Rum for Breakfast’s “Shoot You Down” has some jangle and some psychedelia with a tinge of that idiosyncratic/eclectic folk rock of early Beck. Able yet unusual vocal harmonies, electric and acoustic instrumentation and a “Gimme Shelter”-esque dynamic apex. Which makes the video all the more mysterious with a character wearing a full head mask that could be a dog with no eyes. And that would be strange enough but the quality of the video is reminiscent of one of the segments of the V/H/S horror anthology series. Except this one like a horror short done by by Duplass Brothers Productions—odd but not inherently dark though suggestive of a serial killer’s video diary but one with more a surreal sense of humor than nefarious intentions. It could be disturbing but paired with the song’s charming melody it seems simply eccentric and we could certainly use more of that in a world where standardization and conformity is strongly encouraged. Watch the video and judge for yourself and follow Rum for Breakfast at the links below.
What:Deerhunter w/Moon Diagrams When: Thursday, 07.11, 7 p.m. Where: Ogden Theatre Why: Deerhunter’s main contribution to modern rock music is fusing a garage punk energy and sensibility with a knack for otherworldly melodies and a gift for soundscaping straight from the realm of dreams. Oh, and a genuinely emotional intensity that comes from a deep place of alienation and, paradoxically, yearning for connection. Why Hasn’t Everything Already Disappeared? is the group’s 2019 album and a commentary on the seemingly broken world (politically, economically, socially, culturally) we find ourselves in at the moment.
Friday | July 12
Versing, photo by Gordon De Los Santos
What:Froth w/Versing and Shark Dreams When: Friday, 07.12, 8 p.m. Where: Globe Hall Why: Versing’s 2019 record on Sub Pop 10000 is a pointed take on an unwillingness to commit to being on the right side of history at a time when the twin forces of oligarchy and fascism are on the rise and infiltrating and coming to political ascendancy worldwide. Its angular dynamics surge forth with great momentum while remaining tunefully melodic. Froth is a fuzzy psychedelic band whose vocals seem more soulful than bratty and that makes all the difference.
What:The Blasters, Supersuckers and Wayne The Train Hancock and MC Clownvis Presley When: Friday, 07.12, 8 p.m. Where: Bluebird Theater Why: The Blasters are legends of southern California rock whose mix of Americana, rockabilly, R&B and blues effected with impressive musical chops and raw passion made the group respected in circles much wider than the image of a blues rock band might now. Supersuckers moved from from Tucson, Arizona to Seattle in 1989, a year after forming, and became immersed in the then burgeoning alternative rock world but like other significant bands of the era like Love Battery and Gas Huffer never really got big but put on lively performances and produced good records. Not really grunge so much as garage rock and in the past couple of decades they’ve been known to do some more country-oriented shows. Seeing as they’re sharing the bill with The Blasters that is a distinct possibility.
What:Hi-Dive Hug Down: Panther Martin, Super Bummer, Jobless, Night Champ When: Friday, 07.12, 8 p.m. Where: Hi-Dive Why: Group Hug is putting out albums by some of Denver’s best lo-fi indie rock bands and this is a showcase for some of the best of the lot. None of them are much alike and all experimented with a more popular style earlier in their lives as bands but are now making truly interesting music.
What:Patriarchy in Retrograde at Mercury Café: R A R E B Y R D $, Lady of Sorrows, Bonnie Weimer When: Friday, 07.12, 8 p.m. Where: Mercury Café Why: Celebrating the inevitable end of the patriarchy you can catch some of Denver’s most innovative female musicians including transcendental hip-hop group R A R E B Y R D $, operatic, beat-driven darkwave ambient artist Lady of Sorrows and the avant-folk of Bonnie Weimer.
What:Esmé Patterson w/FELIX FAST4WARD When: Saturday, 07.13, 7 p.m. Where: Dazzle Why: Esmé Patterson may have made her name as a songwriter in the more Americana vein with her old band Paper Bird. But as a solo artist she has pushed herself in increasingly interesting directions both sonically and creatively. And as a performer, for that matter, all while making poignant social and personal commentary. She is headlining but also on the bill is FELIX FAST4WARD who is one of Denver’s most gifted and imaginative electronic music composers and producers in various realms including dance, hip-hop and ambient.
What:Extra Gold, Bison Bone, Claire Heywood When: Saturday, 07.13, 8 p.m. Where: Hi-Dive Why: A legitimate country show with a few of the Mile High City’s finest including the folksy/Merle Haggard-esque Extra Gold, Bison Bone and its eclectic yet singular blend of psych, country and pop and Claire Heywood’s smoky, grittily soulful country torch songs.
Sunday | July 14
Don Felder, photo by Michael Helms
What:Don Felder When: Sunday, 07.14, 5:30 p.m. gates, 7:30 p.m. show Where: Hudson Gardens Why: Don Felder is perhaps best known as the iconic guitarist for the Eagles during one of the most interesting, musically speaking, points in the band’s career. Sure, you may have heard “Hotel California,” the title track of the group’s 1976 album, who can say how many times but those distinctive lead guitar parts were written by Felder and his guitar interplay with Joe Walsh and Glenn Frey helped to define a certain sound of the 70s in southern California. While still in the band he wrote some songs that appeared on the soundtrack to Heavy Metal including “Heavy Metal (Takin’ a Ride)” and “All Of You” lending the soundtrack some brooding darkness and beautifully decadent guitar work. Felder’s guitar style fit in with the country rock thing with the Eagles but what made it stand out was his knack for interesting dynamics and atmosphere even when he writes something more straight ahead rock and roll. His 2019 album American Rock ‘n’ Roll is a tribute to the music that is the title.
Monday | July 15
Michael Mcdonald, photo by Timothy White
What:Have a Nice Life w/Consumer, Street Sects and Midwife When: Monday, 07.15, 8 p.m. Where: Hi-Dive Why: Industrial drone, post-punk ambient or whatever one calls Have a Nice Life’s starkly brooding body of work, its dark compositions have proven influential on a generation of bands that have come along since its inception. Also on the bill is confrontational industrial/darkwave band Street Sects and ambient folk soundscaper extraordinaire Midwife.
What:An Evening With Michael McDonald When: Monday, 07.15, 6:30 p.m. Where: Chautauqua Auditorium Why: Michael McDonald’s smooth and soulful vocals have been a part of American rock and pop music for over four decades now. Whether as a singer in Steely Dan (both live and in studio), The Doobie Brothers, as a solo artist and in his numerous collaborations including with the likes of modern hip-hop/jazz genius Thundercat, McDonald brings a deep musicality and keen ear for melody that transcends genre. He will be performing a series of shows in Colorado that we will include on our Best Shows list up to and including his show at the Denver Botanic Gardens on Thursday, July 20.
What:Headboggle, Malocculsion, Page 27, Blank Human When: Monday, 07.15, 7 p.m. Where: Rhinoceropolis Why: Noise shows are a rarity in Denver these days when once you could find them on the regular when it was more possible for artists to have a warehouse to make this kind of thing or where impromptu venues were more open to hosting this stuff forbidding to more mundane sonic sensibilities. This show includes ambient/noise scaper Blank Human and the godfathers of Denver noise, Page 27 in its first show since the departure of long time member Michael Nowak.
What:Imperial Teen When: Tuesday, 07.16, 6 p.m. Where: Twist & Shout Why: Imperial Teen includes current and former members of Faith No More, Sister Double Happiness and The Wrecks. Their left field pop got a boost when “Yoo Hoo” appeared in the 1999 film Jawbreaker. Though the band’s excellent 1996 album, produced by Steve McDonald of Red Kross, garnered no small amount of critical acclaim it was oft found in bargain bins at music stores. The group’s playful songs and interesting and illuminatingly personal takes on controversial themes has set the foursome apart from many of its late era alternative rock/pop peers. In 2019 the group released its latest album Now We Are Timeless. Since Jone Stebbins lives in Denver now, Imperial Teen is in some ways a local band.
What:3TEETH w/Author and Punisher and GosT When: Tuesday, 07.16, 6:30 p.m. Where: The Marquis Theater Why: 3TEETH is one of the better newer industrial rock bands. But the reason to go to this show is to witness Author and Punisher who creates his own instruments and whose cybernetic appearance is no mere affectation as it incorporates controllers of various types that can be executed by a single person. The project’s music is industrial but more raw and experimental than most music calling itself that these days.
Wednesday | July 17
The Beths, photo by Mason Fairey
What:The Beths and Girl Friday When: Wednesday, 07.17, 7 p.m. Where: Globe Hall Why: The Beths from Auckland, New Zealand started in 2015 and absorbed some of that worldwide retro-90s fuzz rock vibe of the time. But since the trio is from New Zealand it always manifests differently and its melodies go down unconventional paths and the progressions resolve in fascinatingly unpredictable ways. Plus Elizabeth Stokes’ vocals are bright and strong and not couched in manifesting angst so obviously. The group did title its 2018 album Future Me Hates Me tells you that you’re in for something more interesting than “summer time good time music” and yet the group’s music is upbeat and hopeful.
What:Michael McDonald When: Wednesday, 07.17, 7 p.m. Where: Vilar Performing Arts Center in Beaver Creek Why: See above for 7/15 for Michael McDonald.
What:Dinner Time (GA), Sliver, Gila Teen and Moving Still When: Wednesday, 07.17, 8 p.m. Where: Thought//Forms Why: Atlanta’s Dinner Time is a low-fi indie pop band with some raw and ragged edges to its songwriting so that it can sound a little bratty and snotty like a punk band you’d actually want to listen to. Also on the bill are ex-nü metal wavers Sliver whose covers of 90s Bush songs, at least in essence, are almost as good as the real thing. Somehow Moving Still invited Sliver’s singer to perform with them because they’re good people and taking Chris Mercer under their wing and cultivate the guy’s tastes until he realizes that Nirvana was not influenced by Gavin Rossdale. It’s an uphill battle. Gila Teen is a post-punk/pop death rock band from Denver and one of the Mile High City’s greatest duos whose emotionally vibrant sad songs chase the blues away.
Hippo Campus, photo by Pooneh Ghana
What:The Head and the Heart w/Hippo Campus When: Wednesday and Thursday, 07.17 and 07.18, 8 p.m. Where: Red Rocks Why: Hippo Campus from St. Paul, MN are technically an indie rock band but its beat-making and pop songcraft is more akin to R&B and hip-hop with a focus on mood and atmosphere. Its diverse and imaginative songwriting manifested brilliantly on its 2018 album Bambi and in 2019 the group released a cadre of songs in two volumes called Demos I and Demos II. The song experiments on both show how the band got from the promising songwriting of the 2017 album Landmark to the sophistication of craft heard on Bambi. At the top of the bill for this show is indie folk band The Head and the Heart. Maybe “indie folk” doesn’t apply so much anymore as the band has expanded its sounds and songwriting style in all directions. Its 2019 album Living Mirage finds the band truly utilizing space in its songwriting in a way that allows for the expansive feelings inherent to its specific musical style to stretch out and resolve organically. Which is interesting to see in the music of a band that has reached its level of relative commercial success when there can be pressure for efficiency in delivering satisfying musical hooks. This line-up plays both Wednesday July 17 and Thursday July 18 at Red Rocks.
“Steel Tray” by Colour of the Jungle starts off like a full list of examples of not being able to get a break from everyday setbacks and ailments while being assured it’s all normal. But Jack Evans’ voice makes it obvious that he’s on the edge from having to struggle and strive with every little thing from a stone in his show, being prescribed multiple meds with side effects that seem only slightly less worse than life without them, stubbing his toe and dreams in tatters in the face of mundane issues like not enough time and not feeling up to handling everything thrown your way every day and out of explanations for your litany of failings and shortcomings. But there’s a spirited energy to the song that in spite of all the flak that the fact of still being alive has to mean something even if its that for now you’re able to wade through the entropy that you shrugged off more easily in the past. Though the band is from the UK it sounds like they spent a whole lot of time listening to American Midwest rock and roll from places like Memphis and Cincinnati where bands on the Goner imprint and The Afghan Whigs wax poetic poetic about life’s rough and tumble times while writing impassioned and gritty music as a method of self-therapy. Listen to “Steel Tray” on Soundcloud and follow Colour of the Jungle at the links below.
In covering “Cherchez La Ghost” by Ghostface Killah from his 2000 album Supreme Clientele, Orions Belte have funked it up a little more but maintained its unusual rhythms. The guitar is more present and not as spidery, the keyboard more in the realm of mimicking Bernie Worrell at his most minimal. But all tasteful with flourishes of playfully warping the musical lines a bit. Like the original it’s well under three minutes but in that time the track goes through some changes suggestive of its pairing with visual narrative. The eccentric and whimsical quality of his cover sounds like something out of a Judd Apatow movie yet to be like a sequel to Super Bad as the song suggests that some mischief born of restlessness is potentially at hand. The cover will be released on July 12 when the group releases its Slim EP on Jansen Records. Listen below and further explore Orions Belte’s musical hijinks at the links following.
Is “cave dawnings,” the title of the single by Los Angeles experimental rock band warm nights, a reference to Plato’s “Parable of the Cave” in a way? Because it certainly seems to be about coming to realizations from a place of personal darkness with hushed tones to impassioned heights a more active pace before ending on a not of streaming off into the distance having reached the escape velocity of one’s own personal gravity of emotional funk. The realization also comes in the form of self-honesty in admitting love for another despite the inevitable complexities that lay ahead of the initial, simple, non-logical impulse to love. In the end the narrator of embraces the totality of the experience as something shared. It is, refreshingly, not a simple love song where the act of falling in love is a redemptive experience that always seems to place the burden of things not being ideal the whole time on one person or another with a need to place blame or find fault as a pretext for splitting and going with someone “better.” It is a song that is both melodramatic and realistic at once, a rarity in rock music or any music. Sonically, fans of early 2000s post-emo indie rock will appreciate the expressive guitar work and dual vocals complimenting and providing counterpoint but warm nights is an inherently adventurous group of songwriters and its recently released album all inside takes you through some fascinating changes. Listen on Spotify and follow warm nights at the links provided.
Maya Beiser’s actual heartbeat was recorded and used as the pulsating beat heard in the distance in her interpretation of the Beethoven classic “Moonlight Sonata: Adagio” from her forthcoming album delugEON due out August 30 on her own impirint Islandia Music Records. The layered cello rather than the original piano brings an especially sonorous tone to the piece. She expands, restructures and extrapolates throughout but returns to the iconic figure at the center of the composition on a recording that sounds like it was captured for an old 78 of music meant to be played during screenings of a Theodor Dreyer or F.W. Murnau film. Yet the subtle changes reflect a modern classical and avant-garde sensibility and knowledge of sound design and digital production processing that is used to give the song a wide sonic range as well as an intimacy with the original to give it a slower pace (and thus “Adagio”) when the original goes into its faster section. The effect being to give this version of “Moonlight Sonata” an emotionally weighty denouement to the outro of the nearly echoing heartbeat. With the deep level of immersion, skill with impromptu tonal inflection and sonic imagination it’s no wonder Beiser has worked with the likes of Brian Eno, Phillip Glass and Steve Reich, to name a few, over the years. Listen on Soundcloud and follow Beiser at the links provided.
Zahn | Hatami | McClure, image courtesy the artists
“Prysma” is an international collaboration between German sound design/electronic music composer Uwe Zahn, Iranian ambient/field recording producer/musician Porya Hatami and Irish textural ambient/synthesizer/production artist Darren McClure. The artists collective called Zahn | Hatami | McClure are releasing an album on July 12 called Ypsilon, from which this track is taken. There is a deep sense of space and distance conveyed here perfectly with volume control and dynamics in the track. Like what it would be like to live inside a giant, quantum, optical circuit outside of standard space-time as beams of light travel overhead and in the near and middle distance carrying data along nearly invisible pathways and directed automatically to the appropriate exits while processed to whatever mysterious purpose. From the melodic to the textural all the sounds seem incidental in creating a coherent musical as well as environmental experience in the listening and because of this seemingly effortless and natural quality the brilliance and chemistry of the collaboration is obvious. Listen on Soundcloud and follow the trio at the link below.
Ecce Shnak is a seven piece art pop band from New York and its new single the eccentrically titled “Velociraptor Swayze” virtually overflows with musical ideas that might not otherwise work together if not for the group’s unique musical imagination. The rhythms are compound and free flowingly evolving throughout with dynamics suiting the emotional mode of the moment. And it’s a song about someone who broke the narrator’s heart with the prescription to go after the perpetrator like the titular velociraptor but in heroic and dramatic fashion like Patrick Swayze in, say, Road House or even Dirty Dancing. One of the lyrics is, “Bring me his head on a birthday cake.” There are no words minced here but it is couched in an upbeat and bright song with a lot of sonic color filling out the minimal percussion. Through that bit of creative legerdemain the band transmogrifies despair into an absurdist flight of fancy without dishonoring the feelings that inspired the song. Fans of of Montreal and Bitte Orca-period Dirty Projectors will appreciate the idiosyncratic songwriting sensibilities on display here.
The group will release its new album Metamorphejawns on July 19 through Records, Man Records. Following that Ecce Shnak will celebrate the occasion with a pay-what-you-can event called Shnakfest at 267 Wyckoff St. in Brooklyn on July 20. The proceeds will benefit the grassroots climate change organization Extinction Rebellion and the New Sanctuary Coalition. Only the incredibly unperceptive, delusional and invested-in-fossil-fuel-industry types are refusing to recognize that human caused climate change that will destroy all economies and most all life on earth is a thing right now and not after we’re all dead. Also, basic human rights recognize no boundaries and the inhumane system of detentions and deportations existing in the USA is neither moral or effective. The festival will include, according to the press release, several “rishankulously love other bands from NYC and beyond” as well as aerlists, clowns, flame eaters, sword swallowers and other such refinements. But if you can’t make that you can check out the single below and follow the septet at the links provided.
Mattie Safer is perhaps best known up to this point as the bass player for The Rapture during its early heyday writing songs for and playing on its early albums including the 2003 classic Echoes. Since departing the band he’s played with Poolside and now his self-named band Safer. The single “All My Life” is almost an homage to the stripped down post-punk and art punk of New York with some guitar licks resonating with those of Television and the wiry yet tuneful quality that was one of that band’s signature sounds. “All My Life” is accented and driven partly by a strong, melodic bass line as would any song by one of the classic post-punk bands of yore. In the breakdown second around halfway through with Casey Butler on sax the song takes on the lush and majestic quality one might associate with some art glam band like Roxy Music. Mixing soulfulness and starkness, grit and sophistication, this debut single from Safer is promising indeed. You can catch Safer live at Alphaville in Brooklyn on Friday, July 12, 2019 with No Swoon, Campo Formio and Monograms. For now listen below and follow Safer at his website.
Paso Viejo is an Argentinian band that mixes shoegaze soundscaping with post-rock structure and the textures and sensibility of native folk music styles. The result, at least in the “Kitsune” single, is music that sounds like it’s embodying elements of a landscape with branches of trees and grass blowing in a gentle wind—that level of detail that you take in but do not individually dissect yet intuitive understand. “Kitsune” is the Japanese word for fox and as the song progresses into moodier realms for tone and minor scale progressions it drifts further into more direct sonic movement like a fox meandering its way through a landscape shifting shape to suit its trickster goals as the animals are attributed with getting to in Yokai folklore. Later in the song the music becomes more intense and distorted perhaps representing the climax of one of the kitsune’s many caprices. Whatever the direct inspiration, the song is evocative and cinematic and goes beyond the usual tropes of the instrumental rock and post-rock genre by being more than pretty sounds and some conventionally solid musicianship. Paso Viejo are, after all, sonic storytellers whose language is the emotional content of their compositions. Listen below and follow Paso Viejo at the links provided.
Queen City Sounds and Art 
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