Brief Candles singer Kevin Dixon opens the song “Skylark” on the band's new Fractured Days...

Though it probably can't compete with dance music for sheer volume of incredibly specific sub-scenes, modern rock has become a puzzlingly fractured musical universe. Indeed, the term "rock" has become all but meaningless when presented without a qualifier (indie-, math-, psych-, and so on, ad infinitum), so...

Thursday, Aug. 20, WMSE’s Radio Summer Camp w/ Sometime Sweet Susan @ Turner Hall Ballroom, 7 p.m. WMSE launches its Radio Summer Camp festival, a multi-day, multi-venue concert series, with tonight’s showcase of Milwaukee music past and present at Turner Hall Ballroom. Headliners...

Though they began the decade as one of the city’s most popular jam bands, Freshwater Collins, the guys in Invade Rome emerged last year with a new name, a new sound and a new record, Light Eyed and Villainous, a forceful collection of burly, escapist rock ’n’ roll. Invade Rome play at 9:30 p.m. Saturday, after sets from Milwaukee’s catchiest shoegaze band, Brief Candles (8:30 p.m.), and Pezzettino (7:30 p.m.), the stage name of accordionist Margaret Stutt...

Here it is! We are very pleased to announce the 2009 Cascio Groove Garage lineup with our partners Casico Interstate Music and 91.7 WMSE.

Record Store Day began last year as an attempt to lure traffic to often-struggling independent music stores with a series of ultra-rare, Record Store Day-only releases. This year’s crop of collectibles includes releases from Bob Dylan, The Smiths, Pavement, The Hold Steady and The Flaming Lips, and will be sold at both Exclusive Company locations as well as Rush-Mor Records. The Exclusive Company’s locations will be hosting all-day line-ups of local bands, while Rush-Mor will...

Dan DuChaine may be the only record store owner who's actually trying to drive traffic away from his shop on Record Store Day, an annual event created last year to draw attention to independent record stores. While shops around the country will be celebrating with in-store performances and promotions on Saturday, April 18, DuChaine is instead pushing a Pabst Blue Ribbon-sponsored Bay View pub crawl, which...

Pairing a shoegazey squall with a polite, C86 jangle and sweet, Juliana Hatfield-esque vocals, Minneapolis' Gospel Gossip distills many of the highlights of '80s and '90s college rock into a toe-tapping CliffsNotes version. The group is working on a follow-up to 2007's darling Sing Into My Mouth, but in the meantime they return to our city to split another bill with The Brief Candles, Milwaukee's premier shoegaze band, themselves...

Thursday, Jan. 29, The Paul Collins Beat w/ Gentleman Jesse and His Men @ Club Garibaldi, 10 p.m. The Paul Collins Beat—an American group once known simply as The Beat until the British band of the same name created brand confusion, forcing the change— was one of the lucky late-’70s power-pop bands granted...

Has there ever been a subgenre of alternative rock more proudly stagnant than shoegaze? The genre hit its apex in 1991 with My Bloody Valentine’s masterwork, Loveless, and although bands like Slowdive and Swervedriver applied the tenants of shoegazey dream-pop to sludgy alt-rock in the mid-’90s, the genre soon ceased to evolve. Modern shoegaze artists have done little to reinvent the wheel—it seems they’re too transfixed watching it spin to even consider it—but they’ve nonetheless struck gold mining My Bloody Valentine’s durable template...