp
Monday | 05.29 What:Djunah w/Moon Pussy and Limbwrecker When: 7 Where: Hi-Dive Why: Chicago’s Djunah is a noise rock band of the kind that fans of the jarring and cathartic music of HIDE and Diamanda Galás might find much to their liking. Fronted by guitarist/singer/Moog bass player Donna Diane, Djunah recently released its new album Femina Furens. The heaviness of the music doesn’t just come from its gloriously clashing dynamics and instrumentation, it’s, per Djunah’s Bandcamp page, “the story of diagnosis and continuing recovery from complex post-traumatic stress disorder, or C-PTSD. The album’s title comes from the Latin for ‘furious woman.’ The artwork is inspired by representations of the divine feminine in 1970s sci-fi metal art.” Touchstones on a quick listen would have to include Chelsea Wolfe, Patti Smith and Nick Cave for the exuberantly unleashed emotional energy present within. Who better to open than Denver’s Moon Pussy whose own eruptive noise rock while often accompanied by an eccentric sense of humor between songs has a similarly elemental energy that releases personal darkness, pain and frustrations in built and rapidly uncoiled tensions. Limbwrecker has a similar aesthetic though from a place that seems more steeped in a foundation of hardcore and extreme metal.
James Murphy of LCD Soundsystem, photo by Ruvan Wijesooriya
Monday and Tuesday | 05.29 and 05.30 What: LCD Soundsystem w/M.I.A. and Peaches When: 6 Where: Red Rocks Why: LCD Soundsystem is the band started by James Murphy of DFA Records as a vehicle for his experiments in blending indie rock and electronic dance music. Though often associated with “dance punk,” LCD Soundsystem is much more wide-ranging than that designator would suggest with innovative production and a highly experimental approach to songwriting format and style beginning with the early single “I’m Losing My Edge” to its newer material like “New Body Rhumba” from the soundtrack to Noah Baumbach’s 2022 film White Noise based on Don DeLillo’s 1985 novel of the same name. Perhaps just as noteworthy for this show are the opening artists. Sure, irreverent and theatrical electroclash pioneer Peaches was in Denver recently with a powerful and entertaining show at the Summit Music Hall but rapper M.I.A., who learned how to make her own music from Peaches, hasn’t played in this area since her most recent national tour in 2008 at the Fillmore Auditorium, and her own music and performances are informed by her fusion of hip-hop, experimental electronic dance music, non-Western musical styles and an activist bent that challenges human rights abuse and imperialism.
Helloween, photo by Martin Häusler
Tuesday | 05.30 What:Helloween w/Hammerfall When: 6 Where: Ogden Theatre Why: Helloween is the influential power metal band from Hamburg, Germany. Since 1984 released a string of albums that have often featured concepts and storytelling commenting on the human condition in both personal, emotive narratives and paralleling historical references with current events and commenting on recurring themes of human civilization and the impact of culture and those in power on the lives of people within and without a particular country. The iconography of the pumpkin has been part of the group’s artwork since early on and infuses the often weighty subject matter of the songwriting with a touch of humor and humanity. In 2016 older Helloween lead vocalists Michael Kiske and Kai Hansen rejoined along with long time singer Andi Deris for the kind of sound not many groups in metal have ever had in one band. In May 2023 the group was slated for induction into the Metal Hall of Fame. In the coming days look for our audio interview with guitarist Sascha Gerstner on the Queen City Sounds Podcast series.
Ryan Oakes, photo courtesy the artist
Tuesday | 05.30 What:Ryan Oakes w/Layto and Cherie Amour When: 7 Where: Globe Hall Why: Ryan Oakes released his new album WAKE UP on May 12, 2023. The album makes good on the rapper’s experiments in genre bending and blending. The subject matter is about personal struggle, mental health difficulties and overcoming adversity but the attitude and delivery is punk set to trap beats and production for a sound that could be a complete disaster but works because the words are raw and real and the music hitting with an exhilarating immediacy. Somehow Oakes takes the anthemic quality of modern post-hardcore emo and a dazzling parade of current cultural references to tell stories of striving and struggling in an era of amplified anxiety and pressure to succeed despite human limitations and vulnerabilities. Oakes doesn’t bother not tapping into hyper pop’s sonic surrealism and industrial hip-hop as well as the aforementioned styles to create a compelling sound of his own.
Drain, photo by Christian Castillo
Tuesday | 05.30 What:Drain w/Drug Church, MSPAINT and TORENA When: 7 Where: The Marquis Theater Why: Drain is a melodic hardcore trio from Santa Cruz, California that recently released its new album Living Proof. Drug Church hails from the opposite end of the country in Albany, NY but its own style of hardcore is also not short on melody but its style is one with some roots in pop punk or the modern, better, version that emerged in the early 2010s. But the real reason to go to this show is to see MSPAINT from Hattiesburg, Mississippi whose debut full length Post-American release came out on Convulse Records. Clearly the band came out of the punk/hardcore scene but it’s synth-driven art punk is stranger and more colorful than a lot of what else is on offer for this night but delivered with the same level of intense energy and outpouring of passion. One might compare the band to Milemarker and The VSS but it’s really its own, unique flavor of challenging-to-classify punk.
Chella and the Charm in 2022, photo by Tom Murphy
Wednesday | 05.31 What:Chris King & The Gutterballs w/Chella and The Charm and Silver Triplets When: 7 Where: Hi-Dive Why: Chris King & The Gutterballs is a band from Seattle whose flavor of Americana has more in common with CCR than the more modern country folk strain though that’s in the mix too. Chella and The Charm has for the past decade or so provided the kind of Americana that is an urban soundtrack to contemplating life and the sorts of issues and thoughts and feelings that drive an authentic existence and performed with the earthy energy of a rock and roll band. But even within that you can hear the irreverent humor and sharp social commentary and observations on human behavior with affection and insight.
Wednesday | 05.31 What:Ultra Bomb w/Black Dots, The Black Gloves and Shiverz When: 7 Where: HQ Why: Ultrabomb is a punk supergroup featuring Greg Norton of Hüsker Dü, Jamie Oliver of UK Subs and Finny McConnell of The Mahones. The music that’s been available appears to be a particularly vibrant style of power pop and fantastic vocal melodies that one might expect from a group of such punk luminaries.
Buck Gooter is a “Ghost-motivated electronic rock” band from Harrisonburg, Virginia originally consisting of the duo of Terry Turtle and Billy Brett. Across many releases starting in 2006, Buck Gooter has charted a unique creative vision from the music to the artwork and performance style. At times a self-styled “industrial blues” group Turtle and Brett infused their highly political and insightful songs with an electrifying intensity and layered aesthetics fusing the avant-garde with the immediately accessible. Like a punk band that got into arthouse films and drew more inspiration from the likes of The Screamers, Butthole Surfers and Chrome than the usual suspects. Turtle tragically passed away on November 20, 2019 but left the legacy of the band to Brett who has continued Buck Gooter and releasing albums to which Turtle contributed posthumously including 2021’s Head In A Bird Cage and the new album Ghost Brain which includes samples of Turtle’s vocals and music with contributions from Oliver Ackermann of A Place to Bury Strangers who recorded, mixed and mastered the record at Death By Audio in Queens, NY. It represents but the end of a chapter in the life of the band and a new beginning.
Listen to our interview with Billy Brett of Buck Gooter on Bandcamp and see the band on tour in the USA now including on Friday, April 14, 2023 at Glob in Denver with Polly Urethane, Nightshark and Pythian Whispers, show at 9, $10. The tour itinerary below following the Denver show.
4/15/23 – Albany, CA @ Ivy Room 4/16/23 – San Francisco, CA @ Thrillhouse 4/18/23 – San Pedro, CA @ The Sardine 4/19/23 – Los Angeles, CA @ Permanent Records Roadhouse 4/21/23 – Phoenix, AZ @ The Lost Leaf 4/22/23 – Miami, AZ @ Miami Loco Arts Festival
Queen City Sounds and Art 
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