Album and shows of the week: Bad Licks’ “Lies,” The Savage Blush and more

The Savage Blush

SINGLES by The Savage Blush

A deep itch, flushed cheeks, dripping beads of sweat — The Savage Blush’s shows are the reason, not the cure, for the spate of dancehall fever that flares up here and there around Denver. Under clatches of reverb, the surf’s-up psych three-piece evokes the ghosts of the misremembered ’70s, and can turn a cold night inside out on a tempo change. Swampy single “Half Broken” is a good example: It feels like a visitation from Janis Joplin, with credit due to frontwoman Rebecca Williams’ witchy charisma. The band plays Syntax Physic Opera, a fittingly enigmatic space, in Denver on Friday. Fellow Denver hip wigglers Palo Santo will open the show. Tickets to the evening are $7 at the door.

Roy Woods

Trap R&B is nothing new, but the preponderance of it is. Roy Woods is its latest attendant, a max-relax 20-something that’s here less to turn you up than bring you down easy. He drapes himself in dark synths, chilly blue light and action-movie bass rattles that roll through his stylized down-tempo pop like headlights through the blinds of your bedroom window. A member of Drake’s OVO crew, Woods — stylized as Wood$, of course — is in good company, and for good reason. He sounds like a relative of The Weeknd, albeit with less range and even less of an inclination to scale it. Still, he’s an easy bet for the genre’s most promising prospects. See for yourself when he plays Summit Music Hall on March 27. Tickets are $20-$125 via ticketfly.com.

The Bad Licks, “Lies” (EP)

Lies EP by Bad Licks

Bad Licks sounds like the band your grandparents would have warned your parents about. In the vein of Truth and Janey, the band is a fuzz lord, shoveling ungainly amounts of gain in its songs that spikes of a dump of dopamine in the bloodstream. The Denver band’s latest is “Lies,” a three-track smash-and-grab EP of fast, crunching riffs that gets at that base itch that rock was meant to scratch: An outlet for unruly — or unholy — urges. “Is anyone hearing my call into the void?” frontman Rett Rogers sings on “Radio,” an apropos title for the EP’s logical single. But the title track does it one better, cramming a middle finger in the barrel of the band’s gun, its cross-hairs fixed on god and other institutional powers. It’s an immense track, trickling with ’70s studio magic you can only conjure if you’ve listened closely enough to the classics, or spent a weekend playing fight club in a fun house. Whatever Bad Licks did, it’s working.

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