The wonder of music is its ability to transcend cultural barriers and speak in a booming voice directly to the heart. Rory Block is white and a woman, but she’s a truly gifted “bluesman” who knew and trained with the best. The daughter of a Greenwich Village sandal maker at…

Leader of the indie rock band Cursive and his side project, The Good Life, Tim Kasher performs drunken, woebegone tales of relational dysfunction that have crowned him heir to Lou Barlow as the most emotionally besotted individual in indie rock. Like Barlow, Kasher shares unerring aim for the heart of…

Jason Molina is an itinerant artist, driven to challenge himself and change up his material and approach in search of new “moments.” Molina’s done things such as recruiting players unfamiliar with the songs and recording them as they discovered them, or decamping to an abandoned factory to get the perfect…

Punk is urban folk, born of suburban mediocrity and conformity. But the onetime vehicle for protest is now just another marketing niche for songs about girls. Springing into that vacuum is MDC. Along with the Dead Kennedys and Suicidal Tendencies, the band helped forge the American hardcore movement, mixing raw,…

I have a dream of a day when there are no longer formats, no longer genres. A day when hipsters, geeks, hillbillies, hip-hoppers, punkers and metalheads all see shows together, thanks to the continued miscegenation of musical styles. And if there’s evidence of progress toward that day, it’s the music…

This coupling is a little like TNT wrapped in plastic explosive — a kind of hard-rock overkill. The Burning Brides are the more accessible of the two bands, mixing a dirty garage-rock roar with flashes of metal style, sounding at their best like The Stooges in a grudge match with…

Hella is a two-piece that must be seen to be appreciated. It’s not an extensive visual display, just the breathtaking spectacle of two musicians tangling with their instruments with an intensity reserved for assailants in a back-alley knife fight. This shamanistic experimental rock duo is what jam bands would sound…

This Michigan quintet sounds like the orphaned children of several genres, mixing supple post-punk, a distortion-drenched wall of guitar riffing, and indie rock melodicism in a gumbo of dynamics and aggression. There are echoes of emo in the band’s ’90s alt-rock influences; some tracks stumble forward, limping with obvious pain…

This Northwestern quintet plays jagged post-punk with a dash of goth verve (thanks to keyboards and singer Andrea Zollo), sounding like Siouxsie Sue fronting Fugazi. Formed with ex-Murder City Devils bassist Derek Fudesco shortly after that act’s demise in 2001, Pretty Girls has put out two full-lengths, progressing from West…

Ben Nichols was a child of punk, inducted as a youth into the underground world of VFW halls, basement shows and illegal public park performances rife with underage drinking. When he started Lucero after moving to Memphis, it was something of a lark to cheese off his old punk cronies…

If any indie band could be reconstituted with a properly calibrated mix of the mood, pop and rock quarks, Early Day Miners would require practically a whole shaker of mood, seasoned with a sprinkle of pop and but a dash of rock. Like the paintings of Winslow Homer, their watercolor…

Zao is a powerhouse of the metalcore scene, following the example of genre icons Earth Crisis, forging a hardcore/metal act unafraid of dabbling in other genres, and becoming known for passionate performances. But where Earth Crisis’ sociopolitical stance is decidedly secular, Zao is faith-based, working the Christian music and Cornerstone…

Perhaps it’s the omnipresent gray skies, but whatever the cause, the Brits are masters of a strain of gloomy romanticism traceable from Bowie to Blancmange to Morrissey. NYC quartet Elefant channels this dark, synth-driven pop sound (which hit its high-water mark during New Wave’s ’80s reign) with supple melodies and…

Punk has grown as a term to encompass an eclectic array of approaches, and its infiltration of guitar-based underground music is now so complete that everything that’s at least midtempo seems to bear some imprint of the style. It’s to the point where calling a band punk is no more…

Returning after a 15-year-long hiatus — during which leader David Lowery launched the far more successful Cracker (remember “Low”?) — Camper Van Beethoven melds the quirkiness of its earlier incarnation with Cracker’s pop sensibility and a newfound relevance on New Roman Times, thanks to a rich conceptual conceit. Though CVB’s…

Though they hail from Brooklyn, the Damnwells traffic in a loping, Americana-pop sound that seems endemic to the middle of the country, from the Replacements to Wilco to the Old 97’s. Not as ragged as the ‘Mats or as adventurous (if precious) as Tweedy, lead singer/guitarist Alex Dezen’s reedy tenor…

Garage rock seemed a better bet, but acts like the Shins, Death Cab for Cutie, and Modest Mouse have made the case that indie pop, not rock, is the next “thing.” If so, expect Pinback to come through the door and establish itself ahead of the legions of wanna-bes and…

The Clumsy Lovers began falteringly at first, befitting their name, but developed a grassroots following for their fluttering Americana blend while performing around their native Vancouver, British Columbia, and later the American Northwest. Like a sports team that jells in the playoffs, the Clumsy Lovers hit their stride in 2001,…

Every disgruntled, erstwhile band member (except food chain bottom-feeders, drummers) has probably thought, “Fuckin’ A. I could build something that plays better than these fools.” So it was that in his hubris, Jason Vance forged the instruments of his own doom — literally. A member of Chicago ska-punkers Blue Meanies…

The U.K. Subs never were quite as glorious as the Clash, the Damned, or the Sex Pistols, but rather operated just a tier below, releasing an astounding debut LP, Another Kind of Blues, at the height of England’s punk craze in 1979. With such classics as the R&B-and-reggae-tinged “Stranglehold,” the…

Unlike many of its ’80s Cali punk peers, Bad Religion aged like wine, not delivery pizza. While most bands of that era realized their potential within the first two albums and then began a slow, sometimes torturous slide into mediocrity, creative stagnation and beyond, Bad Religion started as a “good,…

Melissa Ferrick’s been making music for more than a decade since her Atlantic Records debut, Massive Blur, without making any lasting inroads to the mainstream, despite possessing strong, passionate vocals and a pop sensibility that’s absorbed the lessons of Sarah McLachlan, Sheryl Crow and Thea Gilmore. The music on The…