Pagans have long had a public relations problem. Where centuries ago they were persecuted as heathens, if not Satanists, today they’re ridiculed as angry outsiders dressed in...

Jack Grassel was once the busiest man in Milwaukee music, playing more gigs most years than the calendar has days. For the past three years, the jazz guitarist and his wife, singer Jill Jensen, have focused...

Dana Coppafeel estimates that he’s spent 15 years, about half his life, in the Milwaukee rap scene. He’s been one of the city’s most ubiquitous rappers for so long it’s a bit surprising that until this month he had never released a solo album, but he says he never saw the need for one. “To be honest, I’m a team player,” Coppafeel says. “I’ve always felt more comfortable working within groups. That’s the dynamic I feel stronger in.”

The average life span of a band in Milwaukee is remarkably short. It seems as if the most promising groups the city has produced during the last few years have broken up right as they appeared poised for bigger and better things. Yet one can take some consolation in the fact that the players from these fractured groups often come together to form new bands...

For many East Side alt-rock hipsters of the late-1980s and early-’90s, the songs of Mike Benign were part of the soundtrack of their lives. Fronting bands such as Umbrella Man, Arms & Legs & Feet and Blue in the Face, Benign’s smart wordplay and taut melodies encapsulated many of the situations one might encounter along East North Avenue or similar...

There was a time when African-American men in matching suits and women in diaphanous dresses singing praises to the Lord in impassioned harmony...

“Lightning From the North is, in a nutshell, a response to people asking us what a bunch of Yankees are doing playing bluegrass,” Derek Dunn, guitarist of Milwaukee’s self-dubbed “streetgrass” quartet, the .357 String Band, explains of their newest release. “To me, Americana, country, bluegrass music...

“Milwaukee is a great city, with all these great clubs,” says Trapper Schoepp, “but unfortunately it’s really hard to play out a lot when the frontman of your band can’t even buy a drink at a bar.” It’s a sentiment shared by many underage musicians in the city, but Schoepp seems to feel it particularly deeply. As you’d expect from a songwriter whose latest album...

Since his alt-country band West of Rome slowed down toward the end of the decade, Milwaukee singer-songwriter Chris DeMay has reinvented himself as an eager free agent, recording a 2007 solo album, I Won’t Be Me, playing shows with songstress Michelle Anthony, joining the Americana ensemble Juniper Tar, co-founding the annual Neil Young...

Milwaukee rapper Ray Nitti didn’t get much of a heads up from V100 when DJs from the radio station called to tell him they were going to premiere his single “Bow” on their local segment “Heat From the Streets.” “They told me I had five minutes before it was going to be broadcast,” Nitti recalls. “I wanted to call everyone I knew and tell them my song was going to be on the radio...

When it comes to mining the depths of folk music, the members of Milwaukee’s alt-folk band The Maze would like to think of themselves as explorers trudging through the dense musical jungles with no predetermined route. With a try-anything mentality where electric guitars are often traded for ukuleles, The Maze has quietly (and occasionally loudly) found a following in the city and around the Midwest...

In a time when experimentation is often the hip thing to do, Green Bay’s rock ’n’ roll troubadours Beach Patrol stick to the tried-and-true basics. With a variety of past and present influences such as The Beatles, The Replacements, Tom Petty and Elvis Costello, the band sets out in studio or on stage to channel core rock ’n’ roll ideals and mix them with expertise...

One of the best things about The Lovelies’ reunion performance in February at an Atomic Records tribute concert was “looking and watching people sing along to songs that haven’t been played in almost 10 years,” recalls the band’s longtime drummer, Damian Strigens. A local alt-rock band that mirrored The Breeders...

Decibully’s long-delayed World Travels Fast arrives four years after the band’s last album, and singer William Seidel says its songs reflect that passage of time. “We definitely needed to slow down, take some time away from the band and focus on our personal lives,” Seidel explains. “We’re all getting older. We’ve been doing this for so long, and there’s only so many days you can sleep...

The Jazz Estate’s Monday night residency is billed as Ballini, Ogburn and Baumann, but internally those three players prefer to call the event by a less formal name. “We call it ‘Honest Mondays,’” says singer-songwriter Marc Ballini, who shares the stage with mandolinist Ryan Ogburn and guitarist Craig Baumann. “We just play...

As if the creativity and innovation of ’60s rock wasn’t exciting enough back in the day, some fans of The Rolling Stones and Cream began to suspect a hidden world behind that music, a deep substratum of influences called the blues. High-school students in the late ’60s, Steve Cohen (harmonica), Bill Stone (guitar) and Dave Kasik...

Brian Barney was the only music writer I’ve worked with that bands requested by name. “Can Brian Barney write an article about us?” countless bands asked me over the years, and it’s easy to see why they wanted Brian to cover them. He wrote about other people’s music with the same enthusiasm and passion he had for his own music...

Bands generally don’t get their first real taste of success until years and years of playing together, performing shows and releasing at least an album or two. But Milwaukee rockers Arkady, who have yet to release so much as an EP or play a show under their current moniker—their first will be at Mad Planet on Nov. 19—are already on their way to getting a big taste of success...

Jeb Ebben swung his guitar and stomped on the row of effects pedals in front of him, the glow-in-the dark shoelaces of his Chuck Taylors radiating in the dimly lit stage area of the Borg Ward Collective. He spun and spasmed in the walls of fuzzy, distorted sound. He wailed and howled. Nathan Riddle was beside him...

Feraim Albano, drummer for The Flips, a band of Milwaukee women rock ’n’ rollers, describes her band as a mix of Shangri-Las styled pop, ’60s girl groups and Phil Spector’s wall of sound. Albano recently took a break from her day job at the Hi Fi Café to talk more about the sound of The Flips. She was joined by Wendy Norton, The Flips’ guitarist. Norton, who...

“Things are a lot different now,” Paul Kalfahs says of the Milwaukee music scene. “There are a lot more ‘garage’ bands, it seems like.” Kalfahs is guitarist/vocalist of one of those “garage” bands. His trio, flippantly dubbed Sticks N Stones, is only a few months old, but they’re already booked on bills opening for national acts like The Ponys...

Fans of The Who will have their choice of two local Who cover bands this weekend, one decidedly professional, the other decidedly not. At Shank Hall Friday night, a Who cover band called Substitute will perform...

In Milwaukee’s East Side and Riverwest rap scene, where soulful beats and laid-back grooves are the norm, rapper JC Poppe is a bit more aggressive than his peers—not rap-rock aggressive, per se (though that’s a style he would like to explore, if it weren’t so stigmatized), but he raps with the pointed indignation of Brother...

It only takes a song to snap us back to the past. The emotional chord that music strums within us is the reason we connect certain tunes to significant moments in our lives. They become our anthems, our soundtracks, and when we hear them later in life, they take us on a vivid trip down memory lane. Whether or not it’s intentional...

As the Soviet Union dissolved and the Iron Curtain crumbled, many decided to leave their various homelands to seek opportunities elsewhere. Some came to Milwaukee, including a few musicians. One of them, Moldovan accordionist Stas Venglevski, probably had no idea that his new home was once the accordion capital of America...