Music Spotlight: Dec 6, 2024
Music Spotlight: Dec 6, 2024
A Place For Owls, Corsicana, INNS
-By Alyssa MacKenzie
December 6th, 2024.
It may not seem like a date of much significance, but it will forever and always be the ‘first’ time Mile High Soundtrack set out to explore the Denver nightlife and get a firsthand taste of all the local music scene has to offer.
To say we weren’t left disappointed would be a vivid understatement.
The venue was Skylark Lounge – a place that reopened in January of 2022 under a somewhat lowkey, star-studded ownership group, consisting of Bob Ashby, Nathaniel Rateliff (you may have heard of him) and Chris Tetzeli, but the place doesn’t remind you of it at every corner or anything. We’ll be doing a review of this venue in the coming weeks, as it’s incredibly long history in Englewood is a story worth talking more about.
We headed upstairs on a frosty evening to warm up, grab a drink and listen to our first band of the evening, INNS. Being one of those types that doesn’t like showing up to a show without hearing the entertainment first, we’d listened to at least one track before arriving, said ‘eh, they sound pretty solid’, and decided they’d add to the other two bands we’d had a lot more literature on, not putting a whole lot of thought into what kind of a performance we’d be in for.
INNS put on a masterful performance, emanating a musical tightness reserved only for bands that have performed together for years, but announcing this to be their first live show together halfway through their set, making each rendition all the more impressive. Guitarist Jordan Lucas and Guitar/Keys/Vox Adam Anglin switched off on lead vocal duties, both giving distinctly unique flavors to the band’s style, while the drum/bass combo was driving and seemingly one. Though their set was the shortest of the evening, it left no negative words to really say and only left us wanting more songs from the 4-piece ensemble.
Next up was Corsicana – a band that describes themselves as ‘denver indie rock/dream pop with bleep bloops’ on their BandCamp page. Leader Ben Pisano has been making music since before graduating high school over 10 years ago, and longtime bassist and synth player Jordan Leone, drummer Sumner Erhard and guitarist Nicki Walters sailed into their dreamy, synth-laced songs, each telling a heartfelt story with an ethereal lightness that felt nearly impossible to turn away from. Pisano effortlessly floated in and out of falsetto that mimicked the feel of each note.
One of the coolest aspects of their set was noticing how much fun each member looked to be having, sharing smiles with each other and not missing a single beat while doing so, wrapping up the performance with the most electric song of the night that ended with Pisano belting out the most powerfully beautiful crescendo with the rest of the band as the song abruptly ended, the crowd erupting in thunderous, approving applause.
Lastly, A Place For Owls was the final bookend of the evening. We knew their sound before hearing them in-person for the first time, as they have a pretty extensive collection of music available online, and their many musical influences are just as apparent in a live setting as they are in their recordings, through no disappointment or lack of creativity.
Simply put- this band exudes an urgency in their energy, like they need the songs they’re playing. The resounding theme throughout the set was emotion and sincerity, delivered in heart-on-sleeve softness at times, then in fully-distorted, electric melody that vocalists Ben Sooy and Daniel Perez at times screamed vocals over, then beautifully harmonized along with.
An importance for the success or failure of a band in the era of being bombarded by streaming music services, is merch, and the band candidly spoke to that point, illustrating the act of buying just one album or shirt at a show being the financial equivalent of hundreds of thousands of streams online.
Conclusively, we think each one of these bands have a deeper story to tell the world, and for this being our first ever show since setting up shop in Denver, INNS, Corsicana and A Place For Owls set one hell of a bar for the indie music scene to live up to for us.
We cannot wait to hear more.