Dr. Dog is a Philadelphia psychedelic pop group with the completely novel idea of playing music inspired by The Beatles. The Philly fivesome screams their love of the fab foursome from the proverbial Apple Corps rooftop on its fifth album, 2008’s Fate, which puts a bit of an Americana accent on borrowed Lennon/McCartney melodies...

There are two surefire ways to climb the country charts: Sing a big ballad for the ladies or make a fun, goofy novelty song for the masses. Blake Shelton, a regular fixture on the charts, is adept at both. Shelton offsets his sensitive cowboy persona with a regular-guy sense of humor, charting with bleeding-heart ballads like “Home...

Illinois’ Dr. Manhattan released their first album on Vagrant Records and are regulars on the Warped Tour circuit, but they aren’t anywhere near the by-the-numbers emo-punk band suggested by that biography. The group’s second album, last summer’s Jam Dreams, is a bizarre quirk-fest with shades of the art-punk of The Mae Shi, the nervy...

he latest in a long line of great songwriters with awful voices inspired/emboldened by Neutral Milk Hotel’s Jeff Mangum, The Rural Alberta Advantage’s Nils Edenloff...

Friday, Jan. 8 Invade Rome w/ The Celebrated Workingman @ Frank’s Power Plant, 9 p.m. After years of playing together as Freshwater Collins, the guys in Invade Rome introduced a new

Not since “Weird Al” Yankovic has a comedian mined more material out of food than Jim Gaffigan. On Gaffigan’s latest comedy album, King Baby, his seventh, the slow-talking Indiana standup riffs on waffles, ribs, bologna, condiments and Dunkin’ Donuts and returns to one of his most fruitful muses: bacon...

@ Circle-A Café, 8 p.m. Danny Price looks and sings like a sailor who just received leave from a ship of the damned. When he sings, his face express- es intense...

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...

Farms in Trouble’s messy, lo-fi pop invites instant comparisons to early Guided by Voices, though the group is even more free-spirited, pasting together fuzzy song pastiches with an anything-can-be-an-instrument-if-you-turn-it-into-one mentality (they’ve been known to play bottles and bike spokes). In the studio this Milwaukee group, which features members of The Candeliers and The Trusty Knife, records straight to cassette...

Ireland’s The Cranberries rode the 1990s alternative boom well, with singles like the 1993 ballad “Linger” and 1994’s far-grungier “Zombie” becoming near-ubiquitous rock radio staples. Like many of their contemporaries, the band’s fame had waned by the new millennium...