concert review – Queen City Sounds and Art

Kim Gordon at the Ogden Theatre 7/23/26

Kim Gordon and her band came on stage with little fanfare but with the expected effortless cool and poise. Everyone in the band contributed to the rich electronic soundscapes that ran throughout the show and everyone played a more standard rock instrument as well with a drummer (Madi Voigt), a bassist (Emily Retsas) and guitar duties with Gordon and Sarah Register. Immediately it felt like we were hearing something born out of the various interests and creative leanings across Gordon’s career as an artist and pushing past immediate expectations of some kind of No Wave noise rock. It was more like a thorough fusion of various styles of hip-hop, industrial aesthetics and stretching notions of what role guitar plays in songwriting. Like real time sampling in moments with rock instruments dropped into a track. The percussion was a combination of programming/sequencing and live drums played with an ear for the various beat styles that have emerged in the past two or three decades: trap, Dilla-isms, drill. The effect was cinematic and emotionally-charged with Gordon’s nearly spoken word vocals accenting the rhythm with her own lines of spare poetry as though she was replicating a production method with own performance.

The band played all of the new record, Play Me (2026) seemingly in order as well as a few songs from The Collective (2024) and No Home Record (2019). But it all felt like a vivid yet hazy dream with Gordon singing songs that felt like they were a commentary on the current era and zeitgeist in a way that was creative like stream-of-consciousness poetry or free verse and free association on a theme. The social commentary was pointed and cathartic with the production lending the music a textural and cinematic quality so the experiencing of witnessing it live had a tactile aspect that was riveting and seemingly personal because Gordon’s words framed the ideas of tech oligarch and the dream of a world after the fall of the imperial program that has been burning through the world with an accelerated spirit of consuming destruction an attainable goal. The caustic menace of “Sub Con” and “Square Jaw” got into your head like hope through validating one’s anger and desire for liberation from the various tools of late capitalist repression. Both songs and “Post Empire” were a string of songs that seemed to draw heavily on hip-hop production and sounds of the past decade and a half but with a little different sound palette and informed by Gordon’s insight into the ills of the horrific aspects of current human civilization.

Hard to imagine Gordon isn’t affected deeply by this music and the words performing them on a tour and yet it has to feel good to get these thoughts and feelings out there and sharing them with people who may not be as focused in their expression when everything can feel overwhelming and you just have to show up to your job or jobs just to survive. But the show did feel like an expression of human solidarity for the collective, ambient anxiety and horror of what feels like the worst timeline of recent years. With the update of “Bye Bye” as “ByeBye25” as a kind of exclamation point on the album it was obvious that Gordon’s new album showcased her masterful wordplay perhaps influenced by the hip-hop artists that have inspired her for decades. Beginning to end the songs sounded like the chaos, fragmentation and collapse of the American experiment but also like a hope for something better to replace the old world order. It made this era feel survivable.

Setlist from JamBase.com

PLAY ME
GIRL WITH A LOOK
NO HANDS
BLACK OUT
DIRTY TECH
NOT TODAY
BUSY BEE
SQUARE JAW
SUBCON
POST EMPIRE
NAIL BITER
BYE BYE
Trophies
It’s Dark Inside
Psychedelic Orgasm
Paprika Pony
Cookie Butter
Encore
Cigarette

Mitski’s Farewell For Now Show at Red Rocks Was Theatrical, Witty and Self-Aware

02Mitski_Jun25_2019 — Mitski at Red Rocks, June 25, 2019, photo by Tom Murphy

[This series will highlight some of the best shows that I (Tom Murphy) saw in 2019. My better camera proved to be broken when I checked it before leaving to Red Rocks and then getting caught in the traffic jam getting into the venue and not being able to get the proper credentials to be at the front of the stage and did the best I could between my back-up camera and my phone]

03Mitski_Jun25_2019 — Mitski at Red Rocks, June 25, 2019, photo by Tom Murphy

When Mitski Miyawaki announced in spring 2019 that the next set of shows would be her last indefinitely. This lead many to believe she was quitting music or at least quitting live performance. But the songwriter later clarified her intention in needing to step away from performing live and the rat race of touring for five years that can’t help but have a deleterious effect on one’s psyche, one’s sense of place and one’s identity in the end by unmooring one from the meaningful contexts that ground one’s existence. One can hardly blame her for wanting to step away from that situation for however long it takes to feel like a normal human again and cultivate one’s creative instincts rather than channel that energy into getting on stage and delivering what’s expected.

Given where Mitski must have been when she worked on the tour performance for her opening slots with Death Cab For Cutie at larger venues than she would likely headline on her own it was telling the care put into making it a show for the big stage. Mitski is probably not a millionaire from her music and yet her using a stage set with a chair and a table as props for a highly theatrical performance was an interesting balance of concept executed to give people that know her music something extra while presenting to those that didn’t something they were likely not expecting from an opening act for a beloved, established older band whose emotional earnestness and 90s-esque, stripped down, raw performance style was the expected aesthetic. In moments her set-up was reminiscent of the spoken word shows from Spalding Gray.

04DeathCab_Jun25_2019 — Death Cab For Cutie at Red Rocks, June 25, 2019

Deathcab for Cutie put in a fine performance proving it had transitioned well from a band some of us saw at a small club that held less than a hundred people to popular indie elders statesmen playing Red Rocks and still making music with meaning and power evolved naturally from its roots. Mitski brought what felt like a stage production of her 2018 album Be the Cowboy with some highlights from previous records. She strutted about the stage, leapt about like a gymnast and seemed to orchestrate the music in the foreground with the band in the wings giving her movements their emotional context in sync with Mitski’s commanding vocals.

01Mitski_Jun25_2019 — Mitski at Red Rocks, June 25, 2019, photo by Tom Murphy

Near the beginning of the show Miyawaki, in a display of acute self-awareness, said, “You may be asking yourself if this is the set. This is the set.” She knew plenty of people were not expecting something so “arty” based on other shows the songwriter had played in Denver at places like Larimer Lounge and The Bluebird Theater at which Mitski played guitar as well as sang. This was Mitski in a stylized outfit and using props while delivering her thought-provoking and psychologically insightful lyrics. Toward the end Miyawaki broke the fourth wall of the show again and addressed those in attendance who weren’t familiar with her work by wryly stating, “If we’re not your flavor, don’t worry [Death Cab For Cutie is] up next.”

If Mitski is taking time off to learn to be human again on her own terms away from the rigors and demands of the road and being something of a public figure, reconnecting with the foundations of her own creative spirit, at least she left off, for now, with some shows hinting at the possible future and the best record of her career and one of the most incisive examinations of identity and the American psyche through a deeply personal lens in recent memory. I, for one, am looking forward to her return to making creatively ambitious pop music.

Washed Out’s Mister Mellow Tour Rendered Daydreaming in High Definition

When Ernest Greene was touring for his 2013 album Paracosm, he looked intensely uncomfortable. He hid it with the kind of grace and aplomb one might hope for and expect. But when he tried to pump up the crowd during the show it seemed awkward because it is the sort of thing that doesn’t jibe with Greene or his music which, at its best, seems like a manifestation of yearnings, aspirations, resting in one’s personal place of peace, processing one’s experiences in doses that make sense to the human psyche if not to our industrial culture of accelerated expectations of ourselves and others. The music of Washed Out at its heart works best when it remains an invitation to take a break from that grind and take the time to reflect and feel at your own pace and in your own way. Hyping a crowd is the opposite of that type of intimacy. It came across as Greene doing his best to fit in with the indie rock world or a commercial rock world in a way that never really suited him. No surprises, Greene took some serious time off from any album driven touring. In that time it seems that Greene has taken efforts to reconnect with his creativity and his musical instincts.

2017’s Mister Mellow, an obvious nod to where Greene wanted to be and not where he seemed to be a few years ago, is a return to Greene’s roots in making beats with samples and synths and its release on underground hip-hop label Stones Throw is a perfect fit. For the album, and for the tour, Greene worked with Jesse Orrall on putting together the visual side of the album. That visual side on DVD was an entrancing companion to an album that seemed to be Greene’s attempt at self-healing through music and visual art. With song titles like “Burn Out Blues,” “Time Off,” “I’ve Been Daydreaming My Entire Life,” “Hard to Say Goodbye,” “Instant Calm,” “Get Lost,” “Easy Does It” and “Zonked,” Greene isn’t hiding. He’s confessing and tapping into how many of us feel in 2017 with the overtaxing demands of the world around us with not nearly enough of the rewards everyone deserves from being involved in a society and economic system that places not nearly enough value on humans in themselves and their dreams that don’t fit in with program of late stage capitalism.

On August 22, 2017, the Washed Out tour came to Denver at the Ogden Theatre. The show took the images from the DVD of Mister Mellow and rendered it in three dimensions. Greene and his associates made a show that felt like we were getting to see a really unusual and deeply personal and colorful film made by a friend. But a film in the modern, immersive sense with music that synched perfectly with the moving images at a volume that hits the body with all tones but especially the low end. The collage aesthetic of the video is like something you might make to chase away boredom and stimulate your mind by repurposing imagery around you. While not sampling, a similar creative instinct. It was a psychedelic hip-hop/synth pop experience and Greene didn’t indulge the “How are you doing tonight? Are you excited” platitudes of many bands. Bands that probably care but it would have taken us out of the moment and sullied what should be an experience that tries to transcend the usual concert context and conception. If there were technical errors with the set or venue, the show got back on track quickly and kept Greene’s sharing of the deep daydreaming he’s been getting back to over the last handful of years. At worst the Mister Mellow shows are an interesting and ambitious experiment, at their best, a reminder in practice of a better world to come where exercise and stimulation of the imagination are afforded their rightful place in the center of world culture.

Dega at Ogden Theatre, 8/22/2017, photo by Tom Murphy