Brendan Benson & Co. projected the vibe of a friends jamming at the Fillmore on Monday. Photos by Laurie Scavo.
It was desperate times, and apparently, desperate times call for a … theater critic.
I was planning to see the Raconteurs with my pal Ricardo Baca, but just moments before the April 28 show was to start, the hardest-working-man in Denver pop-rock hit a wall.
This was serious, people. This just does not happen. If any of you know the man-crush Baca has on Jack White, you know [...]

Colin Meloy’s solo acoustic set at the Fox Theatre on Saturday nearly bested his main gig, the Decemberists. Photos by Julio Enriquez.
Entering the Fox Theatre on Saturday after Laura Gibson began her set felt like committing an offensive intrusion. As the bartender pointed out, it was “quiet time.”
Indeed, the reverential quiet of the audience seemed more fitting for an opera. The girl standing on stage in a homespun dress, holding her acoustic guitar, looked like she had just walked off that polygamist compound so recently [...]

Photos by Glory Anna Breitweiser.
I no longer fear nuclear holocaust.
I’ve been as close to ground zero as you want to come and walked away from it. Not entirely healthy and certainly a little more grumpier for wear, mind you, but I survived. Jucifer brought the ambitions of a two-kiloton blast to the Larimer Lounge Friday night with a massive stage setup that took excess to new levels.
With a seven-by-ten wall of amps crossing the stage and piling up literally inches from the ceiling, about a [...]

Juanes made the ladies swoon and the men jealous at his sold-out Magness Arena concert Friday night. Photos by Julio Enriquez.
Uh oh. The parasite known as Corporate Sponsorship has now infiltrated Spanish music.
A nauseating Sprint lightshow bled into a Ford commercial spot, thus starting things out at Juanes’ sold-out performance at Magness Arena on Friday night. Ford is the official sponsor of the Juanes tour, and their ad spot was as enjoyable to me as vegetables to a surly toddler.
What a pallid introduction, especially for [...]

Kanye West photo from SeatWave.com. (Note: Original photos of this show were removed at the request of artist management.)
Anyone that pays even the mildest attention to hip-hop along the Front Range knows most shows are relegated to small and mid-size venues like the Ogden Theatre, Cervantes’ Masterpiece Ballroom or Boulder’s Fox Theatre.
That’s what made Sunday night’s concert such a thrilling anomaly: the star-studded lineup of Kanye West, Rihanna, N.E.R.D. and Lupe Fiasco actually filled the gargantuan Pepsi Center, a feat few acts outside of Jay-Z [...]

Cynics need not apply at a Kimya Dawson show. Photos by Laurie Scavo.
Kimya Dawson’s Tuesday night set at the Bluebird Theater was refreshing in its playful wordplay, pulling out the child in damn near all of us in the audience. She sat in a chair, looking like an epiphany — alone, spotlighted on the shadowed stage with only her guitar and a seemingly endless baggie of songs, humming bar after bar of personal, sincere poetry.
Dawson’s songbook ranges widely: There are tunes about death, birth, politics, [...]

Widowers frontman Mike Marchant will make you feel the music. Photos by Brian Carney.
There’s a lot of emotion tied up into a CD release party, and sometimes that tightly wound ball of feeling – the love, the stress, the passion and the kind of eagerness that leads to utter drunkenness – makes for one fantastically weird night.
Like any other band, Widowers had to deal with all of that at their CD release show at the Larimer Lounge on Thursday. But the physical manifestation of all [...]

“Hello, Denver. We are Kraftwerk from Germany.” Photos by Laurie Scavo.
It doesn’t take much to make a Kraftwerk fan happy.
If the influential German band gives its fans the classically stoic stage show, including the robot-mannequins and the geeky-arty visuals on the backdrop, they’re psyched. Of course the setlist is important, too – and Kraftwerk doesn’t often disappoint, as most of their multimedia is directly attached (beat for beat, even) to their most iconic hits.
And so the masses were happy at the band’s Wednesday-night show at [...]

Ladyhawk’s ’70s rock-indebted sound flattened a half-full Hi-Dive last night. Photo from MySpace.
If I had known Vampire Hands were opening for Ladyhawk at the Hi-Dive last night — and I probably should have, considering I was reviewing the show (think, McFly, think!) — I would have arrived earlier. The Minneapolis band’s recordings do little to communicate their energy in a live setting, a kidney-punch of click-happy, tumbling percussion and slicing guitars that inspires comparisons to Les Savy Fav and Liars.
But I didn’t, so I showed [...]

“That’s right. I’m a sad mime, you jerk.” Photos by John Moore.
Montreal-based sextet Islands came to the Bluebird Theater Monday night in support of their sophomore album “Arm’s Way,” due May 20 on Anti- Records. The melodic indie group reinvented themselves a few years ago with more radio-friendly songs and members than their previous project, the Unicorns.
The slim but faithful audience was immediately entranced with opening song “Vertigo,” which sports slow, moody, captivating lyrics like, “If it’s a crime, they’ll hang me every time [...]