Putting a tour together that includes three opening acts is a daunting challenge, but one All Time Low has risen to. When the popular Pop Punk band brought its tour to Cincinnati's Bogart's on April 30, all four bands on the bill definitely had their supporters, but the fans seemed to enjoy each of the other acts, as well. Of course everyone was amped to see All Time Low. The group's much anticipated major label debut Dirty Work was pushed back until June, which meant "The Dirty Work Tour" was a rallying call for ATL fans to get pumped for the forthcoming release so they'll save up their allowance money for the big launch date.

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Before I get into to the nitty-gritty of the A$AP Mob, Schoolboy Q and Danny Brown show at Bogart's last night (Oct. 4), I’ve got a couple of bones to pick first.

Bogart’s, what the hell is up with searching your patrons 90 times before they're let in? I mean, I know it’s probably scary having blacks, whites, Asians, and Latinos all in the same place, consuming copious amounts of drugs and alcohol, but I thought the presidential campaign event with The National was at The Emery Theatre downtown and not in Corryville. I appreciate your high standards for keeping the venue safe, but next time I go out to smoke a cigarette, trust me when I tell you I’m not going out to get my 9mm.

Secondly, Cincinnati Hip Hop heads, what’s up with your lack of punctuality? We finally had an awesome lineup of up-and-coming Hip Hop artists come to one of our bigger venues and you guys can’t show up and support them? I get it, alcohol is expensive at the venues, you can’t do your drugs there and you may have just bought the ticket to see A$AP Rocky. But next time, show up for the openers. Maybe you’ll find a new artist to know and love.

Anyways, that’s enough bitching; let’s get down to it.

When I first arrived at Bogart’s, it only took until 7:38 p.m. before I got that first aroma of Mary Jane, which not only got more prominent as the night went on but was the perfect precursor to opening act, Danny Brown.

Danny Brown started in a timely fashion (right at 8 p.m.; kudos for actually starting on time, dude) but, unfortunately, it was to a sparse crowd. Though the place wasn’t filled, Brown played to the audience like it was a sold-out stadium.

In his unfairly short 30-minute performance, Brown blew through 12 songs, including fan favorites like “I Will,” “Piss Test” and  “Monopoly,” ignoring the fact a lot of people didn’t know what to make of his abstract approach to hip-hop. With his bottle of Hennessy in hand, Brown closed his tight set with the smoke session banger “Blunt After Blunt," which had most everybody in the crowd, fan or not, sparking up and chanting the chorus.

After Brown, member of the Black Hippy Hip Hop group and T.D.E. star Schoolboy Q took the stage. I have been a fan of Schoolboy since I first heard his mixtape, “Habits and Contradictions,” but seeing him live totally change my perspective on him as an artist. He’s got this calm cool on stage and this subtle charm really won me over throughout the set.

Surprisingly, his show was a bit of an emotional rollercoaster. His heartfelt song “Blessed” made me want to cry, his need for an inhaler halfway through his performance because he is “sicker than a motherfucker” made me laugh, and cuts like “There He Go” and “Nightmare on Figg St.” made me want to do the crip-walk (don’t worry, I didn’t do it, mostly because I don’t know what it is.)

Although Q ended on a new, bass heavy club-banger, he promised us it wouldn’t be the last we’ll see of him, quieting the hushed moans and groans from audience members waiting to hear his hits “Hands on the Wheel” and “Brand New Guy,” both of which feature headline act, A$AP Rocky.

It became abundantly clear to me that everyone was there to see A$AP after the crowd nearly doubled in size before his performance, especially when I went outside and saw people were still buying tickets (who spends $30 for an hour of music?)

Anyhow, I feel a bit torn as I write this because I truly do enjoy A$AP’s music and found his show to be really fun and energetic. But I ended up being really disappointed by a lot of it. Tracks like “Purple Swag” and “Wassup” got the crowd bouncing and were choice show-starting songs, but there was just too many weird fillers awkwardly inserted in his show. Between his obscure pre-recorded spoken word interludes, his “cockiness dance” inspired by D-Generation X wrestler X-Pac, the excruciatingly long time that A$AP Mob was on stage and handing the microphone out to random fans, it just seemed like he was trying to waste time or something.

Don’t get me wrong, it was really cool that he referenced my early childhood hero X-Pac, gave the fans a chance to speak (one kid even spit a pretty sick verse when he got the mic) and let his crew get some air-time (A$AP Twelvy killed it, by the way) — it’s just not what I paid to see.

But the performance wasn’t all bad. The high energy of his set and appearances by openers Danny Brown and Schoolboy Q gave the show a whole new element. Especially when Q and Rocky were trading verses on “Brand New Guy” and “Hands on the Wheel,” which easily became the highlights of the night.

When A$AP Rocky finally took the microphone back from his exponentially less captivating crew (again, minus A$AP Twelvy; think Odd Future but slightly less talented), he brought some “phonk” to the end of his show by playing drug-induced southern style tracks like “Trilla” and “Peso,” steering the entertaining but peculiar night to a close.

I thought the concert had a terrific atmosphere and you could tell there was a lot of love between the fans and the showmen, making it a wonderfully intoxicating time for everyone.

Now if A$AP Rocky just cut out the filler by playing more of his solo tunes and security at Bogart’s took a couple hits off the chronic (the crowd was smoking and chilled the fuck out), everyone would have had a better time.

At one point during the show Rocky said, “It’s OK to dislike things, it doesn’t make you a hater, you’re just human.”

This really sums up how I feel about the night; I’m not trying to be a hater, Rock, there’s just room for improvement.

The air seems sweeter here in the front of the website, the sun a little brighter and the deadlines a little more immediate, but as Uncle Ben once reminded Peter Parker, with great power comes great responsibility. So here we are in relatively short order with a batch of new reviews and a few more older titles in my continuing quest to revisit the deserving releases from the not-so-waning months of 2011. We’re getting there, slowly but surely. Read them while they’re hot; there’s more where they came from.

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I don’t think I’ve ever written anything about Jake Speed without mentioning Woody Guthrie. Call me lazy, but the political Folk pioneer is such an obvious influence on Speed’s songs and lyrics it almost seems dishonest not to mention it.

While listening to World Come Clean, Jake Speed and the Freddies’ brand new release, I never thought of Woody once.

On the album, Speed and his band still work within a traditional Americana format, but the songs are a bit more expansive and the claustrophobia of Folk clichés is alleviated by the more dynamic songwriting and performances. The album’s songs are far less predictable than ones from previous Speed releases, showing the maturity of Speed as a songwriter, refreshingly not purely working within the idioms of Folk music. There are shades of Rock, Blues, Country and Gypsy Jazz (and, yes, still lots of Folk) in the mix and The Freddies’ turn in typically perfect performances, showing they may just be the best Roots band in the city.

Thankfully, Speed’s lyrical approach remains socially/politically aware, with jabs at the U.S.’s current sad state. Most of the songs began as “Songatorials,” from Speed’s weekly song offerings for CityBeat throughout 2007, “Speedy Delivery,” based on current events. While these issues have often been diluted with a tinge of sharp humor on previous Speed recordings, here, Speed plays it more straight. In fact, there’s a sense of urgency and even a little anger in the feel of many of these tracks, something largely absent from Speed’s discography so far.

The fiery nature of the lyrics is translated wonderfully by the musicians (Freddies Justin Todhunter, Kentucky Graham, Chris Werner, and assorted "guest Freddies"), who perform most of the songs with the energy of a Punk Rock band. The album shifts gears halfway through with gentler songs that turn the anger and despair into hopefulness about the world and the future. Giving the album this kind of duality (and breaking it up so exactly) creates an enjoyable and interesting listening experience.

Some see Speed as a bit of a novelty act, his aw-shucks shtick and throwback duds making him seem like a costumed strolling troubadour at some Renaissance Fair-like Pioneer Days festival. But those people aren’t listening or paying close enough attention. World Come Clean should go a long way in dispelling such surface observations.

Jake Speed and the Freddies will celebrate the release of World Come Clean this Saturday with a free show at Northside Tavern. The Queen City Zapatistas open. Go to Jake Speed and the Freddies official site for more info.

Bellevue-based three-piece Slow Blind Corners kicks up a pleasant, upbeat racket of shambolic, ’60s-styled Pop on their debut CD, New Places. The songs follow a pretty simple formula: acoustic guitars, bass and drums provide the backbeat for vocal harmonies, psychedelic-era-Beatles-informed electric riffing and the occasional bubbling synth line, which all run wild on top of the proceedings.

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Since her 1994 indie debut, The Honesty Room, Dar Williams has attracted a diverse and pathologically loyal fan base with her quirkily hybridized Folk/Pop ministrations. Like an elegant gene splice of Shawn Colvin and Loudon Wainwright III, Williams can easily triangulate the emotional distance between breezy humor, somber reflection and crystalline heartbreak, on subjects as intimate as family and love and as broad as culture and politics, by finding the commonalities between them and translating them through her muse. Equally relevant is the fact that Williams hasn’t shied away from experimenting with her base formula over the past two decades; her desire to extend her reach is a testament to her restless creative spirit and her success in doing just that is a testament to her steadfast audience.

In the Time of Gods is Williams’ ninth studio album and, like the majority of her catalog, it is a work that somehow manages to be both spectacular and subtle. In keeping with her need to experiment, Williams conceived In the Time of Gods as a concept album with each song representing a particular Greek mythological archetype, while also weaving contemporary emotional, social and cultural concerns into the narrative. It’s an unlikely formula, and one that requires an almost impossible songwriting balance, but Williams was clearly up to the task, because In the Time of Gods stands with the best of her albums to date.

Part of its brilliance is that Williams uses the Greek pantheon as a launch point to create her own dieties and address her unique issues, proving that mythology must be both consistent to be permanent and malleable to be relevent. The element that drives all of this home is Williams’ impeccable songwriting skill as she finds the connective tissue between gods and goddesses like Hera (“I Am the One Who Will Remember Everything”), Hermes (“You Will Ride with Me Tonight”), Dionysus (“I Will Free Myself”) and Poseidon (“The Light and the Sea”) and places their gifted and flawed archetypes in real life situations with real life outcomes.

As always, Williams’ musical accompaniment in this endeavor is engaging and beautiful and exactly right, providing the consistency that runs through her  estimable canon. With a surgeon’s skill, Dar Williams has grafted the wisdom, wonder and humanity of Greece’s ancient pantheon onto In the Time of Gods’ modern cautionary tales, further evidence of the contention that Williams is among the finest Folk/Pop songwriters of the last half century.

(Dar Williams performs in Cincinnati on June 23 at Mt. Lookout club The Redmoor.)

According to its government's Web site, New Zealand’s population density is 14 people per square kilometer. (The U.S. population is more than double that—31 people/km^2.) Needless to say, concentrated masses of human beings aren’t particularly easy to come by out there.

“New Zealand is pretty far-removed from anything that would warrant being in a band, and you can’t really tour there,” lead singer Nick Johnson says. So it’s little wonder Cut Off Your Hands waved goodbye to their island home and hit the road to tour the sometimes overcrowded yet always far more plentiful cities of Europe and the U.S.

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Cincinnati singer-songwriter Moegly (a.k.a. Nicholas Moeggenberg) is one of those dreamy, skinny, intelligent boys who always go over well with the coffee shop crowd. His debut five-song (well, six with the hidden track) EP, It’s Getting Hard to Find Good People, is a smooth, gentle Indie Folk effort that sounds especially good in its jumpier moments.

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I haven't done LSD in at least a decade, but Thursday's MidPoint Music Festival sure felt like a psychedelic flashback. My long-ish, strange-ish trip began at 9 a.m., as I drove into downtown and found Central Parkway colorfully dressed up as if an army of elderly women had sneaked in overnight and turned the strip into a Dr. Seussian wonderland. The colorful crocheting that hugged the trees, lampposts and practically everything else sticking out of the ground was actually the work of The BombShells' Yarn,  who've dropped similar "yard bombs" on statues downtown (like the William Henry Harrison one in Garfield Park).

Regardless of whence it came, it set the trippy tone for my first day at MPMF.11. And things only got trippier. I'm a big fan of the surreal and bizarre, so it wasn't a bad trip, by any means. And the soundtrack was pretty kick-ass.

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