Live Review: Black Heart Procession at Hi-Dive, Monday, December 12, 2011
You could say that The Black Heart Procession bears a large portion of responsibility for the sound of “indie” today,…
Weaving through Denver Music, Art, Culture, and Life
You could say that The Black Heart Procession bears a large portion of responsibility for the sound of “indie” today,…
Seems like this may be the beginning of the season of harvest in music, too – at least here in Denver. This weekend features a few awesome CD releases from local bands, and more! Read on to find out about two back-to-back Hot Congress release nights and an alt-country visit from Brooklyn to the Lion’s Lair. Is it just us, or is the heavy weight of Rocktober just around the corner?
Friday night showcases some fantastic Denver indie-meets-post-punk with the release party for Kissing Party’s “Waster’s Wall” album (officially out on October 18). One of Denver’s most promising acts at the moment, Kissing Party bring together a sort of Belle & Sebastian feel to their sound, with a tint of bubble gum and a Manchester shadow.
Saturday night brings the CD release party for Sun Red, a five-piece born out of the wreckage of Denver’s (Die)Pilot, full of sweeping and tenacious prog-esque constructions spearheaded by Gene Brown’s strong vocals. Their sound wavers across indie lines that corral such masters as Stephen Malkmus or Lou Barlow, but is very much something they’ve concocted on their own.
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 Annual Underground Music Showcase (UMS) starts this Thursday evening, and will dominate a few square miles of South Broadway for the following three nights.
This year’s show features close to 300 bands, comedians , singer songwriters and other talents, and will be housed in a huge number of venues, restaurants, bookstores, skateboard shops and t-shirt shops along South Broadway (here’s a handy listing, with a MAP!) – including two major outdoor stages – from 6th Avenue at the top to Cedar at the bottom.
Needless to say, the choices for live music abound – heck, they’re pretty overwhelming. Let’s face it: there’s no way anyone can possibly see all that the UMS has to offer, and it’d be a miracle to see everything you’d like to see. So let us at DenverThread take a little of the pressure to decide off of your shoulders, with our daily preview lists for this year’s festival.
Through the weekend, we’ll be listing our choices of the best things to see – for a lot of reasons. Whether your tastes run into the sludge-stoner-metal quagmire, meander through dreamy twee-pop or get hypnotically lost in psychedelic shoegaze, we’ll get you where you want to be, and make sure you’re catching something you’ve hopefully never seen before while we’re at it.
This part of the Denver scene continues to grow in both band members and fans, and the Hi-Dive hosted an all-local, all noisy and all fun lineup that showcased some of them last Thursday night. Including Solar Bear, Ideal Fathers, St Elias and Colors, it attracted a more than modest crowd, and kept the fans fascinated – often dancing to some metal-dipped prog-rock and post punk.
Solar Bear and St. Elias bookended Ideal Fathers’ set with a somewhat similar vibe based in different sub genres of prog, which actually made the latter band’s style stand out. Not that the two are clones – to the contrary.
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.
Pink Mountaintops, perhaps the closest thing to a perfect mashup of shoegaze and freak-folk, have announced a Denver date at Hi-Dive on November 21, 2009, in support of their recently released third record, “Outside Love.”
Portland singer-songwriter Mirah introduced herself at the Hi-Dive Sunday night by saying “My name is Mirah, and I think I’m actually wearing a bra!” In one simple, quirky sentence about a slightly provocative item of clothing, walls of listener/performer separation instantly evaporated, and we felt as close to Mirah as her skin-tight shirt.