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Photos by Christopher Windle

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After a challenging 2019, the Buttertones are back, kicking off 2020 with a coveted opening slot on the revered Reverend Horton Heat’s latest tour.This spring, the Buttertones will release a long-awaited new album. Nearly two years will have passed since the release of the band’s fourth album, “Midnight in a Moonless Dream.” It probably wasn’t planned that way.Last year, longtime guitarist Dakota Böttcher departed the band. Then, drummer Modeste “Cobi” Cobián had to undergo a cornea transplant after suffering an eye injury and infection. The band was forced to cancel its U.S. tour.But the band has risen above those challenges. The new album, “Jazzhound,” is due April 10. Cobián has made the seamless move to guitarand rocks a killer eyepatch to boot. A new drummer, Grant Snyder, is on board as the band plays its first U.S. tour of the year with the Reverend Horton Heat.The Buttertones are impressing fans of the veteran rockabilly act with old and new songs. On Feb. 13 at the first of three shows with the Reverend at the Bluebird Theater in Denver, the band played three tracks from “Jazzhound.”According to singer Richard Araiza, the album has some of the darker elements exhibited on “Midnight.” But after listening to the new songs and how well they fit into the setlist, there’s also plenty of the classic Buttertones sound to be heard to please fans of the band’s first three albums.The Buttertones opened the set with the first single off “Midnight,” “Baby C4,” then launched into “Velour,” one of the three new tracks. The band was a flurry of manic energy through the first third of the set, which was designed to grab the audience’s attention. The next songs, as Araiza said, were to win the crowd’s hearts.Another new song, the gorgeous “Denial, You Win Again” was sprinkled in among slower songs like “Baby Doll.” “Bebop” was sandwiched nicely between early Buttertones track “Orpheus Under the Influence” and the rousing “Ghost Safari.”The band’s members haven’t even reached their 30s, but they already have an impressive back catalog. Could it be that the Buttertones have defined their sound?Over the band’s four albums so far, there have been forays into surf, rockabilly, and even new wave. Araiza’s voice is the factor that helps bridge those musical styles. Sean Redman’s bass grooves are a constant; so are London Guzmán’s distinctive stylings on saxophone, and increasingly, keyboards.The band closed out the concert with a trio of songs off “Gravedigging.” If there were still doubters in the crowd in “old Colorado,” they were silenced, literally, by “Sadie’s a Sadist,” “Matador,” and “Gravediggin.’”After a tough year, the Buttertones have kept on going, going, goingand they’re still growing as a band.