The singer/songwriter's newest album, 'True Devotion,' is a semi-autobiographical Folk-centered collection, one that basically says, "Hi, I'm Rocky, and this is a snapshot of my life during a three-year hiatus." The new record offers a poet wielding an acoustic guitar, his warm storytelling lifted by an innocuous trifecta of drums, keys and strings.  

Rocky Votolato's songwriting will take him to the West again and again, given that his newest album, 'True Devotion', is a win for Barsuk Records, which released it in February. It's a semi-autobiographical Folk-centered collection. He plays the Southgate House Thursday with Brooke Waggoner.  

"Nick Spencer Cincinnati" — the results of this Web search yield a litany of news and critical opinions surrounding the now 31-year-old former co-owner of alchemize bar, two-time candidate for City Council and founder of the one-off Desdemona Music Festival in 2006. Buried in that search, though, is news about Spencer's latest venture: writing comics.  

Annie Clark, aka St. Vincent, is an accomplished singer/songwriter and multi-instrumentalist who's no longer in the shadows of The Polyphonic Spree and Sufjan Stevens, with whom she toured as a guitarist and vocalist. They did open her ears, though, shaping her jazzy approach to songwriting.  

Alex Brown Church’s latest Sea Wolf offering, White Water, White Bloom, dropped last week. Like 2007’s Leaves in the River, the new album finds Alex lifting his nature-centered narratives with a steady acoustic guitar and orchestral rivers full of brooding cello lines and distant pianos. “Spirit Horse, spirit me away/ I had a vision by the riverside today” aren’t the only lines worth plucking. He seemingly embodies a man shivering in the thick of a snowfall, an element missing on Leaves. He plays the Southgate House.  

Alex Brown Church Church is Sea Wolf, but recently he welcomed drummer Joey Ficken, bassist Ted Liscinski (onetime member of Cincy band Moth during that band's major label tenure) and keyboardist Lisa Fendelander to the permanent fold. Touring newbie Joyce Lee takes up the cello, while Nathan Anderson helms electric guitar, something he also handles for Indie Folk luminary M. Ward. I leave it at that, because I don’t want to   

Disambiguation is fun. Type “Iran” into Wikipedia and a road to reliable and unreliable sources opens. But nowhere does it say that a band took up the name in 2000. No link. No pop culture reference. The Brooklyn Noise Pop band needs attention for several — and not because it deserves a beefy Wikipedia entry. Dissolver, the band's fourth album, maintains an air of Noise Pop and nods to John Lennon, Pink Floyd and, of course, TVOTR. They play the Southgate House with the Fruit Bats and Kevin Barker.  

TV on the Radio guitarist Kyp Malone and musician/filmmaker Aaron Aites front this side project that allows them to noodle around without consequence. Aites fronts the project, creating the playgrounds in which he and Malone collaborate. Their 'Dissolver' album, released in February, ended a six-year hiatus from recording.  

It's a sticky Saturday afternoon in College Corner, Ohio, and four out of the five members of Grooveshire are sitting under a small canopy at Ohmstead, the neo-hippie music festival on the grounds of Hannon's Camp America. We discuss the band's new EP, 'American Son,' the centerpiece of their "Louisiana Bayou Grunge," a term stemming from Jacob Jones' sizzling slide guitar riffs.   

Son Volt’s latest touring efforts have been decent, as drummer Dave Bryson points out with a touch of sarcasm on the band’s blog. Bryson’s steady blog proves that Jay Farrar has stability with Son Volt’s latest lineup. The AltCountry band took quite a hiatus not long after Warner Bros. Records gave it the boot in 1999. But 2005 was a key year: Farrar reformed the group and hooked up with Rhino Records to release A Retrospective: 1995-2000. An appealing survey of the band’s affection for ball-breaking Blues and hushed Americana, it revisits the albums Trace, Straightaways and Wide Swing Tremolo. See the band with Cary Hudson at the Southgate House.