Weaving through Denver Music, Art, Culture, and Life
Listings and stories about bands coming soon to one of the hundreds of Denver venues.
Clutch is heavy. Heavy enough to pull in all the roots of punk, metal, funk and grunge and bundle them into the perfect musical explosive. Their performance at the Fillmore last Wednesday proved it, as they pummeled a more than willing, near capacity audience with over 90 minutes of material from all over their musical history.
Velvet Cash played a strong set of great psychobilly at Meadowlark last Thursday night, in what was supposed to be one of the final outdoor shows of the season.
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.”
Despite sharing nearly all of the characteristics that define many of the other bands in the melodic punk genre, Gamblers are head and shoulders above any I’ve heard in a while, both in skill and passion.
The feeling behind songs like “Cousins,” “Robo Bandidos,” and set-ender “I’m Not Gay” seemed to fall flat. . . . the type of industrial punk they were pawning, infused with a cheap strip-joint aesthetic is more worn out, old and embarrassing than the strippers one might find at said strip-joint.
Git Some gets a lot of their sound from the now defunct Denver band Planes Mistaken for Stars, once home to both Keener and French (and once voted Denver’s best band in the Denver Post’s Underground Music Poll), but this band’s take on the music is somewhat less dramatic. They’ve kept the weighty metal chords in their sound, but have added a Jesus Lizard-meets-Black Flag song structure, which seems to give the sound some lift. Where PMFS reflected the more traditional, sour sturm und drang behind emo, Git Some offers a faster, more careless attitude.
I love it when two drummers can pull it off playing together, and Green and Plummer played as if they were one — with the benefit of eight limbs. At the same time Fairchild’s guitar performance came as close as possible to actually replacing Johnny Marr, arguably one of indie rock’s most innovative players.
[Eric D. Johnson’s Fruit Bats] weaved a ’70s-tinged folky-pop tapestry that recalled as much Supertramp and the Allman Brothers as My Morning Jacket and, yes, just a slight dusting of the Shins, as they choogled through an hour-long set of alternately jammy and poppy tunes.
