The Denver Post reviews and photographs up to 15 concerts a week for posting on . Here are some recent excerpts:
Marc Cohn addressed his shooting in Denver three years ago during his show at the Botanic Gardens on July 11. He starting by saying how safe he felt to be back in Denver, then referenced “The World According to Garp.”
In the movie, Robin Williams is being shown a house, when a plane crashes into it. He turns to the Realtor and says, “I’ll take it.” The reasoning, Cohn said, is that nothing like it is likely to ever happen again — garnering a rousing cheer from the crowd.
That kind of support is why he’s come back to Denver several times since that frightening carjacking incident.
He’s touring with Aimee Mann, well-known from her beginnings in the ’80s band ‘Til Tuesday, as well as her solo career. Her latest album, “@#%&*! Smilers,” makes use of other instruments beyond her usual acoustic guitar. Mann’s set was heavy on material from the latest CD. Candace Horgan
Cowboy Junkies
Two decades have passed since Canada’s Cowboy Junkies sauntered onto the charts with a seductive cover of the Velvet Underground’s “Sweet Jane.” Sunday, beneath a cloudless sky, Margo Timmins stood on the Botanic Gardens stage in a black dress and high heels and remarked on how much had changed since the band arrived on the scene.
Timmins, who now has a 5-year-old son, says she is a lot less romantic and “more crabbier” than when the band recorded that song and other mid-tempo classics that launched the band on college radio in the 1980s.
Yet, much is also the same. Timmins’ sexy voice and the band’s lulling and hypnotic sounds remain intact if not better than 20 years before. Sunday’s concert for the NPR, wine-and-cheese crowd provided the perfect soundtrack for an ideal summer evening. Jeremy Meyer
Nashville Pussy
It seems like Nashville Pussy’s on a perpetual tour, crisscrossing North America with a mission to spread its version of Southern-fried psychobilly as far as it can from its Atlanta base. Or maybe it’s just ’cause the band loves playing it.
Either way, it’s all good — based on its July 11 show at Larimer Lounge — the first of two. The band came out fueled to white-hot from the first explosive outburst. And it got better, hotter, wilder, faster, louder with every song.
I grew up in the South and developed a long-lasting taste for Southern Fried Rock. Take that thick, moonshine- soaked, screaming guitar work, along with lyrics about living and driving between the still and the roadhouse in your tricked-out Charger, or in your pickup — complete with Confederate flag and gun rack — and add a healthy dose of Cramps-style psychobilly and AC/DC-style metal and screaming — and you come close to what Nashville Pussy serves up on stage every night.
What I didn’t expect was to see Ruyter Suys in all her glory. From here on out, Ruyter is my new ideal for rock guitar God/Goddess — male, female, it doesn’t matter. She kicks all of them so far off the stage it’s pointless to compare. Billy Thieme
To read complete reviews of these shows, as well as the Charlie Hunter Trio, Girl Talk, Filter, Journey, Boston, Styx, Steve Earle, and a photo essay of the Flobots’ video shoot at the Gothic Theatre, go to .
