Category: Coming Soon

Listings and stories about bands coming soon to one of the hundreds of Denver venues.

Strings & Wood, local music and art non-profit, throws a 2-year anniversary tonight at the Oriental
February 4, 2011 Off

Strings & Wood, local music and art non-profit, throws a 2-year anniversary tonight at the Oriental

By Billy Thieme

If you’re unfamiliar with Strings & Wood Concerts, and your tastes run towards the more melodic and folksier side of acoustic rock, this weekend may be the perfect opportunity for you to get to know the local promoter and community advocate. Strings & Wood is celebrating their second anniversary in business with a concert and benefit that features a stellar lineup of local solo artists and musicians at the venerable Oriental Theater (44th and Tennyson in NW Denver) on Friday night, February 4th. The show will feature some of Colorado’s best acoustic and vocal bands, singer/songwriters and collaborations, as well as visual and design artists, silent auctions and even a professional on site massage therapist.

Founded by – and still run by – local professional photographer Art Heffron, Strings & Wood Concerts’ non-profit mission, according to their bio, is to promote “… live music, visual arts and social justice in the local Denver community.”
“Strings & Wood produces intimate, living-room style concerts at Denver’s top venues while striving to support the featured artists. Musicians take home 90% of the total ticket sales and 100% of merchandise sales. . .”

Live Review: Kate Nash @theOgden, November 6th, 2010
November 9, 2010 Off

Live Review: Kate Nash @theOgden, November 6th, 2010

By Billy Thieme

What a delight Kate Nash turned out to be at her first-ever visit to Denver for an Ogden show last Saturday night. I expected her to be perfectly satisfactory; what I didn’t expect was to be challenged by and enthralled with this rising Brit-pop sensation, right from the first warbling of her remarkable voice to the final, giggling post-encore farewell.

On record, Nash is comparable to the Cranberries’ Dolores O’Riordan, at least vocally, and her songs tend toward over-wordy, romantic pop. Live, she’s a different story.

Last Saturday night she was more like Poly Styrene, the frantic lead singer of the early punk band X-Ray Spex, than a light-hearted, soft spoken folk singer. She brought a definite, mature and sexy riot grrrl aspect to her songs as well, reminiscent of a young and brash Liz Phair, and positively bled Morrissey influence from time to time, sans all the whining and dour phraseology.

HeyReverb! Live Review: Sonic Youth @the Ogden – 10/04/10 – on a BRAND NEW Reverb site!
October 5, 2010 Off

HeyReverb! Live Review: Sonic Youth @the Ogden – 10/04/10 – on a BRAND NEW Reverb site!

By Billy Thieme

After last Monday night’s show at the Ogden Theater, I’m convinced that Sonic Youth are immortals – beings that refuse to age. What else explains their uncanny ability to remain constantly relevant, prescient – and continuously young – in the face of a culture hell bent on replication of the popular, and often the most vapid? Of course, we could agree that the members of this group of musicians – more a family than a band, really, after nearly 30 years – are intuitive charlatans, well-versed in manipulation of guitar strings, effects, anti-rhythms and atonality, but also steeped in the pop ethos that breeds automatic acceptance – or intrinsic danceability.

But then, you’d also have to explain short lives of other bands that sprung from that same NYC, post-post-punk, “no-wave” noise scene that attempted to espouse that same musical ethos. The truth is, Sonic Youth has proven they’re not only the only surviving band from that movement – but that they’re the most deserving.
They’re the only band that mastered the ability to turn pop sensibility on its ear, wrestle it through dissonant filters, and still know how to present the outcome in an irresistibly accessible way, without giving up any of their D.I.Y., no-wave roots.

Reverb: Nuns of Brixton, Gestapo Pussy Ranch @Bender’s Tavern, September 24th, 2010
September 25, 2010 Off

Reverb: Nuns of Brixton, Gestapo Pussy Ranch @Bender’s Tavern, September 24th, 2010

By Billy Thieme

Having seen Jim Yelenick in his other bands — the hardcore Pitch Invasion and the hilarious acousti-punk Sputnik Slovenia — I figured I’d seen the gamut of his personas, and loved them all. But none topped his loose adaptation of Joe Strummer in a full nun habit, wildly leading a packed house through a litany of the best tunes from the Clash. Yelenick fronted local quintet the Nuns of Brixton (a Clash tribute band) last night at Bender’s Tavern and put on a simultaneously heroic and hilarious show — all in full convent uniform.

The Clash, a.k.a. “The Only Band That Matters,” has forever topped my live dream list. I’m a bit skeptical of tribute bands, so I was prepared to take in a mediocre show at best, but I knew I’d enjoy just being a part of the nostalgia.

New Music Threads – Murder Ranks and St. Elias add new life to Denver music
August 26, 2010 Off

New Music Threads – Murder Ranks and St. Elias add new life to Denver music

By Billy Thieme

Reaching back to the tradition of dancehall, the updated, stripped down and visceral outgrowth of reggae that revitalized that already tired genre, Murder Ranks uses its basic musical tenets to distill a sweet, strong and minimalist – but sickeningly catchy – punk/dub concoction, and layers it upon modified (sometimes completely transfigured) dancehall riddims. But, where dancehall deejays may use horn sections, other instruments and/or background singers to enhance riddims that they chant and toast over, Murder Ranks reworks these parts with their instruments, and with Scratchie’s vocals, to fit their own aggressive and fun style.

REVERB: Warlock Pinchers’ reunion show – There was blood, and so much more . . .
August 9, 2010 Off

REVERB: Warlock Pinchers’ reunion show – There was blood, and so much more . . .

By Billy Thieme

Cheerleaders, men in diapers (one of them covered in blood) and a clown with a mohawk making balloon animals. That was the scene on the Gothic Theatre’s stage last Friday night.

All of that, and there was also a rock band — Warlock Pinchers, one of Denver’s legendary locals from the late ‘80s/early ‘90s — tangled up in there somewhere, celebrating a reunion after nearly two decades of separation, in front of a packed and ecstatic house. Nothing strange about that lineup, at least not if you’re familiar with the Pinchers’ history.

If you catch one show this year, make it this weekend: Warlock Pinchers are back!
August 6, 2010 Off

If you catch one show this year, make it this weekend: Warlock Pinchers are back!

By Billy Thieme

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 you attended other local shows, PETA rallies, and the occasional CIA hiring protests. These boys – King Scratchie (AKA Daniel Wanush), and K.C. K-Sum (AKA Andrew Novick), EE-Rok (AKA Eric Erickson), DD-Rok (AKA Derek van Westrum), 3KSK (AKA Mark Brooks) and a drum machine – were tearing up backyards, basements, punk venues like Boulder’s Ground Zero and warehouses with a fusion of Faith No More and Beastie Boys’ funk/punk/hip-hop, industrial and hardcore thrash, all wrapped up in intelligent and hilarious, tongue-in-cheek punk rock rage directed towards a spineless, shallow and directionless society.

The UMS: 4 incredible days, 300+ bands, memories that won’t soon fade
July 27, 2010 Off

The UMS: 4 incredible days, 300+ bands, memories that won’t soon fade

By Billy Thieme

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 of the best rock festival in the west. After over 300 bands had played their hearts out to thousands of Denver’s music lovers, the effort at the end looked still unfinished, still full of promise, melody, pounding rhythms, desperate screams and wild howls. All of that formed the beginnings of memories that will never fade.