Saddy Phoebe Bridgers and R&B mage PJ Morton are our picks for the best shows around Denver this week. If you don’t make it out, follow our music musings on Twitter and our selfies on Instagram. If you do, mind where you put your jacket. See you there.
Phoebe Bridgers
Long before the lyrics of Phoebe Bridgers’ entrancing debut album, “Stranger in the Alps,” step out of the ether, her smoke gets in your eyes. With a crack band at her back (singer-songwriters Conor Oberst and Ethan Gruska are credited on the album) Bridgers’ gloomy meditations feel elemental, like diffuse moonbeams cast over lost life and expired love. But it’s the words that get you: “Motion Sickness” pins a phrase to the emotional whiplash that comes with some creaky relationships, even if that phrase isn’t quite enough for Bridgers: “There are no words in the English language / I could scream to drown you out.” Catch her at the Gothic Theatre on April 6. Daddy Issues opens the show. Tickets are $15-$17 via axs.com.
PJ Morton
In a dulcet howl, Larimer Lounge’s April 15 bill screams Sunday evening. First up is PJ Morton, the Maroon 5 keyboardist who’s grown beyond his side-stage career in the arena-marauding band. On “Gumbo,” Morton’s latest album, his deep-rhythm pop flows like treacle, spiked with modernity — crystal-clear production, a bump-and-grind jam called “Go Thru Your Phone” — to keep it weighted toward the neo side of soul. Earlier in the evening, The Other Black, Denver’s premiere live hip-hop band, will loosen the audience’s proverbial shirt collar. If you haven’t seen the sprawling, Wes Watkins-fronted outfit yet, punch your ticket sooner rather than later. Tickets to the show are $20-$25 and via ticketfly.com.
Oxeye Daisy, “Oxeye Daisy”
What year is it? In lyric and spirit, Oxeye Daisy — who acknowledges its heart-on-sleeve Cranberries influence in its one-liner band bio — doesn’t care. “Time isn’t linear and memory fades / Why am I leaning on the age as an arbitrary sign post?” frontwoman Lela Roy asks, teasing back layers of a relationship only to find more questions. The song is a screaming introduction to the Denver four-piece, one that posits it as the city’s best answer to the glut of ’90s-nostalgia-plumbing rock outfits that have sprung up in the last few years (Charly Bliss, Darlia, Sorority Noise et al.).
It’s also a bit of a red herring. For as much as its electric-bubblegum of an opener shocks and pops, the meat of the album is strewn with heavy, measured meditations. (That dissonance makes sense: “Where Your Mind Goes” was penned by bassist Eddie Schmid; Roy wrote the rest.) Some are glum, like the down tempo, sludgy “Last Love Song,” which has Roy beating herself up over a relationship taken for granted; others prickle, like the speed-punk lark “Close Toe,” the least convincing of the bunch.
The album was recorded live to capitalize on Roy’s vocal whims (the singer is known to orchestrate harmonic detours mid-show) and effectively opening the windows on these songs, which might otherwise feel so jaded that they’re palpably damp. (On standout “Elevator”: “Tried to talk to the devil she looked just like me / said when you finally give up, you will finally be free.”) Still, that existentialist burden is very of-the-era — both now and the ’90s — and when it’s done this well, swimming in gloom and longing is just as sweet as getting to the other side.
Oxeye Daisy plays an album release show at Syntax Physic Opera on May 11. Turvy Organ and GhostPulse perform in support. Tickets are $7 via brownpapertickets.com.
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