SOJA’s roots go back to vocalist/guitarist Jacob Hemphill and bassist Bobby Lee meeting in first grade (Hemphill’s family had just returned from Africa, where his father had done contracting  

With 2009’s The Mountain, Erika Wennerstrom and Heartless Bastards transformed themselves from a great garage-stained Indie Blues outfit to a world class Rock band.The subtlety and diversity of   

Dave Matthews is understandably fond of Soldiers of Jah Army, or SOJA as they’ve been acronymed. The Arlington, Va., quintet has a similar grass roots success story, after all. SOJA has opened for M  

With 2009’s The Mountain, Erika Wennerstrom and Heartless Bastards transformed themselves from a great garage-stained Indie Blues outfit to a world class Rock band. The contemplative nuances of The   

You rarely see a musician dabbling in sports — OK, Marvin Gaye did try out for the Detroit Lions — but it’s certainly not unusual to see an athlete turn to music. So it was with London Dubst  

Some guitarists form in the womb and emerge ready to push their instrument’s limits and in turn be pushed by them, using their childhoods as a proving ground for the brilliance to follow. That is not Cincinnati’s Natalie Wells.    

Some artists form in the womb and emerge ready to push their instrument's limits and in turn be pushed by them, using their childhoods as a proving ground for the brilliance to follow. That is   

Sometimes I feel like that scene in Seinfeld where Newman talks himself into a state of bug-eyed crazy as he describes the endless stream of mail that the Post Office is forced to deal with every day. I feel his fictional pain as I look about the Bunker and realize the stacks keep stacking regardless of my efforts to review them. I’m also reminded of an offhand comment made by my glass-half-empty pal Sean Daley when we worked together at Wizard Records way back in the weighty ’80s. One afternoon, Sean started looking around the store with a vacant gaze that suggested either the onset of a stroke or the Percocet kicking in. I asked him what was wrong and he said, “It just occurred to me that my new favorite album could be in here somewhere and I’d never know it because I won’t hear it, and no one I know will buy it and turn me onto it.” That’s how deeply philosophical it got in the store when we were short on customers. Of course, my dilemma doesn’t quite drip with that level of O. Henry irony. I might hear something quite good long after its release, but I have this forum to cover it, regardless of when it was actually hot off the presses.   

You rarely see a musician dabbling in sports — OK, Marvin Gaye did try out for the Detroit Lions — but it’s certainly not unusual to see an athlete turn to music. So it was with London Dubstep producer/DJ Gary McCann, more prominently known as Caspa.
  

One spin through Pete Dressman’s new album, Vol. II, might give the impression that the Cincinnati singer/songwriter and his band, the Soul Unified Nation, are unrepentant lovers of contemporary classic Rock icons like Pearl Jam who wouldn’t be the least bit out of place opening for locally-based Psych Rock trio Buffalo Killers. And you’d be right.