FM 102/1’s fourth annual Big Snow Show concert celebrates the harder end of the Milwaukee alternative radio station’s spectrum. There’s no Death Cab for Cutie this year; instead, the headliners are Breaking Benjamin, the hard-edged post-grunge mainstays from Pennsylvania who this summer released their fourth album, Dear Agony...

Although Summerfest was conceived largely as a showcase for local bands, over the decades slots for opening bands became elusive as the festival began to emphasize national headliners, explains Michael Houser, a former Summerfest board member and the current chief executive...

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.

The Championship and Father Phoenix are two of the more popular offerings from Milwaukee’s music scene, but aside from that, they don’t have too much in common. The Championship specialize in mellow, reflective indie-Americana, while Father Phoenix’s raging post-hardcore seldom finds the time to catch its breath, but tonight this odd couple splits an...

On their 2005 debut album, So Much Drama, Red Knife Lottery shouted out songs about murder and betrayal, sounding like a far younger, far thrashier version of The Pretenders. This year they returned with Hip Bruisers, a seven-inch that further tempered the band’s violent punk with jazzy tones and the increasingly . . .

The Cascio Groove Garage, Summerfest’s all-local stage sponsored by the Shepherd Express and WMSE, gets loud for the day with sets from many of the city’s finest punk and hardcore bands, including Novel (3:45 p.m.), Father Phoenix (4:30 p.m.), Red Knife Lottery (5:15 p.m.) and Cougar Dan (6:45 p.m.)

Summerfest has long prided itself on being the world’s largest music festival, pulling in hundreds of performers from around the globe. But while local musicians have always had a place on the festival’s crowded lineup, it was only last year that the annual celebration created a stage reserved solely for music from around Milwaukee.

One of Milwaukee’s finest punk bands, Father Phoenix has kept a low profile for much of their two-year existence, playing mainly small basement shows and house parties, but now that they’ve got an album under their belts, they’ve begun to branch out to larger club gigs in recent months . . .