Coachella? ATP? Lollapalooza? All of these mega fests are announcing/leaking their mega line ups – but who in Denver needs them? Wanna usher in the Spring and Summer music season in style? Head up north to the Oriental Theater, where you’ll catch the 2nd Annual Girl Wreck Fest – two stages and 12 solid...
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How often do you find yourself inadvertently – almost subconsciously humming Blister in the Sun, Kiss Off, Add It Up, American Music or just about any of the seminal hits from early alt-folk (alt-punk? folk-punk? Angst-folk?) trio Violent Femmes? I know for me – and a whole sew of folks who were dragging themselves...
Read more →It's here! And it's definitely THE highpoint of Denver's summer music season! A full Red Rocks schedule, the Warped and other festival tours, multiple nights of Widespread Panic - even the monster U2 show in Invesco Field at Mile High - all pale in comparison to the magnitude of this weekend's pinnacle. The 11th...
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Starting a new job can suck – especially for your online magazine. That’s the explanation for my long absence on the ‘Thread – and I’m stickin’ with it. Now to get back into the swing, and get you readers some well-deserved regularity… But on with the news: This week we’re presenting three fantastic albums,...
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This week we offer a look at a few new threads that run the gamut in sound and intention, and we like just about all of it. From a well-deserved (if awfully early in the their life) tribute to Denver’s Deadbubbles, to The Outfit’s indecipherably titled debut – still full of promise, to tUnE-yArDs,...
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The Walnut Room provided the perfect flavor of intimacy and concrete last Thursday night to encompass - enthrone - the recording of a local fledgling artist’s second album. The 50-some people gathered to watch and listen to Golden’s Erik Husman were treated to a mix between Merle Haggard and a Pete Seeger that spent...
Read more →One of the more popular new trends lately has been a band’s live rendition of an influential record from their past. It’s a pretty cool thing, too, to see bands like Pixies play albums we all grew up listening to, live, in their entirety. It's not often, though, that we get to share the stage...
Read more →Three veteran Denver artists, all previous members of bands that have long since passed into legendary status - and that enjoyed that status off and on during their active years as well - have pooled their talents and love of straight ahead punk/indie rock with a simple aesthetic and an indelible stripe of mischievous...
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If you were anywhere around the scene in Boulder and Denver in the late '80s, chances are you were not only familiar with the Pinchers, but you probably carried some of their merchandise with you daily - clipped to your backpack or in your pocket - or you wore out your shield t-shirt as...
Read more →One impossibly acceptable truth: four days and nights of anything might be just about too much. This is what I found myself thinking last night as I carried pieces of a guitar, smashed onstage at the 3 Kings Tavern by a member of the local band Gangcharger, from venue to venue at the end...
Read more →Here's to the hope that you had a fantastic first night of the 10th Annual Underground Music Showcase all along about a mile of South Broadway last night! Having been to all ten years' shows, I have to say last nights showing was among the most impressive so far. There were lines about 20...
Read more →Denver, The UMS, Day 1, Thursday, July 22nd, 2010 - It's come around again. The UMS - Denver's pinnacle celebration of the local music scene - is upon us, and this year, the festival's tenth anniversary, this beast has grown, nearly to the point of bursting. Four days, over 20 venues, and over 300 bands,...
Read more →The summer music overflow has begun, and Denver looks to be deluged with a constant influx, through-flux and home-spun-flux of music for the season, both live and recorded. Upstate New York’s Gypsy Nomads have released a new collection of twelve songs laced with oodles of magic - of both the cabaret/vaudeville and faerie ilk...
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The world-famous "Denver Sound" has petered out. Which is not to say that the beautiful, often over-the-top and heavy handed gothic alt-country sound isn't significant anymore - not at all. That sound helped put Denver back on the musical globe in the '80s and ‘90s, and still attracts its fair share of fans. It's still...
Read more →Scott Livingston isn’t someone you want to wrong, particularly in the arena of love. As frontman of Denver band The Inactivists, a band known for its nerdy humor mixed with artsy rock, he’s got a soapbox that’s pretty tall. And with the band’s latest record, “Love Songs and Other Songs About Love,” they’ve taken...
Read more →Matthew Hunter is keeping his artful promises, and this time the results approach the sacred - and may come close to a little of the profane as well. Hunter promised himself recently that he would hold a cooperative art show in the Lion’s Lair, Denver's venerated punk rock dive, every other month into...
Read more →I’ve been introduced to the perfect collection of songs to commemorate the “holiday,” complete with the appropriate level of irony, humor and lovelorn misgivings in The inactivists' “Love Songs & Other Songs About Love,” released last year. So much more than merely a pile of rosy, soap opera schmaltz, this record, through The Inactivists’...
Read more →Leave it to Slim Cessna’s Auto Club, who have put on one of Denver’s best live shows for more than a decade, to be the only band that could outdo their own reputation. That’s what happened last Wednesday at the Bluebird in the first of two New Year’s Eve celebratory shows. The six-piece not...
Read more →It’s no shock that DBCs are gaining a following, and quickly. As Banker said in a recent interview: “We want to play music that is crazy fun, but also has some substance to it. We want people to have so much fun they shake where they stand.”
Read more →The Meadowlark Bar continues to set the bar for live national and local lineups in a hip, comfortable environment night after night. Last Saturday’s lineup was no exception, and featured The Outfit and headliners Vitamins, both originally from Greeley, after being supported by Johnny Burroughs (also a Greeley native) and Seattle’s garage-bluesy The Curious...
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Two local businesses, each with some pretty serious clout and equally serious dedication to the local Denver music scene, recently joined forces to offer local bands, beginners or otherwise, a huge resource center to help them succeed. Whisper Fiercely has been a successful production company for the past two years and have always focused...
Read more →Barn art, live performances by two of Denver’s best old-timey bum-core bands and the best damned dive bar on the country’s longest main street - all of this came together last Saturday night for the “Night of the Living Barn” at the Lions Lair.
Read more →This Saturday night, October 24th, the Lion’s Lair has a special night planned that will include art, Bum- and Old-Tyme-Core and corn on the cob. And Matt Hunter, who plays the “gut-bucket bass” for local legends SlakJaw, wants all of you to join us for it.
Read more →While last Saturday’s Hi-Dive show was originally setup to celebrate the release of Palmer’s first solo CD, “Postcard,” circumstances cast a sort of pall over it that made it seem more like a goodbye party than a debut.
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