Abandons – Queen City Sounds and Art

Best Shows in Denver January 2026

**Cherished celebrates the release of its self-titled debut LP at Hi-Dive on 1/22/26**

Friday | 01.02
What: Angel Band w/Ryan Wong, Fishlegs, Elaine and Nimona
When: 7
Where: Hi-Dive
Why: Angel Band is an indie pop band that seems to have taken inspiration from jangle pop groups of the late 80s and early 90s. Like C86-affiliated groups and acts on the Sarah Records and early Slumberland imprints. There is an enthusiasm with which the music is performed but without losing a sense of delicacy and gentleness. Fishlegs is like-minded in its embrace of the kind of charming twee pop that made 90s underground music worth seeking out. Ryan Wong is of course the songwriter and producer behind his band Supreme Joy but his solo performances can wax into his equally worthy country songwriting.

Thursday | 01.08
What: Victim of Fire, Cronos Compulsion, Aleister Cowboy, Pedestal for Leviathan
When: 7
Where: Hi-Dive
Why: Victim of Fire is a Denver-based hardcore/black metal band that has been at the forefront of that music out of the Mile High City. Its 2025 album The Old Lie is a sharp and ferocious dissection of economic elitist lies told to working class people to get them to give up their best interests in pursuit of enriching the wealthy at the expense of everyone. Cronos Compulsion is a death-sludge metal band also from Denver whose 2025 album Lawgiver is a bracing listen and a solid example of the caustic and brutal sonic power of the art form. Fort Collins’ Aleister Cowboy released an EP of what might be described as cosmic death metal called Neolithic Blood Rites in 2025. Pedestal for Leviathan’s flavor of black metal is the more symphonic variety but don’t worry, it’s plenty brutal as well once the songs get into gear.

Friday | 01.09
What: An Evening With Black Flag
When: 7
Where: The Oriental Theater
Why: Ever since replacing the most recent lineups of Black Flag with young musicians, Greg Ginn seems to want to bring some new blood into his venerable and influential punk band Black Flag. Did it work? You’ll have to go to find out but Ginn’s guitar work remains impressive and unique in the canon of punk and hardcore.

Precocious Neophyte, photo by Tom Murphy

Friday | 01.09
What: Warper, Precocious Neophyte and Blackberry Crush
When: 8
Where: Hi-Dive
Why: Warper released its new album Something, Sometime in October 2025 showcasing its further development from moody, atmospheric emo band into a heavier shoegaze band. The new record also showcased the band’s development as songwriters since its 2021 Lateness EP. Sure, you can hear a touch of possible influences like Hum and Sunny Day Real Estate but also newer groups like Cloakroom. Warper doesn’t shy away from demonstrating musical chops in the songs as well with evocative solos. Precocious Neophyte seems to come from similar roots but its musical instincts seem to have some noise rock and metal influences along with obvious touchstones like My Bloody Valentine with a knack for fragile melodies alongside searing guitar work and crushing heaviness. Blackberry Crush has evolved into more of a shoegaze band in the past couple of years but without sacrificing a knack for writing compelling pop hooks with some clear inspiration from 90s grunge.

Saturday | 01.10
What: The Pretty Shabbies, The Futons and Watch Yourself Die
When: 7
Where: The Skylark Lounge Bobcat Room
Why: The Pretty Shabbies sound like its music is comprised of bits of 1970s jazz and funk. There’s a chance the members listened to a lot of Zappa, a bit of Jethro Tull, modern jam bands and someone in the mix probably has every Traffic record. And yet the organic free flow of the music is not without a certain appeal because it’s not like many other local bands. The Futons are sort of a psychedelic garage punk band. But Watch Yourself Die is seemingly different every time with a strong and confrontational, transgressive performance art component which is going to make it completely divergent from everything else on this bill in the best way.

Saturday | 01.10
What: Night Fishing, Nativity in Black, Tainted Blade, Halo of Lightning
When: 7
Where: Hi-Dive
Why: Night Fishing is a collision of fusion, psychedelic prog, surf rock and post-rock but heavy and it includes members of other much heavier and more brutal bands. This is not gentler so much as not aggressive in its sound. Nativity in Black is a Black Sabbath cover band fronted by Chella Negro. Don’t expect the poetic Americana of her other band Chella and the Charm. It’ll be legit Black Sabbath evocation. Tainted Blade is a blackened death doom band from Denver. Halo of Lightning is a “stoner-doom metal” band from Colorado.

Thursday | 01.15
What: Summer Bedhead, Circling Girl and Majona
When: 7
Where: Hi-Dive
Why: Summer Bedhead’s eclectic indie rock reflects the changing musical landscape of the past decade. In the band’s story songs you hear strands of the throwback to 90s rock, garage rock, dream pop and more. But it’s all channeled into the group’s own style of confessional pop songs with some bite and more than a little vulnerability. Circling Girl is a Denver-based dream pop band whose sound has some bright shimmer in the guitar melodies with vocal harmonies that are reminiscent of The Sundays, Lush in its more pop mode and a touch of Cocteau Twins. Its 2025 album Only My Veins Know is one of the better releases in the broad spectrum of shoegaze and dream pop of the past five years with its intricate and entrancing songwriting. Majona is the style of atmospheric pop that is adjacent to shoegaze but more in the realm of Mazzy Star-esque slowcore.

The Green Typewriters, photo by Tom Murphy

Friday | 01.16
What: Green Typewriters, Salads and Sunbeams and Teacup Gorilla
When: 8
Where: The Skylark Lounge Bobcat Room
Why: The Green Typewriters are the kind of psychedelic pop band that makes use of conceptual framing and aesthetics to deliver a unique style of music that blurs the line between Elephant6 indiepop including the experimental streak of that music, art rock and mystical psychedelia. Salads and Sunbeams engages in modern pop storytelling through the sonic lens of 60s and 70s psychedelic rock with poetic observations on modern life and the ways our current civilization works to erode our humanity and offering ways to reclaim it through imagination and honest feeling. Teacup Gorilla is a high concept art pop band that challenges conventional views of gender and identity in its songs and in its presentation of the music.

Sunday | 01.18
What: Kayo Dot and Abandons
When: 7
Where: Hi-Dive
Why: New York-based avant-garde metal and Kayo Dot makes a rare appearance in Denver following the release of one of its most challenging and visionary records to date in 2025’s Every Rock, Every Half-Truth under Reason. The album was written against the idea of the creative act and creativity as a result of predictive modeling and its dystopian offspring, AI music and art. The songs are not in the vein of traditional metal or really something easily or at all identifiable as metal. It’s often like an organic, mutant and sprawling set of songs that at most has something in common with something like Mamaleek. But even more abstract. Abandons is not as avant in its songwriting but it is in the way the band writes music in a more improvisational mode and without seeming to try to fit in with a neat genre. Sure if you want to call them post-rock or post-metal they fit that but also noise rock and art rock and in moments with songs written with more abstract electronic ideas in mind.

Thursday | 01.22
What: Cherished album release w/Tassles, Flesh Tape and Headslug
When: 7
Where: Hi-Dive
Why: Ever since switching names to Cherished in 2022 and a shift in sound more toward the shoegaze end of post-punk this Denver quintet has developed a body of work that defies easy categorization. There is some noisy, punk edge underlying the sonics and performance style but the atmospheric melodies and introspective and thought-provoking lyrics set the band apart from any obvious niche aesthetics. Its 2025 self-titled album was recorded and mixed by Seth Manchester at Machines With Magnets who is perhaps best known for working on records by Model/Actriz, Lingua Ignota, Battles, Big|Brave and Lightning Bolt. It emphasizes the more gritty side of the band’s sound without sacrificing the deep moods Cherished manifests live. Opening the show is bedroom dream pop band Tassles, noise-rock post-punk group Flesh Tape and Headslug whose sound sits somewhere between grunge pop and shoegaze.

Friday | 01.23
What: Cthonic Deity, Street Tombs and Death Possession
When: 8
Where: Hi-Dive
Why: Cthonic Deity is the doom/death metal/punk band from Denver that includes Paul Riedl of Blood Incantation fame. It’s much more stripped down and brutal in its guitar attack and includes members of Scolex and Ascended Dead as well. Street Tombs from Santa Fe, New Mexico are a collision of d-beat punk and thrash-infused death metal. Death Possession play the kind of death metal that sounds like it was inspired by many sessions of taking in early Slayer, early Possessed and Xasthur in a secret club house.

Friday | 01.23
What: Gion Davis, Dollpile, Your Friend Nirantha
When: 8
Where: The Skylark Lounge Bobcat Room
Why: Gion Davis is a poet with the indie rock band Clementine Was Right who is releasing a new book Designated Stranger that “spans years, states, genders, and climates as it confronts the concurrent apocalypses of being trans and poor in America.” Seems appropriate for the world today. Also performing is Dollpile fka Isadora Eden, a band whose dream pop is more theatrical and atmospherically dense than the genre is often known for producing. Also Your Friend Nirantha and its endearingly earnest bedroom dream/noise pop.

Turning Jewels Into Water, photo by Ed Marshall

Saturday | 01.24
What: Turning Jewels Into Water
When: 6PM doors for Artist Discussion and Q&A, concert 7:30PM
Where: Bug Theater
Why: Turning Jewels Into Water is a project with composer/percussionist/turntablist Val Jeanty and percussionist/composer/electronic musician Ravish Momin. Formed around 2017 when the two met at a jam session at Pioneer Works in Brooklyn, New York. Recognizing a shared affinity for crafting unique rhythms and soundscapes and compatible methods of working the two artists have since worked together to explore the ways in which new technologies can be used to blend electronic and acoustic instruments in creating music that reflects the diverse cultural heritages and musical interests in common. The name of the project is a commentary on access to natural resources and howthat has been politicized in human struggles for power especially in the capitalist era increasingly so with the rise in climate change impacts. A casual listen to any of the duo’s three albums reveals a mastery of rhythmic arrangements and patterned tones for a sound that is ambient adjacent but more akin to the kind of early industrial beat-making and culture jamming sounds heard in a band like Cabaret Voltaire but steeped in modern sensibilities and production methods. For our interview with Ravish Momin please follow this link.

Saturday | 01.24
What: Vulgarian, 908, Old Skin and Cop Killer
When: 7
Where: Hi-Dive
Why: Denver-based, anti-capitalist, doom/sludge/crust group Vulgarian are releasing their third album Cost of a Bullet at this show. Expect caustic and brutal riffs and plenty of pointed and incisive lyrics about what a demented and corrupt civilization we’re living through right now. 908 is a grindcore/powerviolence band from Colorado Springs that includes current and former members of Aberrant, Catheter, Throcult, Upon a Field’s Whisper, Havok and Tree of Woe. Old Skin sounds like a band that came up playing stoner metal and doom but leaned into the Unsane and Cherubs end of that sound and now is almost more of a noise rock band with some sludgy grooves while still sounding incredibly menacing. Cop Killer is the hardcore band from Denver that thankfully has lyrics that are appropriate to the name of the band and a confrontational performance style worthy of the name as well.

Thursday | 01.29
What: William Elliot Whitmore and Jim Ward (Sparta)
When: 7
Where: Hi-Dive
Why: William Elliot Whitmore is a singer/songwriter from Iowa who earned a reputation as one of the more skilled practitioners of folk Americana since the late 90s. With releases on Southern Records, ANTI- and Bloodshot Records Whitmore’s respectable body of work has garnered him a bit of a following and he has toured with Chris Cornell, Murder By Death, Converge and Esmé Patterson, with whom he has worked, to give a sense of his broad appeal beyond the obvious for his charismatic performances and fine songcraft. Also on this bill is Jim Ward, the frontman and guitarist of Sparta and former member of At the Drive-In performing his solo material that spans genres but all graced with his vulnerable yet passionate vocals.

Call Sign Cobra circa 2006, photo by Tom Murphy

Friday | 01.30
What: Call Sign Cobra w/Friends of Cesar Romero, El Welk, Total Cult
When: 7
Where: Hi-Dive
Why: Back in the mid-2000s Call Sign Cobra was a bit of a local supergroup that included members of now, minus the punk cognoscenti of the day, forgotten punk bands like Scott Baio Army, The Facet, Mail Order Children and Out on Bail. It’s sound was a kind of loose around the edges garage rock and what later “neo-classic rock” bands aimed for but could never quite nail in trying to sound pro. Imagine a Memphis garage rock band of the 90s, The Dirt Bombs, Teengenerate and a glam rock band mixed together and add a horns section and you have some idea of what you’re in for. It’s raucous, ridiculous and here’s a rare chance to see the band nearly twenty years after it dissolved. Also on hand will be modern garage punk luminaries Friends of Cesar Romero and Total Cult as well as noisy post-Americana group El Welk.

Saturday | 01.31
What: The Crooked Rugs, Rugburn and Chroma Lips
When: 8
Where: Hi-Dive
Why: The Crooked Rugs from Fort Collins live come off like a countrified psychedelic rock/shoegaze band with a deep appreciation for T. Rex. But one with a knack for memorable and transporting melodic hooks. Rugburn’s own flavor of psychedelia is more steeped in grunge and more distorted sounds in general with a bit of an edge. Denver’s Chroma Lips has more synth in the music and its motorik beats point to some inspiration from Krautrock, possibly a touch of Silver Apples and possible hints of having soaked up bits of the better end of King Gizzard and the Lizard Wizard, Black Mountain and the most inspired bits of Tame Impala but with more interesting guitar work.

Best Shows in Denver and Beyond January 2025

**Oryx performs at Hi-Dive on January 10, 2025, photo courtesy the artists**

Friday | 01.03
What: RAREBYRD$ album release w/Machu Linea and Shocker Mom
When: 9pm
Where: Roxy on Broadway
Why: RAREBYRD$ is an experimental hip-hop group from Denver whose mix of sensuous soundscapes, earthy romanticism and radical compassion and sensitivity has produced a powerful and playful body of work that hits deep. This show ushers in the release of its first album on vinyl with Pa$$-A-FiSt. On hand for this show is electronic pop producer and DJ extraordinaire Machu Linea and his creatively imaginative R&B-inflected songwriting as well as ambient indie pop genius Shocker Mom.

Brian Posehn, photo from brianposehn.com

Thursday-Saturday | 01.09-01.11
What: Brian Posehn
When: Varies by date
Where: Comedy Works Denver
Why: Brian Posehn is an active and prolific whose career spans decades including doing some writing and performing on the beloved comedy show Mr. Show. He’s had parts in The Big Bang Theory, The Mandalorian, Lady Dynamite, New Girl and he’s been in films like Devil’s Rejects and Uncle Nick. But his comedy that is partly surreal and confessional spanning subjects from personal issues, nerddom and his status as a lifelong metalhead. There’s something charming and immediately relatable to Posehn’s delivery that makes even his more playfully transgressive material accessible.

Oryx in 2021, photo courtesy the artists

Friday | 01.10
What: Oryx, Midwife, Many Blessings and Aridus
When: 8
Where: Hi-Dive
Why: Oryx is the doom/sludge band from Denver that recently released its latest album 2024’s Primordial Sky (available through the group’s Bandcamp digitally and on cassette and through Translation Loss on limited, colored vinyl editions). Starting out as a the duo of guitarist, vocalist, synth player Thomas Davis and drummer Abigail Davis, Oryx recently added bassist Joshua Kauffman who contributed to the writing of the new record. The sounds of the new release are more open and cavernous than the previous Oryx offerings which were inspired forays into brutal yet epic and cathartic compositions blurring the line between grind, doom and Oryx’s own style that incorporated unconventional rhythms and a heaviness that was dense yet dynamic. The new album is a commentary on the hubris of our civilization seem built on a bedrock of endless consumption at the expense of all. Also on this bill is “heaven metal” artist Midwife whose immersive soundscapes of processed guitar and vocals are like if folk music was being transmitted from a future existing in the consequences of current human hubris but expressed from deep emotional places processing despair and loss. Many Blessings is the solo harsh noise project of Primitive Man guitarist and vocalist Ethan McCarthy. Aridus is a moody black metal band from Santa Fe that includes Galen Baudhuin who contributes to the live lineup of influential “Cascadian black metal” legends Wolves in the Throne Room.

Saturday | 01.11
What: Celebrate the Life of David Dinsmore featuring Judge Roughneck and Lost Dog Ensemble (vinyl release party) as well as Tivoli Club Brass Band and guests.
When: 6:30
Where: The Oriental Theater
Why: The late David Dinsmore passed away in 2024 suddenly due to health complications when he was on the verge of doing more music of a wide spectrum of expression. He was of course the long time trombone player in the great jazz ska funk band Judge Roughneck, he was a singer and musician in Tom Waits tribute band Lost Dog Ensemble, he performed experimental music in various projects including Bowshock. He was a friend to many in the local scene and certainly a fan of supporter. What isn’t obvious is his broad taste in music and his willingness to get out and see new music regularly, weekly. He was someone who isn’t often celebrated but is one of the true linchpins in the music scene, some of the social connective tissue in one person and he is already greatly missed. This show is a celebration of his life with performances from a couple of his old bands.

Saturday | 01.11
What: Boot Gun, Ipecac and Radio Fluke
When: 8
Where: Hi-Dive
Why: Boot Gun isn’t just some classic rock revival band though that’s certainly one of the flavors of its music. Its members have absorbed modern psychedelic garage rock and a touch of prog. But its vocals are at least as strong as the musicianship and it seems obvious someone in the band has spent some time listening to a lot of soul records and southern blues rock. Ipecac similarly is hard to pigeonhole as purveyors of fuzzy hard rock with fiery musicianship and a charismatic, soulful vocalist but all of that is what makes the group noteworthy in the realm of music taking inspiration from another era.

Thursday | 01.16
What: Pink Lady Monster, Ray Diess, Part Weapon and Babybaby
When: 7
Where: Hi-Dive
Why: Pink Lady Monster is like the reincarnation of both a No Wave band and an avant-garde glam rock band with the performance art aspect very part of the delivery of the music. Ray Diess likewise incorporates performance art into his experimental, hyperpop strangeness. Part Weapon actually fuses psych rock, shoegaze and post-rock into a cohesive whole that isn’t a boring mish mash of elements or a derivative manifestation of any of them. BabyBaby is what happens when someone who has spent time making more conventional music with others lets loose and crafts gorgeously entrancing experimental electronic pop like something from the memory of blissful dreams.

Teacup Gorilla, photo courtesy the artists

Friday-Saturday | 01.17-02.01
What: JANE/EYRE with live music from Teacup Gorilla
When: See link for dates and times.
Where: Buntport Theater 717 Lipan St.
Why: Denver-based theater production troupe Grapefruit Lab is putting on an encore run of its debut full-length show JANE/EYRE, a queer exploration of Charlotte Brontë’s 1847 novel of the same name. The show includes musical performances by art folk/indie pop group Teacup Gorilla with songs written by the band and former Bad Luck City, current The Gentlys frontman Dameon Merkl. The multimedia show in its first run was an inspired examination of issues of class, religion, gender identity and sexuality. This remount of the show also celebrates the release of Teacup Gorilla’s debut full-length album also titled JANE/EYRE now available on digital download, streaming and limited edition vinyl.

Saturday | 01.18
What: ABANDONS, Church Fire, Oyarsa
When: 8
Where: Hi-Dive
Why: With its new album Liminal Heart, Denver instrumental, ambient post-metal band ABANDONS has made a great stylistic leap forward. Its earlier work didn’t fit into a neat and easy category with songs that seemed as informed by Pelican and Isis as Slint and 90s slowcore, especially live. With the new record the music is more deeply atmospheric and meditative with even greater attention paid to soundscaping details in the composition and the recording. The band lets tones hang and drift organically, setting them in motion and playing into where the sounds carry the melody. Fans of Mogwai will appreciate how ABANDONS now seems to embrace even more a richly moody dynamic to the way the songs unfold.

Saturday | 01.18
What: ZEPHR Record Release w/Tuff Bluff and Black Dots
When: 9
Where: The Squire Lounge
Why: Heart on sleeve punk trip ZEPHR is releasing its latest album at this show sharing the stage with power pop/garage punk greats Tuff Bluff fronted by former Pin Downs and The Manxx guitarist and singer Sara Fischer and pop punk inflected quartet Black Dots. It’ll be an evening of music that reflects and represents an era of Denver punk that was a bit more diverse and cohesive.

Saturday | 01.18
What: Ashes Fallen, Redwing Blackbird, Hypersomnia
When: 8
Where: The Skylark Lounge Bobcat Club
Why: Ashes Fallen is a three piece post-punk band from California whose sound incorporates New Wave-esque keyboard work and slightly quavering Goth rock style vocals. But its guitar work and gift for moody, icy synth melodies set it apart from a cookie cutter modern darkwave band. Redwing Blackbird is a similarly-minded duo but Paul Baker’s guitar style is more in line with the vibrantly moody, melodicism of The Cure and a touch of shoegaze soundscaping. Hypersomnia is an electro darkwave dance project from Colorado Springs seemingly influenced by classic EBM but without waxing into future pop.

TopHouse, photo by Electric Peak Creative

Saturday | 01.18
What: TopHouse w/The Wildwoods
When: 7
Where: The Ogden Theatre
Why: TopHouse will release its new EP Promise on February 14, 2025 and this show will likely give you an early exposure to that music aside. The band started off in Missoula, Montana but relocated to Nashville where the prospects for developing its blend of bluegrass, Americana and chamber pop more fully among a wider range of peers and for larger audiences in a place where music the music industry is long established and robust. The band’s recorded output seems to reflect the sonic clarity and the intimacy of the live show with its lively and detailed instrumentation captured as perfectly as its uplifting vocals.

Lana Del Rabies, photo courtesy the artist

Monday | 01.20
What: God Is War, Lana Del Rabies, MPW, Maltreatment, Ethan Lee McCarthy and Ashen Glaze
When: 7
Where: Hi-Dive
Why: God Is War is a noise/power electronics artist from Los Angeles whose aggressive, industrial style is also menacing and more layered in its composition of atmospheric layers than a more straight ahead artist operating in similar spheres of music. Lana Del Rabies is an artist that is refreshingly challenging to genre tag. Her ritualistic drones, industrial noise atmospherics and intense and theatrical live performances are cathartic and mesmerizing. Fans of HIDE and Lingua Ignota should definitely check out her music and go to this show. Maltreatment is the solo harsh noise project of Brandon Artus from death/grind group Vermin Womb. MPW is an electro-harsh noise and tape manipulation artist from Denver. Ethan Lee McCarthy will be doing some noise of his own that doesn’t fall under the aegis of his Many Blessings or Spiritual Poison projects. Ashen Glaze’s own compositions fall under the umbrella of noise but with his clear vocals and pounding, disintegrating rhythms and overtly industrial beats his stuff is more akin to a Justin Broadrick project of Omaha’s CBN.

Thursday-Saturday | 01.23-01.25
What: Phil Hanley
When: Varies by date
Where: Comedy Works Denver
Why: Phil Hanley is a comedian from Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada who worked as model in New York and Europe before trying his hand at stand-up. Now Hanley tours regularly and his crowd work videos are among the best you can find online showcasing his gift for turning awkward moments and unpretentious human insight into great moments of shared humor and absurdity.

Ghosts of Glaciers, photo courtesy the artists

Friday | 01.24
What: Ghosts of Glaciers, Palehorse/Palerider and Clarion Void
When: 8
Where: Hi-Dive
Why: Ghosts of Glaciers released its latest album Eternal in October 2024 and its searching, wandering, drifting aspects of its sounds give the music an enigmatic quality suggestive of the title of the album. But not to worry, the band soars off into the fiery post-rock flourishes that have been the hallmark of its music since it evolved out of its earlier doom metal inclinations. But the band has always been different from many of its peers in being inspired in part by experimental, progressive metal bands and being capable of shifting back from intense and forward charging riffs into almost ambient tranquility with a vulnerable grace. Also on the bill is the current incarnation of heavy desert shoegaze band Palehorse/Palerider who also buck expectations with songs that sure fit what you might expect but the imagination behind the songwriting makes a difference as evidenced by previous shows in which the band had an almost tribal musical configuration in its rhythms and the execution of its instrumentation. Clarion Void’s death sludge sound seems to have been tempered by the sludgy waters of a time in heavy music when stoner metal seemed overly abundant and these guys just took that foundation and gave it some edge without losing the melody.

Alan Sparhawk, photo by Sophia Photo Co.

Saturday | 01.25
What: Alan Sparkhawk’s The White Roses Tour w/Circuit des Yeux
When: 8
Where: The Bluebird Theater
Why: Alan Sparhawk’s 2024 album White Roses, My God is to most people familiar with his legendary slowcore band Low a drastic departure. But Low’s last two albums were part of a series of departures from expectation and the most experimental of the band’s career and for some the group’s best and most daring releases to date. For this second solo album Sparhawk couldn’t simply do what was expected of him. He seems to have took a deep dive into the realm of hyper pop, psychedelic IDM, trap and whatever amalgamation of all of that is manifest in the music of 100 gecs and SOPHIE. But true to form Sparhawk has created a unique piece of work that may not be fully appreciated by fans of Low or anyone with narrow expectations of what Sparhawk “should” be doing. There is a playful and alien beauty to the songs that exults in irreverent humor and a self-aware vulnerability that challenges listeners to set aside presumptions and indulge in experiencing something new and unexpected from a familiar artist who has done a ton of soul searching and the processing of grief and seems to have concluded that to indulge divergent creative instincts that feel like a renewed self and the freedom to reinvent is the best and most fulfilling path forward after some of the worst pain of one’s life has crashed into your psyche.

Ted Leo and the Pharmacists, phot by Kyle Cassidy, from the band’s Wikipedia page

Saturday | 01.25
What: Ted Leo and the Pharmacists – Shake the Sheets 20th Anniversary
When: 7
Where: The Oriental Theater
Why: Ted Leo and the Pharmacists have been touring for the 20 year anniversary of the 2004 release of their Shake the Sheets album. That record came out right before things started completely collapsing for the Lookout! Records imprint and for the band marked a sound that was a complete unification of its punk and indie rock impulses. Its exuberant, melodic punk was not the pop punk that was the bread and butter of the label and arguably the band’s creative peak to date with songs that are political and non-didactic.

Extra Kool and Time, photo by Tom Murphy

Wednesday | 01.29
What: Extra Kool and Time vinyl release party for The Grimies w/Box State University, Helga Pataki and Preacher vs. Choir
When: 8
Where: The Crypt
Why: Extra Kool and Time are two of the most gifted lyricists and rappers in Denver of recent years but whose work has not often been championed in local much less national press and culture. Years ago they worked on tracks together in a project they called The Grimies with singles appearing on obscure compilations now challenging to track down. But separately and contributing to each other’s work they have written poignantly personal and vulnerable, insightful and emotional songs about life and society that are vibrant and heartbreaking. Time has frequently released music with the brilliant producer AwareNess as the experimental hip-hop duo Calm. and along with Extra Kool and artists under the label umbrella of The Dirty Laboratory they were a force in alternative hip-hop in the 2000s. That world imploded or faded away in “commercial relevance” if not in impact in influence around the 2010s but the legacy of that time has continued in the more interesting hip-hop of today and certainly Time and Extra Kool didn’t stop creating powerful work just because the crumbling music culture wasn’t shining as much of a spotlight on alternative hip-hop for a long time. In September 2024 Extra Kool and Time finally released their fully collaborative album titled The Grimies. It’s full of vivid and emotionally resonant bars traded by both artists with tales of Denver and existential exploration of what endures in the mind and heart long term, the ghosts that haunt us, our communities and our various cultures. It’s a deep record with richly realized production from the likes of Fumes the Threat, AwareNess, Satyr and Preacher vs. Choir with contributions from Illogic. In typical operating fashion from Time and Extra Kool the openers are up and coming artists from a variety of musical styles including punk band Helga Pataki, young hip hop crew Box State University and aforementioned San Diego based production collective Preacher vs. Choir.

Thursday | 01.30
What: Head Slug, When The Sun Explodes and Plastik Mystik
When: 7
Where: Hi-Dive
Why: Head Slug is a weirdo ambient slowcore project with haunted soundscapes and vulnerable guitar work, melancholic moods. When the Sun Explodes is also a noisy shoegaze band apparently that has its roots among students at D.U.. Plastik Mystik (aka Plastic Mystic) is a band that splits the difference and mix and matches elements of post-hardcore, noise rock and deconstructed Dischordism.

Michael Blaustein, photo from neonentertainment.com

Thursday-Saturday | 01.30-02.01
What: Michael Blaustein
When: Showtime varies by date
Where: Comedy Works Denver
Why: Michael Blaustein co-hosts the Stiff Socks Podcast, has been on MTV’s Battleclips, On Campus Tour and the reboot of Punk’d. But watch his clips and shorts and you see a brilliant comedian with gift for surreal humor and turning any situation into art with his masterful crowdwork.

Friday | 01.31
What: Cursive w/Pile
When: 8
Where: Gothic Theatre
Why: Cursive is one of the most important and influential bands out of 90s post-hardcore/emo and helped to put its hometown of Omaha, Nebraska on the map as one of the flagship bands of the Saddle Creek Records imprint. Cursive could also never be pigeonholed as post-hardcore or emo beyond convenient touchstones for the style of music from which it emerged and which impacted its development. Cursive has always been more experimental and deft at pop songcraft than might seem obvious and its breakthrough records Domestica (2000) and The Ugly Organ (2003) offered insight into the American psyche of that era with a poignancy and poetry to match the band’s exuberant energy as a live band. Its new record Devourer (2024) is the recognition of and embracing of being a consumer and integrator of creative work and culture as part of the process of interpreting and passing forward the legacy of the world in which one finds oneself but also the dark side of that process and how that process can have a negative aspect that affects not just others but oneself and the physical and psychological ecosystem. Heady concepts aside it’s vintage Cursive with the memorable hooks and willingness to go off predictable sonic habits. But hey the great slowcore/post-punk/post-hardcore noise rock band Pile is opening so get there early and see two of the most consistently interesting rock bands of the past 30 years at one show.

Best Shows in Denver and Beyond July 2024

Monday | 07.01
What: Blushing w/Wave Decay and Cherished
When: 7
Where: The Skylark Lounge
Why: Austin-based shoegaze band Blushing recently released its latest album Sugarcoat with its blast of melodiously gritty and ethereal pop. Its flares of tone and anchored rhythms lend the group a dynamic that has an undeniable power on its recordings but even more so in the live setting where the band seems to have a an expansively friendly energy. Opening the show are krautrock/shoegaze band Wave Decay from Denver and the emotionally charged dream pop of Cherished also from the Mile High City.

Tuesday | 07.02
What: The Church and The Afghan Whigs w/Ed Harcourt
When: 6
Where: The Ogden Theatre
Why: Both The Church and The Afghan Whigs could headline a tour of their own. The Church made its initial splash in the 80s with records that infused post-punk with psychedelic guitar rock color and thoughtful lyrics anticipating in its songcraft dream pop and shoegaze. Fortunately The Church continued to evolve as artists with records going into its later era that are among its most creatively fascinating including the twin albums The Hypnogogue (2023) and Eros Zeta and the Perfumed Guitars (2024), concept albums about a future not so far in which the struggle to find meaning persists in human society and the psyche despite developments in technology and the evolution of human culture in an age of techno-globalism. The Afghan Whigs seamlessly melded R&B and post-punk for a hybrid sound that predated and helped to define alternative rock in the 90s but with a sound and songwriting style that has aged better than a lot of music of the era. Greg Dulli has seemed able to write songs about love and relationships and his own inner turmoil with passion and poetic insight since the band’s early days. Live both bands seem very capable of bringing you into a heightened emotional space shakes off the regular world for the duration. Listen to our interview with The Church’s Ian Haug here.

Winnetka Bowling League, photo by Paige Sara

Tuesday | 07.02
What: Winnetka Bowling League w/Emi Grace
When: 7
Where: Meow Wolf
Why: Winnetka Bowling League recently released its debut full-length Sha La La. Nevermind that for some listeners will be reminded immediately of The War on Drugs’ sweeping Americana psychedelia and the warm low end and ethereal melodies of first wave chillwave it’s a set of songs that has some poignant commentary on life in America with vivid set pieces in the lyrics that will be familiar to anyone that has lived through America since the 2010s and paid attention either because you were growing up in that time or observant and aware of the psychological climate of the time. It’s sonically rich indiepop for the time we’re in and its nostalgia-tinged lyrics honor both a flickering yet irrepressible sense of hope for the future and the wry acknowledgment that we could all be doomed given the political, ecological and cultural climate of the world.

Thursday | 07.04
What: King Rat 30 Year Anniversary w/Black Dots, These Kids Today, Anti-Formula and Terror Attack
When: 5
Where: EastFax Tap
Why: King Rat has had a bit of a storied existence across its three decades as a band and its melodic punk and dabbling with roots rock has remained consistently worthwhile with well crafted lyrics and a compelling live show. They play at 10 so all the “adults” in attendance can make it to the show after family obligations and home early enough in case they have to work one of those jobs that don’t give adults the day after a national holiday falling on a Thursday, Friday off.

Thursday | 07.04
What: TV Star, Angel Band, Cherry Spit and DJ Ryan Wong
When: 7
Where: Hi-Dive
Why: TV Star is a jangle psych pop band from Seattle that sounds like it is tapping into 70s power pop and late 80s college rock like the later period of Paisley Underground acts like Game Theory, Let’s Active and Opal. Angel Band is coming from a similar sonic cauldron and indie pop. Cherry Spit, though, is a gouge the lightning from the skies noise rock outfit that includes former members of Quits and Endless, Nameless.

Friday | 07.05
What: Glass Spells w/Hex Cassette
When: 8
Where: HQ
Why: Glass Spells is a darkwave synthpop band from San Diego that has been making music with a clear leg in 80s New Wave and post-punk but more the modern approach bringing together influences, direct or indirect, from electroclash and Nu Disco/Italo disco as well as touches of Latin music rhythms. Opening is the synthwave deathcult performance art act Hex Cassette whose high energy shows make you part of the proceedings with some friendly but intense cajoling. And it all wouldn’t matter too much if his songs weren’t also worthwhile on their own separate from the stagecraft.

Saturday | 07.06
What: The Picture Tour, CELICA, Up Yours People
When: 8
Where: The Skylark Lounge
Why: The Denver Goth scene hasn’t embraced The Picture Tour yet but it should because Billy Armijo and his bandmates have crafted the perfect fusion of shoegaze and moody post-punk. It has too much grit to be the kind of sadcore dad rock you might expect from Denver music scene veterans including Armijo who is the former lead guitarist of Emerald Siam. The guitar tones are searing and soaring yet imbued with enough melancholic melody and atmosphere to sound like a soundtrack to autumn. Up Yours People includes former members of Boss 302 and it is a mutant version of garage punk but noisier and more grimy and aggressive than one might expect even from past projects of the members of the band.

Sarah Shook & The Disarmers, photo by Harvey Robinson

Wednesday | 07.10
What: Sarah Shook & The Disarmers w/Alana Mars and DJ Jake Luna
When: 7
Where: Hi-Dive
Why: Sarah Shook & The Disarmers have been one of the more acclaimed bands in the broad realm of Americana of the past several years. On March 29, 2024 the group released its latest album Revelations on Thirty Tigers. The record isn’t short on the charm and warmth that has made the band’s previous releases so accessible and inviting and this time there seems to be a defiant spirit to the lyrics rejecting being defined by others and engaging in active self-discovery while finding some meaning in establishing healthy boundaries.

Diles Que No Me Maten, photo from Bandcamp

Friday | 07.12
What: Diles Que No Me Maten w/Wave Decay and Pink Lady Monster
When: 8
Where: Hi-Dive
Why: Presumably named after Juan Rulfo’s 1951 story of the same name Diles Que No Me Maten (which means “Tell Them Not to Kill Me”), this Mexico City-based band on the surface is a psychedelic folk group but he further one delves into its body of work you hear elements of dub and art rock with an ear for ambient soundscapes. More akin to the like of The Legendary Pink Dots than a modern psych rock band. Its most recent album Obrigaggi (2023) is a hushed and entrancing listening journey. Wave Decay is the Denver-based shoegaze/psychedelic rock band with far better than average tonal richness. Pink Lady Monster might be described as a No Wave-esque art rock and performance art band and a can’t miss act from Denver for the discerning music fan.

Saturday | 07.13
What: Pallbearer w/Inter Arma and The Keening
When: 7
Where: The Gothic Theatre
Why: Pallbearer’s 2024 album Mind Burns Alive has been a long time coming and its first since 2020’s Forgotten Days. The doom metal band from Little Rock, Arkansas has always been a cut above and more interesting than many of its peers because its music has had complex melodic arrangements and particularly on the new record a widely dynamic vocal harmonies. The new album apparently represented the group being together in the same city after a prolonged time apart. The heaviness of the album taps into concept that the themes and emotional content are what makes for the heaviest of moods and its sometimes psychedelic guitar excursions resonate with what peers like Amenra have been up to of late. Opening the show is former SubRosa guitarist/vocalist Rebecca Vernon and her The Keening project and her own flavor of transcendent, ambient doom.

Saturday | 07.13
What: Kontravoid w/French Kettle Station, Modern Devotion and Kill You Club DJs
When: 8
Where: Hi-Dive
Why: For over a decade Cameron Findlay has been writing and release music as Kontravoid. With heavy, pulsating, industrial beats and dense and murky synths the project with Findlay performing in a white mask in theater style Kontravoid has offered a kind of dance music that draws upon the likes of classic EBM, the creative production style of Meat Beat Manifesto and techno. The latest album Detachment includes vocal contributions from Nuovo Testamento singer Chelsey Crowley. Opening the show are Denver acts French Kettle Station and his own fusion of glitch, electronic dance pop and performance art and Modern Devotion’s minimal techno.

Thursday | 07.18
What: Quasi w/Jeffrey Lewis
When: 7
Where: Marquis Theater
Why: Quasi is the rock duo comprised of Sam Coomes and Janet Weiss. The former some may know from his time in Heatmiser with Elliott Smith. The latter was the long time drummer of Sleater-Kinney and Stephen Malkmus & The Jicks and one of the truly great live drummers of the current era. After years of being inactive Quasi released Breaking the Balls of History in 2023 on Sub Pop and a set of songs that showcase the band’s gift for fusing punk and bombastic art rock. Jeffrey Lewis is the eccentric punk musician and visual artist whose songs are punk in spirit but not in the predictable way musically—just a disregard for convention of genre and expectation of subject matter like a one man They Might Be Giants.

Th and S | 07.18 and 07.20
What: AJR w/mxmtoon and Dean Lewis
When: 6
Where: Ball Arena
Why: AJR is the trio from NYC comprised of Adam Met, Jack Met and Ryan Met (thus the name, the last name truncated from Metzger) who are all vocalists and multi-instrumentalists and all are involved in the songwriting that’s a hybrid of hip-hop, indie pop and some elements of hyper pop and Americana. Opening the show is multi-media artist and folk bedroom pop artist mxmtoon who propelled herself into the public eye with her use of social media from a young age sharing her visual art and early songwriting with ukulele on a YouTube channel she started at age 13. Her soulful vocals help to set her music apart from what some may assume to be her natural peers and her songwriting demonstrates a poetically thoughtful perspective that takes on the usual subjects of the struggles of youth and looming adulthood with creativity. Add her imaginative production and free association of musical styles into a coherent one of her own and mxmtoon is easily one of the most interesting pop artists now more than flirting with mainstream success.

A Strange Happening in 2022, photo by Tom Murphy

Friday | 07.19
What: A Strange Happening, Plague Pitted Moon, Penny Auction
When: 8
Where: The Skylark Lounge
Why: Plague Pitted Moon is a psychedelic doom band from Rapid City that recently released its 2024 self-titled EP. Its dark, distorted drones are like a grittier, more metal-inspired shoegaze band. Penny Auction from Casper, Wyoming is similarly minded but generally more noisy and menacing like if someone that listened to a lot of Sonic Youth, Big Black and My Dad Is Dead decided to start a band that was more lo-fi than even all of that. A Strange Happening is basically an indie rock band if its members were all nerds for old radio serial programming and psychedelic garage rock but skipped on the 2010s version of that sort of thing and essentially a weird band that writes accessible music.

Saturday | 07.20
What: The Roots w/Digable Planets
When: 7
Where: Mission Ballroom
Why: The Roots are a band that early on adopted using live jazz instrumentation into its brand of hip-hop setting it apart from most of its peers especially when it launched in 1987. Stylistically Digable Planets shared eclectic and jazz and R&B rooted sensibilities when it too formed in 1987. Both projects have roots in Philadelphia though Digable Planets first came to prominence when it was based in Brooklyn. Both outfits released their respective debut albums in 1993 on major record labels with a follow up in 1995. Digable Planets split for a decade after the release of that album, the deep mood jazz psychedelia-infused Blowout Comb, while The Roots continued to build its cult following into relative mainstream success even before it became the official house band for Late Night with Jimmy Fallon in 2009. Big ups for the 2011 Michele Bachman incident. Although it hasn’t released a new album in nearly 30 years Digable Planets began its latest run as a live band in 2015 and The Roots for its own part hasn’t offered a new record since 2014 but both have proven themselves as vital live bands whose sounds and ideas have helped to shape the aesthetics of much of the modern hip-hop that dares to break the mold of standard and well worn ideas with imagination and a willingness to think of their own music beyond tradition and established style.

Saturday and Sunday | 07.20 and 07.21
What: Daikaiju and TripLip w/Pink Lady Monster (07.20) and Big Canned Ham (07.21)
When: 7pm both nights
Where: The Matchbox (07.20) and The Squire Lounge (07.21)
Why: Daikaiju is the legendary psychedelic surf rock band with truly exciting live shows with fire and breaking the audience and performer wall by making an entire venue a potential stage. TripLip could be described as a progressive surf rock punk band but really art rock in the more playful 90s vein and truly not easily put into any genre box though a perfect band to play with Daikaiju. Pink Lady Monster is the charismatic and enigmatic No Wave post-punk/art rock band from Denver. Big Canned Ham is sort of a psychedelic art rock funk band that apparently didn’t see some reason not to fuse Pink Floyd, Primus and Sleepytime Gorilla Museum.

Tuesday | 07.23
What: The Decemberists w/Ratboys
When: 7
Where: Mission Ballroom
Why: The Decemberists have long been one of the quintessential indie rock bands of the 2000s and beyond with its penchant for eclectic instrumentation, folkloric, literary lyrics and a sound that dips into Americana and chamber pop. Plenty of shade has been thrown the band’s way for being pretentious in its theatrical presentation, its often somewhat nerdy subject matter and the baroque aesthetic of its cover art yet it’s refreshing to see a band put that much effort into the small details of its music from its performances to the way its music greets the world separate from the live context. Not to mention the creative ambition to pull it all off and to establish a body of work with layers of meaning and nuance. The band’s latest album As It Ever Was, So It Will Be Again (2024) sounds like a descendant of jangle rock and 80s indiepop as embodied by groups out of the Paisley Underground and the southeastern part of the USA like The Windbreakers, Let’s Active and The db’s.

Tuesday | 07.23
What: Facet, Moon Pussy, Abandons and Wingwalker
When: 7
Where: Hi-Dive
Why: Facet is the Oakland-based, noisy post-hardcore band whose self-titled 2023 album is half Amphetamine-Reptile-artist-esque atonal madness and DC post-punk. Fitting Denver’s own noise rock weirdo geniuses Moon Pussy are sharing the bill along with instrumental art doom trio Abandons and heavy, angular post-punk trio Wingwalker.

Tuesday | 07.23
What: Ben Howard w/John Francis Flynn
When: 7
Where: Ogden Theatre
Why: You don’t need any kind of background on the artist or the making of the album to get something out of Ben Howard’s 2023 album Is It? The singer-songwriter whose career stretches back to the late 2000s suffered two mini-strokes in 2022 which initiated some lifestyle changes and the subsequent album which in some ways charts his creative coming to terms with and working through his life changes isn’t just introspective in expected ways the music is richly detailed and flows with a seemingly organic flow of electronic and not so electronic elements that is instantly engaging and is resonant with recent offerings from Mount Kimbie. The songs are illuminating and tender, emotionally vivid and Howard’s vocals, processed or otherwise, shine with a gentle warmth. The record is the artists magnum opus.

Wednesday | 07.24
What: Easy Honey w/Sex Wacks and Welcome Back
When: 7
Where: Larimer Lounge
Why: Charleston, South Carolina-based Easy Honey originally started in Sewanee, Tennessee and have cultivated a sound one more often associates with the mood and energy of a psychedelic pop band from the opposite side of the country. But in its songwriting one hears threads of influence beyond obvious touchstones. There is a power pop sensibility crossed with the storytelling mode of The Kinks and the way the latter ties its captivating choruses with big, melodic hooks. There is an easygoing aspect of the music even though its wit and exuberance inform the songwriting and the performances. On July 19, 2024 the band released its new album Cupidity Unlimited and is currently on a wide touring leg in Colorado alone that began on July 7 in Buena Vista and continues through July 27 in Colorado Springs.

Friday and Saturday | 07.26 and 07.27
What: Mark Farina
When: 8
Where: Meow Wolf Convergence Station
Why: Mark Farina is the legendary DJ who fused house, jazz and downtempo with elements of other styles in an almost free association of beats and sounds to produce his trademark sound “mushroom jazz.” The latter hit like acid jazz mutated by left field hip-hop beats. Farina explored the inner and outer edges of that aesthetic across several releases in the Mushroom Jazz series. Farina’s eclectic, mellow but vivid production has influenced at least one generation of house and electronic dance music creatives Farina performs sets Friday and Saturday at Meow Wolf’s Convergence Station where the room’s spacious and spare accommodations seem like the right place to experience music provided by one of modern house music’s most significant artists/mixologists.

Tuesday | 07.30
What: Street Fever w/MDX View, Palace Guard, Dream Compartment
When: 7
Where: Hi-Dive
Why: Street Fever is the performance artist and industrial techno/EBM darkwave artist from Boise, Idaho who has a bit of an underground cult following dating back around a decade when he was a completely mysterious figure whose sets were in the realm of gritty darkwave before that became more of a thing within a few years. But more recent Street Fever shows have been more intense, seemingly more focused and heavier, harder beats perhaps heard in the most realized form on the 2024 album Absolution. The record whose themes seem to explore working through religious trauma and life under late capitalism is refreshingly not stylistically monolithic and start and has moments of sublime, melodic beauty and emotionally vibrant vocals. Live, Street Fever often brings the stage into the audience and involves those who show up in his personal catharsis.

To Be Continued…

Best Shows in Denver and Beyond August 2023

**Troller performs at Lost Lake with The Body on August 24, 2023**

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.

Illuminati 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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Judge Roughneck, photo by Hi-Def Photography

Saturday | 08.19
What: Reggae on the Rocks: Rebelution, Iration, The Abyssinians, The Expendables, The Skatalites, Passafire, Judge Roughneck and DJ Mackie
When: 1
Where: Red Rocks
Why: The nearly annual showcase for some of today’s most noteworthy acts in modern reggae. Rumor has it this might be the final edition of the event so if this is up your alley consider making it.

Jess Williamson, photo by Jackie Lee Young

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Portrayal 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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Queen City Sounds Podcast S3E08: Ghost Canyon Fest

Ghost Canyon Fest organizers (L-R: Brian Dooley, Cory Hager, Jeremy Brashaw and Sean Dove), photo by Tom Murphy

Ghost Canyon Fest is “A Boundary-Pushing DIY Music Festival” that runs August 11-13 across three venues. The event germinated as an idea among friends in the bands New Standards Men, Moon Pussy and Almanac Man who attended and/or performed at events like PRF BBQ, Caterwaul and No Coast and felt there was enough interest and enough mutual connections among bands well outside of Denver to hold a viable, like-minded festival in the Mile High City. In year’s past Denver hosted multiple festivals of strongly focused curation like Goldrush Festival, Transistor Festival, Denver Noise Fest, DAD Fest , Ultra Metal and in Boulder Communikey among others but left field sounds are largely not included in most other festivals in Denver. Ghost Canyon Fest in its inaugural year of 2023 goes to some length to shine a light on those sounds in a more high profile way including a mention in a recent issue of The Wire as a festival of note. If you go, expect to see stars of local and non-local noise rock, post-metal, noise and experimental dance and drone including BIG|BRAVE, Quits, Masma Dream World, Big’N, Church Fire, Pleasure Venom and of course the projects of the event organizers. For a full list and a schedule of events please and to purchase passes for the weekend or single nights visit the Ghost Canyon Fest website. At the site you can link to curated playlists created by various artists performing that weekend. This interview includes a conversation with Jeremy Brashaw (New Standards Men), Cory Hager (Moon Pussy), Sean Dove (Almanac Man) and Brian Dooley (Almanac Man).

Listen to our interview with the organizers on Bandcamp and look for our interviews with various artists performing at Ghost Canyon Fest in the coming weeks.

Ghost Canyon Fest website

Best Shows in Denver and Beyond July 2023

Sparks perform at Boulder Theater on Sunday, July 9, 2023. Photo by Munachi Osegbu.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Wednesday and Thursday | 07.19 and 07.20
What: Caamp w/Carsie Blanton and Zach Nytomt (07.19) and Lady W r ay 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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Monday | 07.31
What: Overcalc (Nick Skro b isz 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.

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.

Best Shows in Denver and Beyond February 2023

**Chat Pile performs with Lingua Ignota at Stanley Hotel Feb 24 and 25, photo by Bayley Hanes**

Thursday | 02.02
What: Almira Gulch, Equine, Witch Baby and Fireball Rose
When: 8
Where: The Skylark Lounge
Why: The rare all avant-garde show at a club that normally hosts rock, pop and country including performances from musicians in the small free jazz scene in Denver as well as experimental guitar drone and jazz composer Equine.

Velvet Horns in 2023, photo by Tom Murphy

Friday | 02.03
What: Church Fire w/Elegant Everyone, Velvet Horns and An Antiquated Bluff
When: 8
Where: The Skylark Lounge
Why: Church Fire brings the weird and the emotionally charged electronic and industrial dance fire to the Skylark sharing the stage with the emo-folk-psychedelic Americana intensity of An Antiquated Bluff and the unabashedly queer emo of power punk trio Velvet Horns.

Friday | 02.03
What: BleakHeart w/Autumn Creatures and Fainting Dreams
When: 8
Where: Hi-Dive
Why: BleakHeart’s fusion of post-punk/dreampop and doom is not much like any other band in Denver now. Autumn Creatures from the Springs is a good fit on that bill since its own music bridges the worlds of electronic industrial, darkwave, post-metal, post-punk and shoegaze. And Fainting Dreams with its own roots in hardcore and progressive death metal finds a different musical outlet with its own emotionally rich take on dream pop.

Friday | 02.03
What: Voight w/Blackcell and DJ Eli
When: 8
Where: HQ
Why: Two giants of local post-punk and industrial music that doesn’t fit narrowly into either designation share the bill this night. Voight is more on the shoegaze end but has so thoroughly threaded techno into its mix that it has become its own fusion of styles. Blackcell has been around for around 30 years evolving its own eclectic sound borne out of noise, EBM and psychedelic industrial techno.

Totem Pocket, photo courtesy the artists

Saturday | 02.04
What: VCO, Totem Pocket and Business Cashmere
When: 8
Where: The Skylark Lounge
Why: Is VCO the band from Glasgow? Who can say. Seems unlikely but if it is, it’s a kind of synth heavy post-punk pop band. But either way opening the show are two of Denver’s more promising prospects in the local underground rocks scene. Totem Pocket is a psychedelic shoegaze band that apparently wasn’t bother to listen when someone said maybe you should mix influences like Dinosaur Jr, Animal Collective and Slowdive. The idea of indie rock has become a bit of a lifestyle marketing joke in recent years but when you hear Business Cashmere it’s like they took the challenge of doing something off center from the standard pop and experimental rock and disparate retro influences formula to craft music that seems to draw on genuine emotions and dream imagery.

Wednesday | 02.08
What: Blink 90210, Reckless Nights and SPELLS
When: 7
Where: Hi-Dive
Why: Garage rock with a touch of soul and blues band Reckless Nights is reuniting at the request of their friend Thomas/Tom Packard who is fighting stage 4 colon cancer and wanted to see one more show. So it’ll be a bit of an extravaganza. Joaquin Liebert has been a fixture of the local music and acting scene as the frontman of The Risk/Hi-Fidelity and various other projects over the years so he’ll bring high entertainment value. And so will SPELLS with their unabashed aiming for the highly attainable and completely acceptable 80% performance level but with higher than 80% songwriting and energy punk pop.

Gabriel Albelo Band in 2022, photo by Tom Murphy

Friday | 02.10
What: Gabriel Albelo & The Midnight Temples, Los Toms, Galleries and DJ Eddie B
When: 8
Where: Hi-Dive
Why: Gabriel Albelo & The Midnight Temples is releasing its new four song EP at this show. The group lead by former Silver Face guitarist and singer Gabriel Albelo is an amalgam of heavy psychedelia and what might be called progressive garage rock. It’s the kind of music that could only really come about from an intentional study of earlier psychedelic and art rock with an aim of wanting to do something with a similar impact but without coming off like a direct imitation. Also on the bill is the like-minded hard rock psych group Galleries.

Saturday | 02.11
What: The Red Scare w/Sunnnner, Legs. The Band, Cellar Smellar
When: 8
Where: Hi-Dive
Why: The Red Scare from Fort Collins sounds like it absorbed a great deal of Sonic Youth influence with its tonal and dynamic bends and favoring Lee Ranaldo’s offhand vocal style. But with a guitar palette like something born of the noisier end of The Swirlies and Lilys. Sunnnner is a little more challenging to suss out stylistically but other than a simple weirdo noise rock and scuzzy garage rock its exuberant live performances are simultaneously inviting and confrontational. Legs. The Band is another musical mutant also perfect for this bill with its unlikely and poweful combination of blues rock and punk fronted by the charismatic Marcus Macabre whose stage persona is equal parts Screamin’ Jay Hawkins and Bobby Hackney Sr. from Death.

Saturday | 02.11
What: ABANDONS, Only Echoes and Edith Pike
When: 8
Where: The Squire Lounge
Why: ABANDONS is a trio whose music has roots in post-rock, post-metal, art prog and noisy strangeness generally. Its imaginative soundscapes are arranged in cinematic fashion with figures and moods evolving and figures fading in and out as the music progresses and by the end of a show you feel like you’ve been through something more than just a rock show. Only Echoes is one of Denver’s premier instrumental post-metal bands whose relentless yet modulated flow of melodic sounds suggest epic journeys without crossing over into cheesy pretension. Edith Pike is a band that somehow brings together strands of emo and powerviolence with post-rock like a weird amalgamation of Siege and The For Carnation.

Rubblebucket, photo courtesy Grand Jury Music

Saturday | 02.11
What: Rubblebucket w/Spaceface
When: 8
Where: Gothic Theatre
Why: Brooklyn’s Rubblebucket returned in 2022 with its album Earth Worship, the follow up to the triumphantly soulful and heartbreaking 2018 record Sun Machine. This new set of songs find’s the art pop duo taking its mutant jazz, R&B synthpop into seemingly another vista of poetic examination of yearning, identity and saying goodbye to significant chapters and relationships in your life as they are and embracing the vitality of what is already forming and yet to come. Spaceface released one of the more lively retro psych pop records of 2022 with the self-aware Anemoia. When it toured in support of the album in clubs it was like getting to see a band making use of the space like they were both glam rock rock gods and a teenybopper pop band and made it work. It didn’t hurt the songs were also irresistible in their colorfully trippy melodies baked into solid dance rhythms.

Saturday | 02.11
What: The Charlatans and Ride
When: 8
Where: Ogden Theatre
Why: The Charlatans and Ride both formed in 1988 in time to be a part of exciting movements of music coming out of the UK and across the Atlantic. The Charlatans were creating emotionally rich psychedelic pop songs wedded to some of the aesthetics of acidhouse and got lumped in a bit with the whole Madchester thing but were in many ways an early example of what came to be called Britpop. But these clumsy designations aside, The Chalatans’ songs then and now have a freshness of spirit that has meant its older songs have aged well and its new music as exemplified by its 2017 album Different Days hits with a modern resonance informed by an older person’s sense of nuance and perspective minus the ossified self-congratulation. Ride was certainly one of the flagship bands of shoegaze and its debut album Nowhere (1990) helped to define the subgenre. Its 1992 follow-up Going Blank Again pushed the fidelity of its massive guitar sound further and pointed at where the group would travel further in its songwriting with hints of electronic elements and a more evolved psychedelic pop. Its own latest album 2018’s Tomorrow’s Shore proved the band wasn’t stuck in some phase of trying to recapture old glory and demonstrated a knack for inventive melodic turns of phrase and strong pop hooks. This tour is a perfect match of classic bands who still have something to say rather than merely resting on their laurels as “legendary” acts.

Chella and The Charm in 2022, photo by Tom Murphy

What: Chella and the Charm w/Team Nonexistent and Calamity
When: 8
Where: The Skylark Lounge
Why: Michelle Caponigro is rebooting her Sweethearts of the Rodeo Valentine’s show for this performance of Chella and the Charm. The band’s music is a beautiful fusion of passionate Americana and rock poetry with uncanny insights into the intricacies and glories and pitfalls of human relationships and one’s own relationship with oneself in a world that can often put challenges that can work to dissolve anything you build. Caponigro’s lyrics in their various ways highlight how navigating these dangerous waters can reveal to you the essence of what makes one’s struggles worthwhile. Team Nonexistent is a band still exploring its sound but its jagged and scrappy energy hits as punk but with a defiant vulnerability that makes its songwriting more interesting than a lot of bands in that vein. Calamity is the brainchild of Kate Hannington and depending on the show you see you might think it’s more noisy indie rock or lushly expansive indiepop. But either way, Hannington’s commanding and expressive vocals deliver literate and imaginative tales of getting through life in challenging times without succumbing to an understanding impulse to despair.

Allison Lorenzen in 2022, photo by Tom Murphy

Saturday | 02.11
What: Allison Lorenzen and Midwife
When: 7:30/8
Where: Chautauqua Community House
Why: Allison Lorenzen and Madeline Johnston (Midwife) have both been putting out some of the most deeply moving music in the realm of indie folk of recent years. Really, both are experimental artists whose body of work is both unpretentiously conceptual and dig deep into places in the psyche that can be challenging to bring to light and articulate in ways that make them accessible. Both recently released a collaborative cover of Bush’s 1994 hit “Glycerine” (video below) but of course make it an affecting and transformative listening experience. This rare collaborative show in a place like Chautauqua Community House will bring something raw yet sophisticated and genuine to a place that usually hosts more commercially established artists.

Tuesday | 02.14
What: Midwife, H Lite, Polly Urethane and Debaser
When: 7
Where: Hi-Dive
Why: Midwife follows up a show in Boulder with like-minded transcendent indie folk experimentalist Allison Lorenzen with this headlining date at the Hi-Dive. The show includes performances from glitch IDM abstract dance electronica artist H Lite, the always surprising and theatrical classical/industrial noise/musique concrète/songwriter Polly Urethane and her shows that seem to be different in fundamental ways from performance to performance and OG DIY Denver Godfather Josh Taylor (Friends Forever, Foot Village, Secret Girls, Monkey Mania, The Smell etc.) performing with his bass and drums (the instruments, not the electronic music style) etc. project Debaser.

Tuesday | 02.14
What: Matt Anderson and Mariel Buckley
When: 7
Where: Soiled Dove Underground
Why: For over twenty years Juno Award nominated songwriter Matt Andersen brings his tour in support of his 2022 album House to House to Denver. His warm and intimate performances are both passionate and informed by a gentleness of spirit that is immediately commanding and inviting with a musical style that taps into a blues and folk tradition influenced by a heaping of soul and R&B. Also on this tour is Mariel Buckley who released her own latest album in 2022 with Everywhere I Used to Be and its candid and incredibly relatable lyrics. Though known as something of a country artist the new record reveals Buckley to be a much more musically eclectic artist who weaves in sounds and styles in a way that complements well her expressive vocals and richly emotional musical delivery.

Wednesday | 02.15
What: Midwife w/Edith Pike, Viewfinder and Autumn Creatures
When: 6/7
Where: Vultures
Why: Midwife completes her journey through Colorado with a show in the Springs at Vultures just east of The Black Sheep with noise rock hardcore group Edith Pike and electro-shoegaze band Autumn Creatures.

Thursday and Friday | 02.16 and 02.17
What: Jerry Harrison & Adrian Belew: Remain In Light w/Cool Cool Cool
When: 7
Where: Ogden Theatre (02.16) and Boulder Theater (02.17)
Why: Jerry Harrison was a founding member of art punk weirdo quartet Talking Heads whose 1980 experimental pop masterpiece Remain in Light was unexpectedly its gateway into the mainstream with the broadcast of the quirky video for “Once in a Lifetime” in regular rotation when MTV launched in 1981. For the support tour of the album former Frank Zappa band guitarist and touring member of David Bowie’s band for the Isolar II Tour Adrian Belew (who went on to a long stint with King Crimson as well as Bowie again and a distinguished solo career) was brought on board for some of Talking Heads’ most memorable live performances as captured on film and live recordings. So the two musicians are performing the iconic album for these performances. While not including the other members of the Talking Heads it should be an interesting execution of the material given the musicians involved.

Weird Al Qaida in 2014, photo by Tom Murphy

Friday | 02.17
What: Weird Al Qaida album release
When: 8:30-10
Where: Mutiny Information Café
Why: Weird Al Qaida got off the ground in 2008/2009 when Eric Peterson and Ingvald Grunder formed the experimental project with the aim of being able to explore whatever musical ideas came to mind. Both had been in bands in and around the Denver music scene for years prior with Peterson having played in power pop/punk pop group The Barrys and Grunder having spent some time in Orbit Service. Weird Al Qaida doesn’t fit nicely into any Denver subscene not being quite noise enough for that world though elements of musique concrète, ambient and noise are elements of its songwriting and not quite psychedelic folk or jazz enough for a more mainstream version of that. But its fascinating body of recorded work including the 2011 seven inch Psychic Wizard, 2016’s Plastic Family and now the 2022 record The Dog & The Deer showcase imaginative soundscaping and arrangements that expand categories of what music can be while remaining essentially accessible.

Friday | 02.17
What: Plasma Canvas album release w/Cheap Perfume, SPELLS and WIFF
When: 7
Where: Seventh Circle Music Collective
Why: Plasma Canvas is celebrating the release of its new album DUSK with a series of shows along the front range in February and March beginning with this show at the long running DIY space Seventh Circle Music Collective. The punk/emo/hard rock band’s heartfelt and cathartic songs has earned it a cult following beyond Colorado with anthemic lyrics and exuberant live performances. The album recorded at The Blasting Room by Andrew Berlin and mixed by Jason Livermore, produced by Bill Stevenson, is the first release to include the four piece lineup of founding members Adrienne Rae Ash (vocals/guitar) and Evalyn Flowers (drums) along with second guitarist Frankie Harlin and bassist Jarod Ford. And if you’ve been able to catch the band in the past year you’ve witnessed the power of the new palette of sounds. For this show and the performance in the Springs there will be the searing and inspirational, unabashedly feminist punk of Cheap Perfume, SPELLS whose workmanlike punk pop songwriting delivered with raw energy is always surprisingly likeable and WIFF whose blend of power pop and punk has a fuzzy tinge of 90s alternative rock.

New Ben Franklins in 2021, photo by Tom Murphy

Friday | 02.17
What: New Ben Franklins w/Jimbo Darville & The Truckadours (15th Annual Waylon Jennings Tribute show)
When: 8
Where: Globe Hall
Why: Waylon Jennings is one of the most celebrated figures in country music. As a young man he was hired by Buddy Holly to play bass and as fate would have it he gave up his seat on the flight in 1959 that killed Holly, The Big Bopper and Ritchie Valens. Throughout the 60s he played in his own rockabilly band but transitioned into a more country sound by the end of the decade and in the 1970s he was one of the main pioneers of the outlaw country movement. But throughout his career Jennings innovated in his songwriting craft and musicianship and while one might look askance at some of his autobiographical details his influence on the genre is indisputable up to his death in 2002. So a couple of the heavy hitters of local country and the better end of rockabilly have been doing cover sets in a show around the time of the songwriter’s passing on February 13.

Cheap Perfume in 2019, photo by Tom Murphy

Saturday | 02.18
What: Plasma Canvas, Cheap Perfume, SPELLS and Bad Year
When: 6/7
Where: Vultures
Why: See above about Plasma Canvas, Cheap Perfume and SPELLS. Except this will be in the great dive bar off of downtown Colorado Springs.

Tianna Esparanza, photo by Shervin Lainez

Saturday and Sunday | 02.18 and 02.19
What: Tianna Esperanza (with Mick Flannery both dates)
When: 6 (2.18 and 02.19)
Where: eTown Hall (02.18) and Swallow Hill (02.19)
Why: Tianna Esperanza released her debut album Terror on February 17, 2023. The early singles revealed the singer/songwriter’s knack for fusing jazz, pop and hip-hop into a set of songs imbued with a confidence and soul one would expect from a songwriter a decade older than her 22 years. As the granddaughter of former Slits and Raincoats drummer Paloma “Palmolive” McLardy, Esperanza had a different kind of upbringing in affluent Cape Cod, Massachusetts where there aren’t a lot of people that look like her and how that plays out as you navigate that kind of environment. She lost her younger brother growing up and survived sexual assault and all of that tragedy and misfortune and struggle though not necessary to create valid art gives some context to the melancholic moods and exuberant yet tempered defiant spirit heard throughout the album. She is performing a short run of live shows including two in Colorado opening for acclaimed Irish singer/songwriter Mick Flannery.

Sunday | 02.19
What: nü-age outlaws, Fragrant Blossom, SiLT & Zər03n-A, Matt Robidoux and Kelly Garlick
When: 7
Where: D3
Why: This is a showcase for some of the more left field techno, experimental electronic and ambient artists out of Denver and elsewhere now. Includes former Pizza Time and still current Dubble Trouble musician David Castillo in nü-age outlaws, Charles Ballas of Dan’l Boone and Howling Hex and Petite Garçon’s Ben Donehower in Fragrant Blossom, Matt Robidoux from San Francisco with his finely textured soundscapes, SiLT and Zər03n-A’s chill, field recording infused prepared sound designs combined with choreographed movements and Kelly Garlick’s futuristic fusion of pop, glitch and found sound composition.

Harsh Symmetry, photo from artist Bandcamp

Sunday | 02.19
What: Harsh Symmetry w/Plague Garden and DJ Niq V
When: 7
Where: HQ
Why: Julian Sharwarko’s crafts moody and dark electronic post-punk as Harsh Symmetry like a more synth-driven and lo-fi Comsat Angels by way of Boy Harsher with guitar. Denver’s Plague Garden has long offered some of the local scene’s most imaginative and emotionally rich post-punk colored with deeply evocative, New Wave-era-esque electronics.

Kristine Leschper, photo by Tyler Borchardt

Monday | 02.20
What: Kristine Leschper w/Duck Turnstone and Alana Mars
When: 8
Where: Hi-Dive
Why: Former Mothers singer Kristine Leschper released her debut solo effort in 2022 with The Opening, Or Closing Of A Door. The album hits like the manifestation of conceptualizing music as a physical presence in the sense of a prepared environment with sound sources occupying their own spaces in the mix with a subtle dynamism in sync with Leschper’s melodious vocals. Like an indie pop Laurie Anderson, Leschper offers a peek into a playfully mysterious storytelling that challenges the standard structures of social power and cognition. For the album the songwriter draws upon the familiarity of everyday objects and and expressions and deconstructs them and anchors them with new resonances.

Friday | 02.24
What: Dressy Bessy w/Waiting Room, Friends of Caesar Romero and Pink Lady Monster
When: 8
Where: Hi-Dive
Why: Indie pop legends Dressy Bessy headline this night at the Hi-Dive with the dream pop-esque stylings of Waiting Room which consists of former members of The Corner Girls and TúLips, garage pop ragers Friends of Caesar Romero and the current iteration of Pink Lady Monster which has evolved from a more ethereal pop sound to one more experimental and jazz-noise-funk-art-damaged.

Friday and Saturday | 02.24 and 02.25
What: Lingua Ignota and Chat Pile
When: 6
Where: Stanley Hotel
Why: Kristin Hayter has announced she’s retiring the Lingua Ignota project and this is probably the last chance to see the ritualistic industrial noise and classical project. Across a handful of albums Lingua Ignota has subverted the musical idiom of religious music and that steeped in that tradition with the symbols and patriarchal framing of spirituality with a caustic and always thrilling commentary in sound and word and her confrontational yet cathartic live shows feel like the exorcism of collective abuse and oppression the likes of which must have taken a toll with embodying that energy for several years. However Hayter emerges as an artist after this run it will likely be informed by the high level of imagination and craft she has brought to bear with Lingua Ignota. Opening is Chat Pile whose 2022 album God’s Country immediately garnered a cult following and critical acclaim for its especially pointed and poignant noise rock that scorched the notion that modern capitalism has any effect on the environment, society and our lives other than one of erosion, destruction and corruption throughout politics and economy and how that descends into the culture and how people think of their very lives. It’s a deeply provocative and thought provoking record that seems to hit right where it needs to but with a personal note that gives it the force that one doesn’t hear often enough in modern music.

Sunday | 02.26
What: JD Clayton and Tanner Usrey
When: Oskar Blues
Where: 9
Why: JD Clayton is touring in support of his new record Long Way From Home which dropped on January 27, 2023. The record is a poignant and warm account of navigating becoming a new father and the deep impact the pandemic had on his career and the cascading effects of that on his life and that of so many people around him and his circle of friends. It’s a well crafted set of songs in a style rooted in country but with a strength of songwriting that transcends genre with performances that are rich on small details without detracting from the spare and clear songwriting that Clayton expertly brings to stories of working class life in a time when that seems so precarious yet Clayton finds a way to highlight the joys and dignity that are part of his experience as well.

Sunday | 02.26
What: Suicide Forest, Belltower and Insipidus
When: 7
Where: Hi-Dive
Why: Tucson, Arizona-based Suicide Forest has created the kind of black metal that combines the transcendent with the feral in a way that seems nightmarish even it expresses a vulnerability in the face of a deeply uncertain future and the turmoil of trying to hold on to something of meaning when so many social and ecological forces seem on the verge of washing that all away. Or at least that’s the sound and sentiments heard on its 2021 album Reluctantly.

Monday | 02.27
What: Viagra Boys w/Spiritual Cramp
When: 7
Where: Ogden Theatre
Why: Over the past eight years Stockholm, Sweden’s Viagra Boys has established itself as one of the most exciting live rock bands with its surrealistic sense of humor and brash, charismatic live performance style. And its songs that take aim with humor and incisive rhetoric at right wing politics and the conspiracy theories that fuel them as well as the cult of masculinity that seems interwoven into alt-right culture and the ways that has poisoned mainstream framing of social issues. And Viagra Boys does all of that with a sense of fun while completely obliterating the lines between post-punk, garage rock and dance music. This reached a particularly high point with its 2022 album Cave World with its front to back art punk bangers including the single “Big Boy” featuring Jason Williamson with the like-minded weirdo punkers Sleaford Mods. Anyone fortunate enough to have caught the tour for Cave Weapons got to see a band in high form with attitude to burn but one that invited you along for the ride in celebrating the dismantling of toxic ideas with creativity and wit.

The Rural Alberta Advantage, photo by Colin Medley

Tuesday | 02.28
What: The Rural Alberta Advantage w/Georgia Harmer
When: 8
Where: Hi-Dive
Why: Toronto, Ontario’s The Rural Alberta Advantage formed in 2005 during an era when modern indie rock was starting to form an identity in myriad forms but influenced by 90s indiepop, 60s rock and folk and a heart on sleeves approach to writing lyrics. The group’s 2008 debut album Hometowns was a warm fusion of lo-fi sonics and forward thinking nostalgia rooted in stories of life coming from places that maybe one didn’t full appreciate when coming up there but which one can look back on with the fondness you can only have once you’ve outgrown your roots some. The trio of Amy Cole, Nils Edenloff and Paul Banwatt returned in 2022 with EP The Rise, its first release since Cole rejoined the band in 2018 after a roughly two year hiatus. Intact are the lush chamber pop element and Edenloff’s earnest and gritty vocal melodies and a knack for taking an everyday story rendering it into an epic of relatable proportions.

Tuesday | 02.28
What: American Authors w/Billy Raffoul
When: 7
Where: Gothic Theatre
Why: American Authors has been carving a bit of a following for itself for its upbeat, sunny, posi folk pop songs since 2006 when it called itself The Blue Pages. It’s 2023 album Best Night of My Life is a bit like the brighter side of a modern update of Friday Night Lights without the football and after the weirdness of high school is left behind and you are on to building and achieving the life you want. It’s definitely the kind of thing that’ll probably find its way onto the Indie 102.3 play list if it hasn’t already. Billy Raffoul’s own brand of indie folk pop is more self-effacing and self-aware, vulnerable and delivered with his gently gritty voice that ranges widely between nearly whispered intimate moments and a paradoxically full throated introspection. His singles since the 2021 release of Olympus have revealed that Raffoul is capable of even broader vistas of vocal performance and finely nuanced songcraft.

Tuesday | 02.28
What: Cafuné w/Bathe
When: 7
Where: Globe Hall
Why: Indie pop duo Cafuné met in the early 2010s while attending the Clive Davis Institute of NYC and it began as a side project that over the course of a few years became a more full time concern. Throughout the 2020 phase of the COVID-19 pandemic Noah Yoo and Sedona Schat wrote the material for their album Running which was initially released on their own imprint Aurelians Club before being picked up by Elektra in 2022 after which their ebullient single “Tek It” became something of a viral hit with its fetching blend of more classic pop and hyperpop.

Best Shows in Denver and Beyond December 2022

Palm performs at Larimer Lounge on December 6, 2022, photo by Eve Alpert

Thursday | 12.01
What: Wild Pink w/Trace Mountains and Knuckle Pups
When: 7
Where: Globe Hall
Why: Wild Pink’s John Ross wrote one of the great story albums of recent years with 2021’s A Billion Little Lights and its themes of coming to terms with adulthood while staying connected with one’s creative life and navigating the temptations to ditch music as the occupation of adolescence. And how through creative work one can explore an evolving sense of meaning that hits you throughout your thirties and the rest of your life. 2022’s ILYSM (an acronym for “I Love You So Much”) takes that perspective to examine the details of life that deepen one”s bond with the people in your life. Knuckle Pups in from Denver released a deeply self-reflective album with 2022’s TV Ready in which the ambitious pop band fuses radical vulnerability with a compassionate honesty that is not nearly common enough in the realm of indie rock or any form of music today. Sometimes earnestness can seem like a pose but with Knuckle Pups it seems inspirational in its lack of pretension.

Friday | 12.02
What: Cold Cave w/Voight and Hex Cassette
When: 7
Where: The Oriental Theater
Why: Wesley Eisold of Cold Cave has been mostly been releasing singles and EPs since the most recent full length album Cherish the Light Years came out in 2011. His most recent Fate in Seven Lessons (2021) is well within the realm of modern darkwave post-punk with his usual gift for teasing grit and darkness out of the songwriting although plenty of the music has a beautifully melodic melancholia reminiscent of New Order. Eisold has also been involved in a bit of writing including his work with the late, great Mark Lanegon on the book of poetry Plague Poems (2020). Opening the show are two Denver acts. Hex Cassette’s confrontational industrial dance music challenges notions of the role of artist and audience and breaking that barrier for a collective experience. Voight seems to be making good on its threat of completely injecting techno into its own searing shoegaze-infused post-punk and emotionally intense music.

Friday | 12.02
What: Decibel Magazine Metal & Beer Fest Denver 2022 Day 1: Cannibal Corpse, Dark Funeral, Immolation, Black Anvil, Onyx and In The Company of Serpents
When: 5
Where: Summit Music Hall
Why: This unique event includes some pretty extensive beer tasting for those so inclined but the real reason is to get to see some of the great extreme metal acts of today. That includes death metal legends Cannibal Corpse whose over the top gory lyrics have been banned in various countries despite how obviously absurd they are in the vein of the most demented horror movies of the 80s but really just more creative than a lot of those films. And the music itself stands up well in upholding the brutality of the lyrics with a technical proficiency worthy of the name of the band. Get there early to catch the bluesy, cinematic doom band from Denver In the Company of Serpents who don’t play Denver as much as they once did these days.

Saturday | 12.03
What: Decibel Magazine Metal & Beer Fest Denver 2022 Day 2: Pig Destroyer, Skinless, Wayfarer, Of Feather and Bone and Wake
When: 4
Where: Summit Music Hall
Why: Day two of this event includes more noteworthy acts out of the broad world of extreme metal including performances from Denver’s masters of cinematic doom, Wayfarer, the caustic death grind onslaught of Of Feather and Bone, the blackened grind of Calgary’s Wake and grindcore legends Pig Destroyer whose contorted and savagely brutal music is a fitting companion to JR Hayes’ darkly incisive lyrics about human experiences on the edge.

Saturday | 12.03
What: Soccer Mommy w/TOPS
When: 7
Where: The Ogden Theatre
Why: Sophia Allison has been writing music and performing as Soccer Mommy since she was in college before dropping out and moving back to Nashville to pursue her career as a musician full time. It helped that she had a record deal with Fat Possum which released her debut album Clean in 2018 before she turned twenty-one. The album’s emotional openness and unabashed embrace of unconventional melody and song structure while crafting undeniable hooks garnered the record widespread critical acclaim. The most recent Soccer Mommy album Somtimes, Forever (2022) was produced with Daniel Lopatin aka Oneohtrix Point Never and the team-up brought to Allison’s particularly confessional lyrics and always imaginative guitar work an experimental edge and sound design element for the songwriter’s most musically adventurous recording of her career thus far. Additionally, the lyrics probably startled listeners that expect artists to be vague in their sentiments in a pop song setting but hasn’t Allison been poetically pointed and vivid in her words all along? Opening the show is Montreal’s indie pop band TOPS whose gentle yet passionate compositions seem like they’d be pretty light and airy live as well but at the show the band seems to exude an unexpected vitality.

Saturday | 12.03
What: HaemoGoblin and Fast N Loose at L. Lazer art opening
When: 9
Where: The Crypt ($10 cash)
Why: HaemoGoblin is an electronic duo that will be performing what it calls a ritualistic invocation. Calling the performance “Inauguration” what you will see is a “mini stage play set to music, designed to disorient, disturb and ‘shake awake’ the audience for a half hour or longer.” What will this look like? Well, veteran carnie frontwoman Ortenzia von Deadworry and S.S.G. her “summoned demon” synth player will definitely bring some theater to an often very predictable local music scene. Also on the bill for this art opening featuring the work of L. Lazer is Fast N Loose is a Motorhead tribute band.

The Soft Moon in 2015, photo by Tom Murphy

Sunday | 12.04
What: The Soft Moon w/Nuovo Testamento and Kill You Club DJs
When: 8
Where: Hi-Dive
Why: Luis Vasquez was a little ahead of the curve when he launched The Soft Moon in 2009. Originally a solo project, The Soft Moon evolved to become more of a live band that brought Vasquez’s songs of nervy energy and anxiety-purging urgency to life. His most recent album is 2022’s Exister which in the wake of one of the most challenging periods in recent world history on a wide scale is a catharsis of overcoming the enervating influences that come your way and considering the mere continuation of existence a triumph in itself. The songs seem to have leaned more into the industrial side of Vasquez’s songwriting with some real visceral power driving the moody atmospherics. Los Angeles-based darkwave/synth pop band Nuovo Testamento opens the show.

Sunday | 12.04
What: Hembree w/Little Hurt, False Report and Mae Mae
When: 7
Where: Larimer Lounge
Why: Hembree from Kansas City, Missouri that formed in 2015 and its big break to a national audience was the placement of its single “Holy Water” in an Apple ad during Super Bowl LII. The group’s tight rhythms serve as a foundation for the rest of the songwriting to stretch out whether into focused, unadorned rock songs or expansive, moody pieces and the techno-underpinned indie funk that is at the core of its sound. The group’s new album It’s a Dream! is a record tinged with nostalgic examinations of the roots of current anxieties and insecurities expressed in hazy melodies and resonating tones driven by a hypnotic beat. On the surface it may sound like another current indie rock offering with more than its fair share of more imaginative songwriting but Hembree really charts an internal journey in which one is prepared to exit the gauntlet of lucid dreams trapped in feeling everything until it makes sense and after one is able to move through tangled emotional memories.

The Lemonheads, photo by Barry Brescheisen

Monday | 12.05
What: The Lemonheads w/Bass Drum Of Death and On Being an Angel https://www.bluebirdtheater.net/events/detail/443688
When: 7
Where: The Bluebird Theater
Why: The Lemonheads are one of few still extant bands to have come to prominence during the alternative rock era that didn’t quite fit in with the more trendy subgenres that made that era one of the most vibrant in the history of popular music. Its own brand of power pop was a vehicle for the songwriting of only constant member, singer and guitarist Evan Dando. The latter seems to have an ability to look into situations and people and extrapolate poetic insights with a compassionate perspective. The title track of the group’s 1992 breakthrough album It’s A Shame About Ray isn’t just about a troubled person who doesn’t fit in with any school and its politics, it’s about feeling like a perpetual outsider and the rest of the songs on the record are vivid stories about people we all know and might even be in a way that didn’t comport with the tales of desperation one heard in a lot of grunge and too “dark” for more faux posi faire of that era to now. Ever since The Lemonheads went on hiatus in 1997 and returned to operations in 2005, the group hasn’t been prolific with original material but Dando’s interpretations of artists that have influenced him on Varshons (2009) Varshons 2 (2019) have been a peek into what Dando’s brain has latched onto for inspiration and perhaps for this performance we’ll get to hear what the veteran songwriter has been up to in recent years. One thing is for certain his own songs have aged far better than those of many of his contemporaries owing in part to the gentle but raw honesty of the songwriting. Also on this bill is Bass Drum of Death originally from Oxford, Mississippi whose blues tinged noisy garage rock has a refreshing level of grit and menace befitting the name of the project.

Monday | 12.05
What: W.A.S.P. w/Armored Saint
When: 7
Where: The Oriental Theater
Why: W.A.S.P. is the kind of band out of the glam metal era in Los Angeles of the 1980s that more than any other group out of that world that courted controversy. Its music was and is a spirited, melodic hard rock with a strong sense of theater even in the songwriting. Sure its cover art for its debut single “Animal (Fuck Like a Beast)” with the circular saw codpiece offended people that took it more literally than could even remotely be intended. Certainly former guitarist Chris Holmes looked the buffoon drunk in a pool with his mother sitting by in the 1988 documentary The Decline of Western Civilization Part II: The Metal Years seemed to affirm the extreme and self-destructive hedonism associated with the band. But at its best W.A.S.P. were avatars of a music scene that could be cartoonish, bombastic and puerile while offering an alternative to a conformist puritanical culture with its lurid and triumphant storytelling. Perhaps co-headlining though less notorious is Armored Saint who also started in 1982 in Los Angeles and also pre-dated glam metal though often associated with that world of music due to the big hair and knack for solid melodic hooks. But like W.A.S.P. there was something with more edge than most of its glam rock contemporaries. While never quite having any mainstream breakthrough hits, Armored Saint was a staple of 1980s metal that has held up better than much of the music out of the 1980s Los Angeles heavy metal scene has.

Water From Your Eyes, photo by Ana Fangayen

Tuesday | 12.06
What: Palm w/Water From Your Eyes
When: 7
Where: Larimer Lounge
Why: As Water From Your Eyes, Nate Amos and Rachel Brown have made a career of using an eclectic and ever evolving palette of sounds to explore ideas and concepts through what could be considered dance pop. That is if your frame of reference might be the experimental electronic and punk out of New York and Los Angeles of the last fifteen years. Its 2020 album 33:44 is something you’d expect more out of a band on the Northern Spy label with its beautifully dire, ambient and modern classical soundscapes that are almost an homage to Penderecki’s “Threnody for the Victims of Hiroshima” crossed with Howard Shore’s work for the films of David Cronenberg. But the duo’s most recent album Structure at times sounds like what might have happened if Aphex Twin in writing Selected Ambient Works Volume II had decided to turn those into pop songs. Except that Water From Your Eyes inserts enigmatic spoken word elements that serve as a a meta narrative that re-configures traditional album structure and gives the whole album a non-linear quality made cohesive by reimagining the nature of how creative work is structured. Fitting that this arty yet incredibly accessible group is sharing the stage with Philadelphia’s art rock weirdos Palm touring in support of Nicks and Grazes, an album that sounds like the band challenged its members to go on separate retreats to clear their minds of contemporary influences and to immerse themselves in non-musical art forms and come back to make the kind of psychedelic rock record that comes across like a collage of playful daydreams and arranged in a way that brushes aside conventional structure itself.

Thursday and Friday | 12.08 and 12.09
What: OFF! w/Zulu
When: 8
Where: Hi-Dive
Why: OFF! is of course the newer hardcore project fronted by legendary vocalist Keith Morris formerly of Black Flag and of Circle Jerks. The current lineup includes founding member Dmitri Coats of Burning Brides on guitar and as of 2021 Autry Fulbright II on bass and Justin Brown on drums. After an eight year hiatus on releases, OFF! released Free LSD in 2022. It’s still the searing hardcore sound you’d expect from the group but there are some clear differences with what sounds like synth and other ambient sounds giving the songs a psychedelic feel that wasn’t so much a part of its earlier sound. A refreshing update for a band that still maintains the intensity and edge without being stuck in a stylistic rut. Opening both dates at the Hi-Dive is anti-racist powerviolence band Zulu which injects its music with R&B samples and eschews the tough guy stance of hardcore.

Friday | 12.09
What: Pond w/Cryogeyser — rescheduled to April 16, 2023
When: 8
Where: Gothic Theatre
Why: Pond has shared membership with Tame Impala over the years with lead singer Nick Albrook being involved with both bands for a few years and Kevin Parker serving as drummer in earlier years and as a producer until 2020. The polished psychedelic pop of its first eight albums was helped in no small part due to Parker’s influence in the production department but with the 2021 album 9, Pond has given us its most interesting record to date with more grit in its overall sound, some edge to its funk elements and a willingness to embrace some rawness in its sound as well as take its atmospherics into a realm flirting with space rock. Los Angeles-based jangle fuzz trio Cryogeyser opens the show with its melancholic, lo-fi dream pop.

Friday | 12.09
What: Obituary w/Amon Amarth, Carcass and Cattle Decapitation
When: 5:30
Where: The Fillmore Auditorium
Why: Obituary is touring ahead of the 2023 release of its new album Dying of Everything. After nearly 40 years as a band exploring the outer edges of the death metal format and pioneering some of that aesthetic it can be challenging to have something new to say with your music and a return to form can be tedious. But Obituary this time decided to stick to writing a strong set of material worthy of its pre-1997 split output. The dire messaging delivered with still convincingly brutal vocals but without cartoonish lyrics. Rounding out the bill are Seattle grindcore outfit Cattle Decapitation who are somehow both keenly aware of the absurdity and cruelty of modern human civilization and the need to ridicule the hubris of our species without making light of the situation in which we and other animals find ourselves due to a tolerance for savage forms of economic and social organization. And yes, grindcore/death metal legends/pioneers Carcass and Swedish, melodic death metal group Amon Amarth and its proclivity for lyrics about the Viking Age and a time before the Christian domination of Nordic culture.

The Smile, from the band’s Facebook page

Saturday and Sunday | 12.10 and 12.11
What: The Smile w/Robert Stillman
When: 7
Where: Mission Ballroom
Why: The Smile is Thom Yorke and Jonny Greenwood of Radiohead fame with drummer Tom Skinner of Sons of Kemet. The trio made its debut at Glastonbury Festival in 2021 and its music produced during the limitations of association and collaboration during the COVID-19 lockdown emerged as an intimate and spacious, lonely set of melodies and fragile emotional expressions. In 2022 the group released its debut album A Light for Attracting Attention. The record is contemplative as one might expect with the musicians involved but also vulnerable and open in sentiments embracing a massive level of uncertainty and peril that continues to flow seemingly unchecked in a world beyond the ongoing pandemic and perpetuating a sustained anxiety that will have untold impacts for decades to come and written about in history books or their equivalent in some future time should such indulgences be permitted in a post-authoritarian era. The Smile seems to have written a record from the perspective of people keenly attuned to these concerns and not knowing if they’ll live long enough to see better days but not being attached to a sinking spirit of despair.

Bartees Strange, photo by Luke Piotrowski

Wednesday | 12.14
What: Bartees Strange w/Pom Pom Squad and They Hate Change
When: 7
Where: The Bluebird Theater
Why: Bartees Leon Cox Jr. has worn various hats in his career both musical and otherwise. But he is perhaps best known for his music under the moniker Bartees Strange following his stint in in the post-hardcore band Stay Inside. With the release of his 2020 debut Live Forever, Cox has proven himself a master of writing emotionally nuanced and vulnerable pop songs that incorporate elements of indie folk and, synth pop and hip-hop but with a production element that seems to make the music and its complex arrangements hit with a stirring immediacy. Fans of Twin Shadow will hear some similar sonic touchstones and the sophomore album Farm to Table (2022) revealed more of Cox’s gift for genre bending to great effect in delivering songs that are at once deeply personal and politically charged.

Thursday | 12.15
What: Twin Tribes w/Dancing Plague and Plague Garden
When: 7
Where: HQ
Why: Twin Tribes from Brownsville, TX have garnered no small amount of buzz for its blend of minimal synth and post-punk and a kind of vitality amid melancholic tones. Its most recent studio album Ceremony (2019) sounds like songs written during a flurry of peak emotions and capturing the urgency and desperation of a recent breakup. In most cities of size, Twin Tribes is performing in medium sized clubs but in Denver we’re fortunate to be able to catch the popular band in a small club like HQ. Dancing Plague is a darkwave solo act from Portland, OR whose dusky synth pop is like a darker OMD with some touches of influence from John Maus. In the interest of full transparency, the author of this blurb is in Plague Garden, a noteworthy post-punk/New Wave band from Denver.

Thursday | 12.15
What: ABANDONS w/Old Soul Dies Young, Almanac Man and Fainting Dreams
When: 7
Where: Hi-Dive
Why: This show is a nice split of experimental noise rock and shoegaze. ABANDONS might at another time be considered a post-rock band but in its mix one hears bits of post-metal, noise rock and ambient and it live shows have a visceral quality with music that one might more expect to be performed in a more meditative spirit. Old Soul Dies Young is the kind of band that happens when guys who were way into post-hardcore and doom drop that sound palette for something more melodic and atmospheric but with the same level of sonic bombast. Almanac Man is like a collision of doom and borderline aggressive, Chicago style noise rock. Fainting Dreams is the kind of dream pop band that comes about when its members maybe came up through hardcore and death metal and are shedding the aggression and mathematical precision and heaviness for radical vulnerability and dreamlike tones.

Friday | 12.16
What: Sounds for Charity: Avarice, Organ, No More Cheering, Gabriel Albelo
When: 7
Where: Glob
Why: Proceeds from this show go to Colorado Coalition for the Homeless. Warm weather gear and hand warmers also accepted. For your donation you can catch the glitch industrial dance stylings of Organ, Gabriel Albelo’s solo performance of his heavy psychedelic rock, Avarice’s dark, menacing industrial techno and the prepared noise environment soundscapes of No More Cheering.

Meet the Giant in 2022, photo by Tom Murphy

Saturday | 12.17
What: Love Stallion w/Shanghai Metro Temple and Meet the Giant
When: 8
Where: Lost Lake
Why: Love Stallion is basically an 80s style glam metal band and if that’s your thing they’re definitely on the better end of the modern version of that with of course stage antics and style and the level of musicianship you’d expect. Shanghai Metro Temple is a fairly straight ahead indie rock band that sounds like it is heavily influenced by late 90s alternative and hard rock. Meet the Giant fuse downtempo electronic pop with post-punk, heavy shoegaze and imaginative soundscapes on the production end.

Saturday | 12.17
What: Bluebook w/Wave Decay and Mon Cher
When: 8
Where: Globe Hall
Why: Bluebook these days isn’t the experimental indie folk jazz band of its early days. Instead there is a darkness and not so buttoned downed, controlled intensity to the performances. Seems like Julie Davis is letting her flaws, anxieties and dreams hang more loosely with this version of the band and that has just meant its music has blossomed more and its sound palette greatly expanded with the inclusion of formery Monofog and Snake Rattle Rattle Snake singer Hayley Helmericks on drums and backing vocals, Jess Parsons on keys and other instrumentation and maybe even Anna Morsett on guitar. Wave Decay is the kind of band that sounds like it took the door through psych garage into more shoegaze sounds and all the better for it. Mon Cher’s music is a particularly transporting and lies somewhere between dream pop and downtempo jazz.

Milk Blossoms in 2021, photo by Tom Murphy

Saturday | 12.17
What: Milk Blossoms w/Meek and Knuckle Pups
When: 8
Where: Hi-Dive
Why: Knuckle Pups write radically vulnerable and thoughtful indie pop in the classic mold and its 2022 album TV Ready is both heartbreaking and uplifting. Milk Blossoms play a rare show with Michelle Rocquet now that she spends much of her time in New York City for professional and academic pursuits. So with this configuration of the band you’ll get the full dual vocal effect of powerfully rendered, tender pop songs that are irresistibly twee and cathartic.

Master Ferocious in 2021, photo by Tom Murphy

Sunday | 12.18
What: Never Kenezzard w/Zingaro, Sea of Flame and Master Ferocious
When: 3
Where: Globe Hall
Why: Never Kenezzard don’t really fit in with the metal scene so much though its blend of progressive rock sensibilities, doom and psychedelia finds it in a particularly more interesting corner of that realm of music. Sea of Flame are a sludge rock/doom band whose epic arrangements are not the rote edition of what doom has become. Master Ferocious somehow mix classic power metal with glam rock without seeming corny because the musicianship is so strong and the performance bordering on theatrical.

Alaska Thunderfuck, photo by Albert Sanchez

Sunday | 12.18
What: Alaska Thunderfuck Presents: The Red 4 Filth Tour
When: 7
Where: The Bluebird Theater
Why: Alaska Thunderfuck is perhaps best known for her competing in RuPaul’s Drag Race but over the last several years she has cultivated a pop music career. Steeped in modern electronic pop and a showcase for her outsize stage persona. Her latest album Red 4 Filth leaves behind some of the camp and humor of previous releases with a more obviously sincere set of pop songs that bring together sounds from hip-hop and classic modern pop including a cover of “All That She Wants” by Ace of Base.

Thursday | 12.22
What: FaceMan Western Jupiter vinyl release, Tivoli Club Brass Band and Anthony Ruptak
When: 7
Where: The Skylark Lounge/Bobcat Club
Why: Faceman celebrates the release of its latest album on vinyl as well as making available on vinyl for the first time its 2016 album Wild and Hunting. The band fronted by Steve Faceman has long offered finely crafted pop Americana with an experimental edge though its new album Western Jupiter shows an embrace of a more straightforward approach to songcraft. But every release is fulled with songs that have heartfelt and sharply observed lyrics in stories about life that feel like they’re part of your life because Steve has honed in on an aspect of culture and social reality that seems to be in the air in that moment. In years past Faceman has put on theatrical performances with set pieces and costumes that help to illustrate the music in dramatic fashion in collaboration with local visual artists who have helped to make these outfits and elaborate sets and pieces of artwork like the stage Megalodon of several years ago or the huge tornado of paper made for the epic Faceman’s 100 Year Storm event of 2016 at The Oriental Theater in which Faceman invited 100 bands to perform. So there’s a bit of community involvement and creative vision behind what drives the band even if it’s not necessarily abundantly obvious from listening to its excellent songs on their own.

Friday | 12.23
What: Baby Baby, Gila Teen, SORROWS and Ray Diess
When: 7
Where: Enigma Bazaar
Why: Baby Baby is the indie dream pop project of Lily Conrad. Reminiscent of bedroom pop artists of the late 90s and 2000s and has the aesthetics of lo-fi but with better sound production than much of that stuff often had. Gila Teen is the genre defying emo-shoegaze-post-punk band whose eccentric songs nevertheless always seem to be a direct line into the anxieties and affections coursing through the cosmos at the given moment of the performance. SORROWS is an emotionally charged downtempo band comprised of vibrant vocals, elegantly crafted rhythms and electronic production. Ray Diess is one of the Denver scene’s most compelling darkwave pop artists operating today.

Julian Street Nightmare, photo by Tom Murphy

Friday | 12.23
What: Fast Eddy, Julian Street Nightmare and Morning Oil
When: 8
Where: Globe Hall (free)
Why: When garage punk and the more mundane end of psychedelic rock collapsed under the weight of its own hubris and fake excitement some of the people who were on one end of that broader scene with any talent or imagination had to do something different and Fast Eddy came out of that milieu as a solid power pop band. Julian Street Nightmare create music from a thrilling nexus of post-punk, surf rock and art rock. Morning Oil sounds like it took some bit of inspiration from the better part of 80s glam metal and The Dead Boys.

Tuesday | 12.27
What: The Roots and BIG K.R.I.T.
When: 7
Where: Mission Ballroom
Why: The Roots are the influential, jazz rooted hip-hop band from Philadelphia that many may also know for serving as the house band on The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon. Its use of live musical instrumentation has always set The Roots apart from most hip-hop groups whose use of samples is most often used to craft the beat and thus its live performances have a powerful physical presence that is impossible to duplicate otherwise. Big K.R.I.T. is the acclaimed rapper and producer from Mississippi whose eclectic production and socially conscious lyrics seem to hit at a very grassroots level of appeal with an accessible sound and a way of presenting heady ideas in a way that is both creative and personally relatable.

Thursday | 12.29
What: Watch Yourself Die, Voight, Sell Farm https://www.eventbrite.com/e/sell-farm-voight-wyd-at-the-mercury-cafe-tickets-481076160747?aff=ebdshpsearchautocomplete
When: 8
Where: Mercury Café
Why: Watch Yourself Die is kind of a post-punk supergroup comprised of members of Hex Cassette, Ray Diess and Julian Street Nightmare. Voight has long blurred the line between shoegaze, post-punk, darkwave and techno and infused it with emotionally intense live performances. Sell Farm might be an indiepop band but one that doesn’t see a reason why heavy dub and industrial music can’t be a part of the overall wheelhouse of sounds going into the project’s eclectic but always interesting songwriting.

Thursday | 12.29
What: Discomfort Creature w/Curious Things, Nightfishing
When: 8
Where: Hi-Dive
Why: Discomfort Creature is a punk band from Denver whose lineup includes current and former members of Gamits and Uphollow and this show signals the vinyl release of its 2021 self-titled debut on Snappy Little Numbers now that Chris Fogal is back in town for the occasion from his current residence in Switzerland. The record is an energetic fusion of pop punk and the more angular, Dischord-esque variety of punk.

Brotherhood of Machines at Deep Club event in 2014, photo by Tom Murphy

Friday | 12.30
What: FOANS, Brotherhood of Machines (album release) and Luxury Hearse
When: 9
Where: Broadway Roxy
Why: FOANS is the brainchild of producer Andrew Dahabrah whose melancholic house and techno music has been at the center of Denver’s underground dance music world for several years. Luxury Hearse is the project of Dan Coleman (Blank Human) and Rin Howell (Psychic Secretary) that breaks the barrier between techno, ambient and musique concrète. Brotherhood of Machines is apparently returning with its first new release and album in over six years. The project live has been a mysterious and sonically rich example of where ambient, abstract industrial, techno and noise converge to produce a sound that establishes a deep sense of mood and place.

To Be Continued…

Queen City Sounds Podcast S2E13: ABANDONS

ABANDONS is an experimental rock trio from Denver comprised of guitarist Brenton Dwyer, bassist Nate Colbert and drummer Sam Mowat. The group met through Craigslist ads and coalesced to start writing their first instrumental tracks in 2019 before looking to play shows. It was an odd time in the Denver underground scene with not as robust an infrastructure for bands not playing fairly established styles of music to perform for a potential audience as there had been in years past and then of course the 2020 pandemic hit. During the long period when no responsible person that wasn’t desperate wasn’t playing shows ABANDONS recorded a live EP at Mutiny Information Café on August 29, 2020. The recording is the group’s sole available release on Bandcamp and the entire performance was released on YouTube. ABANDONS hadn’t played many shows in general before 2022 due to the obvious restrictions but the band quickly found like-minded artists in the local post-rock and art rock community such as exists in the current phase of the Denver music scene. Projects like New Standards Men, Brother Saturn, Only Echoes, Moon Pussy and Almanac Man are some of the peers, none of which sound remotely alike, with whom ABANDONS has found some kinship. Its own mostly instrumental, music rooted in improvisation is cinematic, takes strands of post-rock structure, noise rock intensity and its own flavor or vibrantly emotional soundscape-y compositions.

Listen to our interview with ABANDONS on Bandcamp, check out the live video and the EP linked below and follow the project on Instagram and Facebook.

Best Shows in Denver and Beyond August 2022

The Wild Hearts Tour featuring Sharon Van Etten, Angel Olsen and Julien Baker at Sculpture Park August 7, 2022, photo by Alysse-Gafkjen

Horse Jumper of Love, photo from Bandcamp

Monday | 08.01
What: Horse Jumper of Love w/Cryogeyser, Cherished and Fainting Dreams
When: 7 p.m.
Where: Hi-Dive
Why: Boston’s Horse Jumper of Love is that rare band that can somehow be simultaneously a post-punk band and a psychedelic Americana band. Its new album Natural Part has a haunted grittiness that is at times reminiscent of Big Star at its gloomiest and Built to Spill in an introspective mood. Cryogeyser might be considered a bit of a slowcore band even though plenty of its songs aren’t so slow and employ jangly guitar in the way Lush did in its more pop songwriting. Cherished used to be called Lowfaith and thus an intense deathrock band with knack for moody atmospherics. Fainting Dreams is a Denver-based slowcore duo whose introspective/melancholic songs shimmer and incandesce and bloom with lingering moods.

Psychedelic Furs in July 2016, photo by Tom Murphy

Tuesday | 08.02
What: The Psychedelic Furs w/X
When: 7 p.m.
Where: Mission Ballroom
Why: The Psychedelic Furs and X probably need no introduction as bands who in the first case popularized post-punk for a mainstream audience and in the second made arty, literary punk that didn’t shy away from its own roots in country and rockabilly while embracing the ferocious energy of the scene in which it found itself. Both began in 1977. The Furs in London, X in Los Angeles. The former had songs on movie soundtracks most notably the title track, as it were, of the 1986 John Hughes film. The latter were stars of the first underground punk movie of long lasting influence and notoriety, 1981’s The Decline of Western Civilization. Both wrote some of the most memorable songs of their time and genre. Both had many years off between their heyday and their most recent albums but with the most recent albums being among their best. And both still put on a compelling and powerful live show that will sound good in a place like Mission Ballroom.

Friday | 08.05
What: Florist w/Marc Merza
When: 5 p.m.
Where: Larimer Lounge
Why: Florist returns with a full band album with 2022’s self-titled album. Though the band is often dubbed with the indie folk label, fair enough, its gently atmospheric music sounds like it was written while contemplating deep feelings and thoughts while having the time to let the mind stretch out in a calm place and replicating that mood in the songwriting. The textural elements of the instrumentation, even when Emily Sprague has composed with her analog synths, are part of the appeal of the band’s music as it establishes a tactile as well as sonic intimacy that sets the band well apart from many other artists whose work is described as indie folk and on the new album there are parts that sound like musique concrète and field recordings used both in the mix and recreated with instruments. It makes for a different kind of listen than the usual pop arrangements that inform the music of most bands. Fans of Mega Bog will appreciate the unconventional style yet immediate accessibility of what Florist has to offer.

The Derelicts, photo by Christina Rogers from thederelicts.net

Friday | 08.05
What: The Derelicts w/Cyclo Sonic and Cease Fire
When: 8 p.m.
Where: Lost Lake
Why: The Derelicts are a punk/garage rock band from Seattle that formed in 1986 around the same time as Mudhoney who had similar musical roots and sensibilities. Maybe they both listened to a lot of The Saints and Radio Birdman. Known for bombastic performances and frontman Duane Bodenheimer’s irreverent stage banter, The Derelicts have remained a bit of an underground legend known among connoisseurs of late 80s and early 90s punk. Chances are The Derelicts encountered The Fluid during that late 80s period when the Denver-based band toured to the Pacific Northwest and played shows with like-minded groups among bands that would go on to form the core of grunge because The Fluid too was a band influenced heavily by the Stooges, garage rock and the like and arguably the most influential punk/post-punk band out of Denver in the 80s and 90s whether other bands know it or not. Matt Bischoff was the bass player for The Fluid but he’d also been in an earlier punk great Frantix from Aurora, Colorado whose single “My Dad’s a Fuckin’ Alcoholic” definitely strikes an immediate chord. These days Bischoff plays guitar in Cyclo Sonic. Sure musically it’s not a big leap from his other bands but fortunately for us Bischoff and his bandmates including Arnie and AJ Beckman formerly of garage punk band The Choosey Mothers and Jif Jipers of punk legends Rok Tots have written a some vital slabs of incredibly catchy punk which can be heard on their 2020 album Candied Rats and the earlier EPs. Cease Fire is a street punk band from Denver that includes former members of The Purple Fluid including Richard Kulwicki, one of the sons of the late great Fluid guitarist the senior Richard “Ricky” Kulwicki.

Angel Olsen at Larimer Lounge 2014, photo by Tom Murphy

Sunday | 08.07
What: The Wild Hearts Tour: Sharon Van Etten, Julien Baker and Angel Olsen w/Quinn Christopherson
When: 5 p.m.
Where: Mission Ballroom
Why: The Wild Hearts Tour is a showcase of three of the greatest songwriters to have emerged in the past fifteen years. Sharon Van Etten, Julien Baker and Angel Olsen are all artists who earned their reputations with strong songwriting and an inventive take on their specific musicianship styles establishing their own artistic voice early on in their respective careers. And each has gone on to push the boundaries of expectation for what they would do creatively with a body of work that is inventive and emotionally rich. As performers all three women have an openness and freshness of presentation that lends the show an air of the spontaneous that is consistently strikingly compelling. Van Etten’s 2022 album We’ve Been Going About This All Wrong is a bit of a departure from some of her earlier work with a sound that’s so spare it might throw off older fans but it also has an intimacy that has always been a part of her appeal as a songwriter but this one feels so very up close and direct. Julien Baker’s early releases proved she is a gifted songwriter able to take a very stripped down presentation of the music and letting her powerful and emotive voice speak for itself with wit and perceptive observations of self and of being a human navigating a life often fraught with challenges and discouragement. Her 2021 album Little Oblivions greatly expanded her sonic palette as a songwriter with extensive use of electronics and deep atmospheric elements and yet none of it hid and rather enhanced the expression of a startling and thrillingly raw lyrics that just hit so powerfully with an urgent and honest exploration of conflicted feelings and working through emotional trauma in a way that felt maybe a little too real for some listeners. Angel Olsen has been refining and reinventing her songwriting style and sound since her 2011 debut EP Strange Cacti and with her first full-band release 2014’s Burn Your Fire For No Witness her career seemed to take off. Her creatively expressive vocals lent itself well to stories drawn from her own life and observational songs about the impact of culture and one’s own history on the psyche. Her evocative and pastoral guitar work and voice have worked powerfully in tandem across her career as she freely incorporated aesthetics and musical ideas into her work but always somehow being able to speak to underlying emotions that often defy cogent expression but which Olsen has been able to bring forth across six albums including the classic country flavored 2022 album Big Time which does draw upon an older aesthetic but is fully modern in execution which is no mean feat. Won’t be a subpar moment of music on stage for this show.

Sunday | 08.07
What: Telekinetic Yeti w/White Hills and Hashtronaut
When: 7 p.m.
Where: Globe Hall
Why: When one thinks of gloriously epic psychedelic metal Dubuque, Iowa is probably not where you’d expect a band like Telekinetic Yeti to come from though the state has long been home to many musical surprises over the years. The duo’s new album Primordial released July 8 on Tee Pee Records, home to some of the cooler heavy psychedelic and doom bands of recent years. “Stoner rock” started getting super stale around 18 years ago but fortunately some of those musicians evolved in to doom metal and then the weirder musicians recognized that Black Sabbath and Sleep both didn’t bother with splitting up heaviness and psychedelia and in fact saw how they could complement each other well in creating mind-altering music. Telekinetic Yeti is of that vintage. White Hills has long been one of the best heavy psychedelic bands going since forming in 2003. Also a duo, White Hills has fortunately been impossible to pigeonhole because yes there are elements of metal, krautrock, space rock, post-punk, ambient, noise and the avant-garde in the group’s music the entirety of its career and each record has been an attempt to do something different in terms of sonics, songwriting, structure, emotional colorings and the potential for performance that goes beyond simple songwriting. The forthcoming The Revenge Of Heads On Fire out September 16 on Cargo Records UK is definitely a stretch into the kind of space rock territory fans of Hawkwind will appreciate. Denver’s Hashtronaut are also fellow travelers of the tripped out, slow burn, heavy psychedelia.

Sunday | 08.07
What: Death Bells w/Pendant and Candy Apple
When: 7 p.m.
Where: Hi-Dive
Why: Death Bells formed in Sydney, Australia in 2015 but moved to Los Angeles in 2018 in search of greater horizons of developing and sharing its unique brand of post-punk. The sophomore album New Signs of Life was a refreshingly spare and stark set of songs with hushed moods and strong melodies. Its new album Between Here & Everywhere seems to have incorporated even more synths and electronic drums for an album that has even further refined the band’s use of repetition as an emotional mnemonic element that has an effect like connecting with ripples of water in the mind all while one hears in the arrangements an element of haunted folk. But one thing is for certain, Death Bells is not really making music in line with the more trendy sounds of modern darkwave and post-punk.

Sunday | 08.07
What: Machine Gun Kelly w/Travis Barker and WILLOW
When: 6:30 p.m.
Where: Ball Arena
Why: Machine Gun Kelly is someone whose blend of hip hop and rock you either like or find odd but one thing he has done outside of providing fodder for tabloid news is champion up and coming artists of promise in the realm of pop by bringing them on to his recordings and/or on tour. This time that artist is WILLOW. The latter for sure had a leg up in the realm of entertainment as the daughter of Will Smith and Jada Pinkett Smith. But not all children of famous, wealthy people end up doing anything of interest beyond casual curiosity. Fortunately Willow Smith isn’t just skating by on those connections even though they have certainly helped her out along the way. Her musical career thus far has been one of reinvention and exploration from early, teenage pop music to her 2021 album lately I feel EVERYTHING in which she debuted a knack for writing pop-punk songs that really do articulate the overloaded feelings of adolescence well and with lyrics that go beyond tropes of the genre. Look for WILLOW’s new album <COPINGMECHANISM> due out later in the summer, the early singles of which find the songwriter evolving further in her fusion of styles and incorporating them into her own sound.

Marissa Nadler at Lost Lake in 2016, photo by Tom Murphy

Monday | 08.08
What: Marissa Nadler w/Bluebook
When: 8 p.m.
Where: Hi-Dive
Why: Marissa Nadler is one of the most distinctive voices in modern music. Her musical style that may default to comparisons to folk, Gothic Americana, dream pop and what might be described as pastoral metal has an emotional vibrant and intense yet expansive quality that has rendered her music probably too dark for even the psychedelic and freak folk scene and not hard rock enough for heavy music purists. And yet there’s something compellingly otherworldly about Nadler’s songwriting that has rendered all of her albums and collaborations unique and requiring the listener to enter the songwriter’s emotional universe, one which has direct resonance in a universal sense as Nadler’s mezzo-soprano vocals and intimacy with the roots of her own psychology translates well into a personal myth making and storytelling that is instantly captivating. Her latest album The Path of the Clouds may be her finest yet as she was forced to compose the songs during the depths of the first phase of the pandemic and its companion EP the The Wrath of the Clouds reveals a broad range of emotion and an attempt to move through the anxiety and anomy the ongoing crisis is visiting upon everyone with any level of sensitivity. Bluebook these days is very much in sync with the broodingly brilliant energy of Nadler’s own work especially in the band’s current arrangement like a darkwave-flavored chamber folk band.

Tuesday | 08.09
What: Church of the Cosmic Skull w/Lord Buffalo and Keefduster
When: 7 p.m.
Where: Hi-Dive
Why: Church of the Cosmic Skull sounds like it listened to a lot of Ya Ho Wha 13 along the line of arriving at its unusual brand of psychedelic chamber pop. Lord Buffalo has a vibe like the guys in the band went out into the desert and tried to find signs of the Great Spirit in the dark and forgotten places of the landscape and returned a little haunted, a little mad and a little inspired to make expansive, psychedelic rock to reflect those kinds of journeys outside mundane pursuits.

Thursday | 08.11
What: Ian Sweet w/BNNY
When: 7 p.m.
Where: Larimer Lounge
Why: When Ian Sweet released its album Show Me How You Disappear on March 5, 2021 it was right before an extended period of great uncertainty for live music and music careers in general and the industry surrounding all of that. Perhaps it’s a bit too ironic but also oddly good timing for that record to have come out as its psychedelic pop was an exploration of anxiety, the traumas that fuel it and working through the paralyzing guilt that crashes into your brain when you take on the responsibility for the trauma inflicted and overthinking what could have been and what could be in an endless spiral of self-reinforcing, internalized punishment and turmoil. The album’s songs feel like both a realistic depiction of the feelings of processing the aforementioned and a salve on the psychic turmoil that can feel like an inescapable trap. In 2022 Ian Sweet issued the Star Stuff EP which deals with similar emotional territory as Show Me How You Disappear but feels more at peace in its exquisite atmospherics even when it hits some deep melancholic notes. Chicago’s BNNY has been writing similarly emotionally tender material but its own music is more in the realm of slowcore and dream pop. Singer Jess Viscius sounds like she’s singing out of a book of private thoughts and writings drawn from extensive self-examination and deep observation. He group’s 2021 album Everything is reminiscent of both Mazzy Star and Galaxie 500 in its beautifully billowing tonal aesthetic.

Thursday | 08.11
What: Red Fang w/Bell Witch & Aerial Ruin: Stygian Bough and HELP https://www.bluebirdtheater.net/events/detail/436500
When: 7 p.m.
Where: Bluebird Theater
Why: Red Fang is the sludge/doom metal band based out of Portland, Oregon who have managed to carve out of a niche for themselves in a crowded field with imaginative music videos, a healthy sense of humor and songwriting that goes beyond simply making melodic heavy music paired with superior tone sculpting. Bell Witch and Aerial Ruin are playing a collaborative set with a performance of the 2020 album Stygian Bough Volume I. In typical fashion there is a lot of delicacy and nuance in the crushing and transporting heaviness of the music like a mini-metal orchestra but without the cheesiness of some of the more melodic death metal bands, just mystical, haunting soundscapes that feel like a heroic journey through dark places. Opener HELP is a noise rock band also from Portland whose songs seethe with a rage against the power structures that have been increasingly making life more challenging and unsustainable for most people and in the end all life on earth as well. Unabashedly political that sensibility can be heard in its clashing, twisting, angular assault of drums, guitar, bass and vocals with a triumphant spirit we don’t hear often enough and the 2022 album 2053 is worthy of Killing Joke at its most righteously caustic.

Friday | 08.12
What: Local Natives w/Jordana
When: 7 p.m.
Where: Ogden Theatre
Why: Local Natives have thus far made a pretty good career out of writing the modern equivalent of yacht rock but with undeniably great vocal harmonies that incorporate superbly executed falsetto which isn’t easy to pull off. Opening artist Jordana released her latest album Face The Wall. Jordana Nye played all the instruments and did much of the production for the record. It’s a deeply introspective, confessional set of songs that feel open and gently but strikingly honest. What is perhaps most striking about the songwriting is Jordana’s mastery of transitions and orchestrating the layers of atmosphere. A lot of pop music has solid production or it wouldn’t work but Jordana’s work on the album draws you in and while very real about issues of anxiety and uncomfortable truths makes it all seem like something you can survive even if you may or may not overcome your life’s struggles for good or in the ways you had anticipated.

Friday | 08.12
What: DUG, Moon Pussy, Quits and Almanac Man
When: 7 p.m.
Where: Seventh Circle Music Collective
Why: DUG is comprised of former members of the great noise rock band Buildings from Minneapolis. Noise rock can be a generic term so in the case of DUG it sounded like they took some inspiration from Laughing Hyenas and The Jesus Lizard/Scratch Acid in equal measure. Moon Pussy from Denver has a catharsis embedded in its eruptive and sometimes caustic but also angularly mind-altering riffs. Quits somehow sounds colossal and on the verge of breakdown and breaking out at the same time making its own sonic barrage exciting and engrossing. Almanac Man somehow splices together an unhinged sludge rock with math-y posthardcore. Like if Clutch and Neurosis had a baby.

Saturday | 08.13
What: Lost 80s Live A Flock of Seagulls, Wang Chung, The English Beat, Naked Eyes, Missing Persons, Stacey Q, Animotion, Dramarama, Tommy Tutone and Musical Youth
When: 5:30 p.m.
Where: Fiddler’s Green
Why: Could be kind of a mess, this many bands on one bill but of course all the acts will get limited stage time to play their 80s hits. But it may also be one of the only opportunities you get to see the legendary and pioneering New Wave band Missing Persons who were always different from its peers and still a compelling live band. Also Flock of Seagulls wrote plenty of evocative, moody synth pop beyond its own hits but will they play songs like “Wishing (If I Had a Photograph of You)” or “The More You Live, the More You Love”? Wang Chung is most well known for hits like “Dance Hall Days” and “Everybody Have Fun Tonight” but its score for the 1985 film To Live and Die in L.A. proved that the group was capable of crafting enduring art pop of urgency and intensity. Hope if you see their set they’ll indulge a track or two from the soundtrack.

Sunday and Monday | 08.14 and 08.15
What: Hoveriii (with Moose and The Crooked Rugs on 08.14 and with Nolan Potter and Petite Amie on 08.15)
When: 7 p.m.
Where: Larimer Lounge 08.14 and Vultures 08.15
Why: Los Angeles-based psychedelic rock band Hooveriii (pronounced “Hoover Three”) recently released its new record A Round of Applause. The record is only eleven tracks and all roughly the length of a radio friendly pop song but it feels like a sprawling yet progressive affair of kaleidoscopic tones and a strong streak of experimentation in what sounds and structures the group was willing to indulge as it took the time to explore what it could do in the studio in shaping and crafting a sound that was fairly different from the jam band stylings of its 2021 album Water For Frogs. Urgent yet playful, the new album finds Hooveriii operating with a focus and economy of style without skimping on imaginative sonic excursions outside the established songwriting lines.

Monday | 08.15
What: Bodega w/The Sickly Hecks and Flora de la Luna
When: 8 p.m.
Where: Hi-Dive
Why: Bodega is a Brooklyn-based art punk/post-punk band whose offbeat sense of humor and fascinating fusion of New Wave rock and the kind of pop band Brian Eno might have started had he not attached himself to Talking Heads and U2 for several years. Its sharply observed lyrics cast modern life in sharp contrast to its historical roots and the legacy thereof at least on its 2022 album Broken Equipment—a title that is such a great metaphor for the tools we’re given to navigate and make sense of the world handed down to us and making do the best we can.

Tuesday | 08.16
What: Spaceface w/Petite Amie and Pleasure Prince
When: 7 p.m.
Where: Lost Lake
Why: For the past decade Spaceface has been crafting otherworldly, psychedelic pop and its 2022 album Anemoia is a genre swapping, colorful sonic collage of sounds and ideas that seems to free associate styles from across decades. A core of fuzzy guitar and ethereal melodies evoke 70s R&B and funk while the songs often sound like summertime music for a place the band !!! might vacation after being woken from cryogenic slumber in 100 years after a generation as yet unborn has dismantled the foundations of our dysfunctional civilization in favor of something more nurturing and fun for everyone. But really its just gorgeous, retro-furturist psychedelic music that somehow sounds hedonistic without coming off corny. Petite Amie is a similarly-minded band from Mexico City whose own music has lush, downtempo funky vibes like they absorbed the entire ABBA catalog along with heapings of Broadcast, Daft Punk and taking in the films of Sofia Coppola. It has that dreamlike quality that exudes benevolence and mystery like few bands do. It’s the kind of music those of us who remember going to roller skating rinks in the 1970s and 1980s wish we could have been listening to instead of the too often tepid pop hits of the day. The band’s 2021 self-titled album is grand showcase of transporting sounds and soothing soundscapes.

…And You Will Knows By the Trail of Dead, photo courtesy the artists

Tuesday | 08.16
What: …And You Will Know Us By The Trail of Dead w/New Candys https://www.eventbrite.com/e/and-you-will-know-us-by-the-trail-of-dead-with-new-candys-tickets-356700158777?aff=odwdwdspacecraft
When: 8 p.m.
Where: Hi-Dive
Why: Forming in Austin, Texas in 1994, …And You Will Know Us By The Trail of Dead has been one of the more interesting guitar rock bands out of the underground that somehow both exerted an influence on modern indie rock while remaining a bit of a cult band. Its 2002 album Source Tags & Codes defied easy classification with its eclectic and inventive range of sounds, a pattern the band maintains up to and including its 2020 album X: The Godless Void and Other Stories. Known for its incendiary live shows contrasted with thoughtful and often high concept lyrics, Trail of Dead may be underrated but always surprisingly vital. New Candys from Venice, Italy released Vyvyd in 2021 and it proved to be one of the best psychedelic rock albums of the year with its hybrid of krautrock and shoegaze.

Wednesday | 08.17
What: The Teaches of Peaches Anniversary Tour
When: 7 p.m.
Where: Summit Music Hall
Why: Canadian electroclash pioneer and producer Peaches is touring for the anniversary of the release of her genre landmark album The Teaches of Peaches (2000). The album broke Peaches aka Merrill Nisker to a more mainstream audience despite its playfully profane and unabashedly sexual lyrics. Perhaps its biggest hit “Fuck the Pain Away” is a classic of modern electronic music and Peaches’ confrontational and genre bending live show blurs the boundaries between hip-hop, electronic dance music and punk in a way that both challenges preconceptions and welcomes listeners and those who are there for the show to open up to new ways of thinking about subjects you thought you already knew your thinking about.

Thursday | 08.18
What: The Weeknd
When: 6:30 p.m.
Where: Empower Field at Mile High
Why: Abel Tesfaye aka The Weeknd has spent the last decade and a half building a career as one of the most compelling songwriters and producers in popular music. Whether he lends his imaginative soundscaping to R&B, hip-hop, pop or his unique and powerful interpretation of synth pop or lending his skills to the works of other artists, Tesfaye seems to bring a creative sensibility that finds and brings forth the hidden potential in the music and helps that to highlight and enhance the work overall. His new album Dawn FM (2022) bridges all his musical worlds while also being one of the great darkwave records of the past decade. Expect a spectacle for this show especially given the of necessity large format venue as the songwriter seems the type to want to give people something extra for the trouble of showing up and following his music in general.

Thursday | 08.18
What: The KVB w/M!R!M
When: 8 p.m.
Where: Hi-Dive
Why: UK duo The KVB caught the attention of shoegaze and post-punk heads with its early releases starting a decade ago and garnering a bit of a cult following for its highly stylized multimedia aesthetics and seamless synthesis of electronic music and the aforementioned styles. Its 2021 album Unity is a further exploration of the techno production that has informed the band’s music since its early days as fused to downtempo pop in hazy melodies shot through with a forceful energy. M!R!M is the solo project of Jack Milwaukee whose 2022 album Time Traitor recalls a strange blend of early TR/ST and mid-80s synth pop and thus darkwave style but with some R&B sensibility in the beat making.

Friday – Sunday | 08.19 – 08.21
What: Down In Denver Fest
When: 6 p.m. – 1 a.m. on Friday, 12 p.m. – 1 a.m. on Saturday, 12 p.m. – 12 a.m. on Sunday
Where: Larimer Lounge
Why: In the decay of local culture curation born of a robust local media covering music and the arts in a systematic and interested rather than neglectful manner local music coverage and festivals seemingly lack an awareness of the history of the community of the arts and the context in which new artists emerge. This festival was conceived of when in 2021 the UMS, which had been an actively communitarian endeavor in years prior, seemed to have lost its mooring and sense of mission and musicians representing a swath of local music cut out of that sprawling event realized they could put something together that was very much about the local scene and the people who make it up. Assembled in about a month to six weeks the 2021 edition of Down in Denver was a well orchestrated showcase of some of the best local music at any festival all year. This year the event is slightly bigger but in the same format of two stages and now the first day is a free pre-party featuring some prime local talent as well. No skimping. Look for our extended coverage with interviews throughout this week with some of the artists performing and photographic shares on the Queen City Sounds IG account throughout the weekend. To purchase tickets and for the detailed and most up to date lineup and schedule check the link above or here.

Saturday | 08.20
What: Barstool Messiah album release show for Whiskey Baptismal featuring Erica Brown w/Cyclo Sonic and Dust Beneath Dirt
When: 8 p.m.
Where: Herman’s Hideaway
Why: Barstool Messiah is celebrating the release of its thunderous and soulful new album Whiskey Baptismal with a performance including legendary soul, blues and R&B singer Erica Brown whose vocals in her own music are reason enough to go see the show but whose talents have graced numerous records including the aforementioned and artists one might think well outside her realm of musical expertise. Also on the bill is the exceptional garage punk band Cyclo Sonic comprised of former members of the Fluid, Frantix, Rok Tots and Choosey Mothers.

Saturday | 08.20
What: Punk in Drublic Craft Beer & Music Festival Feat. NOFX w/Pennywise, Circle Jerks, The Suicide Machines, Adolescents, T.S.O.L., Dwarves, The Bridge City Sinners, Bad Cop/Bad Cop, PKEW PKEW PKEW, Cheap Perfume and All Waffle Trick https://www.fiddlersgreenamp.com/events/detail/429519
When: 11 a.m.
Where: Fiddler’s Green
Why: Until this tour one would have said that the Jawbreaker tour was the punk tour of 2022. But there’s no need for competition in punk or music and this event happening at Fiddler’s Green includes some of punk’s most important bands of both the pop-punk and hardcore era. And also the great Colorado Springs, feminist punk band Cheap Perfume whose powerful and irreverent songs dismantling patriarchal behavior and human cruelty in general are always worth a gander. It would be facile to list off why every band on the bill matters but Circle Jerks, this might be the last time you get to see them on some kind of national tour. The group began after singer Keith Morris departed Black Flag and his combination of deep contempt for vested authority and surreal and pointed sense of humor found a vital outlet in a new band Circle Jerks which produced a body of work so potent and creative beyond simply being foundational to hardcore that its early records still sound fresh and telling it like it is. 2022 marks the 40th anniversary of the release of the group’s Wild in the Streets album and thus the setlist might lean a little heavy in that direction. The tour earlier in the year proved the Jerks still have the fire so maybe, just maybe, they’ll tour in 2023 for the 40 year anniversary of its 1983 classic Golden Shower of Hits.

Nathaniel Rateliff & the Night Sweats, photo by Danny Clinch

Tuesday and Wednesday | 08.23 and 08.24
What: Nathaniel Rateliff & the Night Sweats w/Caroline Rose
When: 6:30
Where: Red Rocks
Why: Nathaniel Rateliff first made waves in Denver with his alternative rock band Born in the Flood. The atmospheric, heartfelt music that came out of that project garnered the songwriter and his bandmates fans far and wide and was poised for at least indie fame when it was invited to be on a live music program Matt Pinfield was helming, recording one of the pilot episodes. The show never aired. Rateliff went on to do some solo music as The Wheel which became a band with local musical luminaries and long time collaborators and friends and it too seemed poised for success in the kind of indie success most bands never quite achieve and that didn’t happen either. Nevermind the quality of the material, the music world is fickle and people just as worthy out of Denver have been overlooked for decades. But then Rateliff got together some friends for a band called Nathaniel Rateliff & the Night Sweats. The name probably came along after the music, as these things go, but the 2015 self-titled debut album yielded a left field and unfortunately locally ubiquitous hit in “S.O.B..” But even if you got sick of hearing it in Denver it finally propelled Rateliff into mainstream success and he took some friends along for that ride that one can tell from interviews he knows can end at any time so now the band is simply enjoying that success while it lasts and is now touring in support of its “COVID” album The Future which is the blues, Americana rock blend that has kept the band in the musical mainstream but there is an interesting spaciousness and stark production at points that point to an acute awareness of the fragility and tentative nature of life and what we take for granted when we allow ourselves to get too comfortable. It’s also the band’s best record of its three thus far.

Wednesday| 08.24
What: Mizmor w/Heretical Sect, Spiritual Poison, Cronos Compulsion
When: 8 p.m.
Where: Hi-Dive
Why: Mizmor’s 2022 album Wit’s End is a meditation on the caustic effect of superstition gone wrong and the extolling of destructive irrationality above compassion and intelligence. In the language of colossal, atmospheric blackened doom it seeks a path through a time of civilizational darkness. Heretical Sect is a blackened death metal outfit from Santa Fe whose spooky atmospherics are driving and not really cartoonishly menacing and the content of shows 2020 album Rapturous Flesh Consumed shares some thematic sentiments as the new Mizmor record. Spiritual Poison you won’t get to see too often and it’s one of Ethan McCarthy’s always interesting noise projects, this one more ambient and enigmatic than even Many Blessings.

Extra Kool and Time of Calm. August 2016, photo by Tom Murphy

Friday | 08.26
What: Extra Kool album release w/DJ Jon Blaze and Calm.
When: 7 p.m.
Where: Englewood Tavern
Why: Extra Kool almost never performs live anymore but Danny Vincennie aka Extra Kool has been writing some of the most heartbreaking, hilarious, thought-provoking and creative raps of the past two decades and more. This night he’s releasing his latest album Not A Ghost…But Dead Inside and it’s proof that if you do something with integrity for your entire career everything you put out will have artistic merit and this album is on par with his entire catalog. Also playing this night is the political and also intensely creative hip-hop duo Calm. with their own literary raps and some of the most colorful, moving and beautiful beats in the Colorado rap game and beyond.

Saturday | 08.27
What: Madeline Peyroux and Joan Osborne
When: 7:30 p.m.
Where: Arvada Center For the Arts and Humanities
Why: Joan Osborne burst onto the national music scene with her hit album 1996 Relish and the single “One of Us.” One might be excused to not being into the single so much and perhaps misjudging Osborne’s other music based on the ubiquity of the single in the year or three after its release. But anyone that got to see Osborne around that time whether on one of her own tours or her appearances on the Lilith Tour in 1997 and 1998 witnessed a passionate performer with a raw, authentic style that couldn’t fail to leave a strong impression of the singer/songwriter as a performer and human capable of projecting her feelings and connecting with the audience in a seemingly direct way. For this show, Osborne will performs Relish in its entirety. Madeline released her own noteworthy debut album Dreamland in 1996 as well. The record garnered her a bit of a following but her 2004 follow-up albums Careless Love marked the beginning of her prolific subsequent career as one of the most popular jazz singers of the past couple of decades.

Monday | 08.29
What: Marissa Nadler w/Seance
When: 7 p.m.
Where: Vultures
Why: See above on 08.08 for Marissa Nadler.

Tuesday | 08.30
What: Cults w/Reptaliens and DJ Boyhollow
When: 7 p.m.
Where: HQ
Why: Reptaliens from Portland, Oregon may at initial contact seem like a cool, fairly downtempo, psychedelic indie pop band with earworm vocal melodies. But the more you delve into its lyrics and the subject matter of its albums something far stranger emerges with songs inspired by left field science fiction, bizarre pop culture artifacts and esoteric knowledge. After all who names an album VALIS after the 1981 science fiction novel by Philip K. Dick based on true events with possibly metaphysical experiences with an alien intelligence. Headliners Cults enjoyed real indie buzz in the early 2010s when its self-titled debut was released on Columbia. Fortunately the hype wasn’t overblown and Cults’ dream pop offerings had some vitality as evidenced by its often spirited live shows.

Tuesday | 08.30
What: Black Flak and the Nightmare Fighters w/Totem Pocket, Innerspace, Abandons and Brother Saturn
When: 7 p.m.
Where: Lost Lake
Why: This is an all post-rock/post-metal show featuring Salt Lake City’s Black Flak and the Nightmare Fighters who might more rightly be considered a shoegaze band with Kate Hoffmeister’s dusky vocals. Abandons is the kind of band who maybe came out of an early interest in progressive metal and art rock that evolved into a skillful crafting of soundscapes and textures in broad, dynamic strokes without writing music aimed at fitting in with a genre or subgenre which is why it’s difficult to make comparisons except to describe the music except partially as sculpted waves of mood. Brother Saturn is Drew Miller’s post-rock project which means some blissed out guitar tonal compositions and electronics that are the more visceral side of his other projects in ambient music.

Wednesday | 08.31
What: Elder w/Belzebong and Dreadnought
When: 8 p.m.
Where: Hi-Dive
Why: ELDOVAR – A Story of Darkness & Light (2021) pretty much established former Massachusetts-based progressive metal band Elder and German psychedelic band Kadavar as purveyors of a heavy art rock that is as creatively ambitious as it is compelling beyond any ability to appreciate the technical skill going into it or the theory. It’s cinematic in the way that mid-70s Genesis was and the delicate touches in the composition give context to heavier passages and the album doesn’t get stuck in the tropes of any genre. Yes, we’ve heard epic, science fiction flavored hard psychedelic rock before but this album feels like something different and worthy of a listen to anyone with an interest in psychedelic rock and where doom can go when it’s not stuck in its familiar habits. Dreadnought is a band whose tribal, heavy pagan psychedelia is a good fit for a bill like this where there isn’t a tired formula guiding anyone’s music.

Wednesday | 08.31
What: Hiatus Kaiyote
When: 7 p.m.
Where: Boulder Theater
Why: Melbourne, Australia’s Hiatus Kaiyote is refreshingly difficult to pin down without sounding like they’re trying too many things. Their unique style of soul and R&B is so idiosyncratic it sounds like the kind of band J. Dilla would have wanted to have started or at least produced because the avant-garde jazz flourishes in the songwriting almost sound like well-produced samples. Its 2021 album Mood Valient is the group’s most coherent offering to date and its organic and evolving rhythms so fresh and unusual it sounds like an improv session developed until the rhythms are tight but never stale.