Music Tonight: The Southgate House's Parlour stage will be rockin' tonight with firecracker energy and creative, complex song structuring as Pittsburgh foursome edhochuli (yes, named for the unlikely cult hero/NFL ref) comes to Newport for a 9 p.m. show. The band is joined by excellent local Post Punk/Post Hardcore trio Knife the Symphony and Vacation, a local progressive Punk group that is fresh off of a string of East Coast tour dates with fellow Cincinnatians The Dopamines. Vacation's debut full-length is currently streaming through The Recording Label site (here), the locally-based home to free downloads of albums by Pop Empire, Sacred Spirits and The Kickaways.

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Music Tonight: Handsome Furs is the Electro/Post Punk/No Wave project featuring Wolf Parade's Dan Boeckner and his wife, keyboardist and short story author Alexei Perry. On the road supporting its latest release, Sound Kapital (on SubPop), the duo comes to Newport's Southgate House tonight. The Furs aren't fighting for positioning on the Synth Pop bandwagon, nor are they flirting with contemporary Dance music styles, as seems the case with many acts dependent on electronics. Though they hardly sound retro, the Furs have more in common with Suicide, early OMD and the raw Electro experiments that marked the bridging of Joy Division and New Order. Fittingly, Cincinnati's Eat Sugar, another Electronic act forging its own non-pandering vision of tech-driven musical adventurousness, opens up the show at 9 p.m. Tickets are $13 at the door. Read Brian Baker's preview from this week's CityBeat here. Below is Handsome Furs' video for Sound Kapital's "What About Us." WARNING: Unless you work at a Hustler store, this clip is VERY NSFW.

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Music Tonight: The MidPoint Indie Summer Series on Fountain Square features some of Cincinnati's finest this week. Tonight's free show (7 p.m. start) is headlined by beloved local Indie Pop duo Bad Veins, which recently posted on Facebook that their second full-length is finished and they need extras for a video shoot for one of the new LP's tracks (go here for more info). No word on a release date (or a label — BV and Dangerbird Records, home to the duo's debut, appear to have broken up, removing all reference to each other from their various websites).

Newer Electronic/Rock/Post Punk group Kry Kids and Nashville's The Clutters, featuring keyboardist Andrew Higley, also perform. Higley is a former local musician (now Nashville pro) who remains a frequent collaborator with Cincinnati's The Chocolate Horse, also performing on the Square tonight, just before Bad Veins. The Horse is celebrating its just released new album, Beasts.

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Music Tonight: Tonight’s the last time you’ll be able to catch Cincinnati-based trio The Rubber Knife Gang in town for a while. But it’s not for any kind of hiatus — no rehab or plastic surgery or whatever it is bands do on such breaks. Quite the opposite. It’s because the band is jumping on a plane in a few weeks and heading overseas to spread RKG’s soulful Americana/Roots/Bluegrass sound. Tonight, the Gang joins Nashville’s Grace Adele and the Grand Band for a free, 10 p.m. show at MOTR Pub. The two acts reteam for a Columbus show this weekend, then RKG hops on a plane for Belgium, where the threesome will play two weeks’ worth of dates through mid-September (with a few shows in Germany and the Netherlands sprinkled in).

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If you wanted to, you could poke around online for about two minutes and come up with a fairly accurate list of songs Paul McCartney and his band will be playing in Cincinnati Thursday for the first major concert event at the Reds’ young Great American Ballpark. Actually, even the most casual fan could probably come up with 3/4 of the setlist off the top of their head. Despite the massive amount of classics in his catalog, there are some songs even Sir Paul knows (or thinks) he has to play.

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The accelerated speed of tech developments over the past decade has changed the world in innumerable ways. The impact it has had on music is glaring, completely readjusting how the worldwide music industry operates and affecting everything from the way the sounds are created, recorded and distributed to the way they are experienced by listeners. Cincinnati’s Walk the Moon is currently in the midst of a quick rise in the music world that is a perfect example of how the career plans of aspiring young artists can today play out over an amazingly short period of time. It’s why you might want to catch Walk the Moon’s concert tonight at Oakley’s 20th Century Theater.

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A few years ago I was invited by CityBeat to share some journal entries I had been jotting down while touring over in Europe. These entries somewhat led to my current side hustle of faux-journalism with the paper. I’m on tour again and CityBeat offered me another crack at documenting our experiences up and down the interstates. This time I’m on tour with some Ohio-based friends and artists for the Ohio Takeover Tour (in Cincinnati tonight at The Drinkery, the new club in the old Jefferson Hall space on Main Street), so the shows (and adventures around the shows) have a bit more meaning.

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I've had nearly a dozen different people ask me the same question over the last week or so: “What have you been listening to?” 

Luckily, it's been a fruitful season for (relatively) new music. Here's my answer:

PJ Harvey —Let England Shake: Harvey's latest gets better and digs deeper with every spin via its textured arrangements and curious, Folk-tinged genre U-turns. I'm still not sure I like her more overtly topical lyrical bent, but her voice is as affecting as ever.

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Tonight at downtown club Main Event, three of Cincinnati’s best DJs will perform at a benefit to assist the musical pioneer who made their DJ careers possible. When news hit late last month that DJ Kool Herc was in the hospital, bleeding internally and enduring massive pain, many Hip Hop lovers with an understanding of the music’s origins and originators began plotting ways to help. Tonight’s event featuring Mista Rare Groove, Apryl Reign and DJ Pillo is one of several efforts across the continent (and probably globe) organized by appreciative fans to lessen the financial burden of Herc's mounting medical bills.

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Music lovers complaining about the out-of-touchness of the Grammy awards is like stand-up comedians complaining about airline food. Both are overdone and clichéd, but the frustration is a shared experience that people instantly identify with. With the Grammys, sometimes an unlikely win or loss is so infuriating and baffling, people can’t help but go ballistic. This year’s event was a rollercoaster that reflected both the Grammys’ perpetual practice of giving trophies to irrelevant and/or the “safest” artists and the program’s well-intentioned efforts of late to get with the times. I can’t remember ever describing a Grammys ceremony as “shocking,” but this year’s was full of surprises both pleasant and mind-numbingly inexplicable.

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