If Jack White is Indie Rock’s most prominent attention deficit multitasker, his Raconteurs bandmate Brendan Benson is his lesser known Indie Pop counterpart. The Detroit native’s band work with the Well Fed Boys and the Mood Elevator received good notices, but his solo output (1996’s One Mississippi, 2002’s Lapalco, 2005’s The Alternative to Love, 2009’s My Old, Familiar Friend) has ga...  

When the phrase “guitar hero” gets tossed around, it’s naturally in reference to some of the greatest six string figures in Rock history. But if there is a subset of that hallowed group — guitar heroes in waiting, as it were — then Natalie Wells surely deserves to be included on that hop...  

  Like the star-crossed events that improbably introduced peanut butter to chocolate, the universe conspired to match Susan Tedeschi and Derek Trucks at a beautiful personal and professional crossroad.  

It’s been an eventful three years since Matthew "M." Ward last gave free rein to his solo muse on 2009’s much heralded Hold Time. Ward, doing a brisk Indie Rock business under his first initial and last name, has been almost psychopathically busy in the interim, from recording and touring with Connor Oberst, Jim James and Mike Mogis under their Monsters of Folk banner and performing similar du...  

During the past decade and a half, guitarist/vocalist/songwriter Tim Kasher has served as the reeling ringmaster for the dark, wonderfully dysfunctional circus known as Cursive. A constantly fluctuating membership has resulted in Cursive’s fascinatingly malleable sound, from the Indie Rock gravity of 1997’s Such Blinding Stars for Starving Eyes to the denser and more conceptual Early Summer: Semantics of Song in 1998 to the string-driven Burst and Bloom and The Ugly Organ in the new millennium.   

 Ric Hordinski’s name on any project or event is the musical version of the Good Housekeeping seal of approval. So it is with Joel Henderson’s release gig at Hordinski’s Monastery studio in Walnut Hills as he introduces his new release, Locked Doors & Pretty Fences.  

Some bands work for years for even the smallest scrap of national attention. For Cincinnati’s Bad Veins, that recognition came just after their second show in 2006 and has hardly abated in the subsequent six years. 
  

When Joan Osborne vaulted into the public consciousness with Relish, her 1995 major label debut, she had already established a loyal fan base that was well aware of her estimable Jazz and Soul skills. With Soul Show in 1991 and the Blue Million Miles EP in 1993, Osborne displayed her smoldering vocal chops and her unerring ability to write to her own strengths as well as inhabit another writer’s...  

The phrase “living legend” gets thrown around a bit too liberally but there’s no better description for Merle Haggard. Far removed from the big-hat twang Pop dominating Country music today, Haggard was among the ’60s artists who helped popularize and transform the genre beyond its regional hillbilly appeal and teeing up its mainstream success. Haggard didn’t play the role of Country bad boy, he lived it.
  

Few Death Metal bands have aroused as much fan passion or public outcry as Cannibal Corpse. Cannibal Corpse has long defended the murder and mayhem in its lyrics as nothing more than graphically gory short stories, fictional exaggerations of real life’s more brutal aspects. The band’s fans clearly understand the distinction and will turn out in droves to feel Cannibal Corpse’s self-described “anger music” in their unspilled entrails.