Like many people on a journey, Shye Ben-Tzur found connections between what he found and what he thought he left behind. The Israeli rock musician became entranced by Indian music and made for India to learn its intricacies. But once he arrived, he discovered that the mystic chords connected with his own...

Crowded House’s second post-reunion album—an elegant, mostly laid-back affair—finds the band continuing to eschew its earlier mainstream appeal and write serious alternative-pop songs for grown-ups...

The band’s name may imply that its members are somnambulists, but Green Bay/Milwaukee/Oshkosh trio Ian Olvera & The Sleepwalkers sound wide-awake on their full-length debut. The Reckless Kind finds a comfortable space between cheerful power-pop, ’70s Southern California singer-songwriter confessions...

As a young girl living in Brooklyn, N.Y., Galeet Dardashti was fascinated by stories of her grandfather, a great Jewish cantor in Tehran whose voice drew Muslims to his synagogue. Her CD The Naming reclaims the endangered Persian-Jewish heritage in a contemporary setting. The music is a dramatic mix of the...

Ola Belle Reed learned the banjo and songs of Appalachia as a child in the 1920s; by the 1940s she played in string bands; and in the ’50s she became an object of interest to folklorists. Rising Sun Melodies collects some of the recordings she made for the Folkways label in the ’70s along with previously unreleased...

Lee “Scratch” Perry was one of the most distinctive voices to emerge from reggae and an innovator in dub, the echo-laden, studio-generated island music offshoot. Revelation continues Perry’s journey through stream-of-consciousness Rasta word spins and intriguing sonic textures. The elastic rhythms and hypnotic...

The Germantown punk rock kids of Dairyland Youth have grown up in the 22 years since they first sang of young romance and other youthful adventures. Thankfully for longtime fans, they haven't grown up all that much—and they continue the fun times on their reunion album, Re:Volting. Their hooks may be a little...

Rest assured: No song on this album will ever make its way into the public consciousness. Its first single, “Born Free,” pretends to be a sample of or homage to Suicide’s “Ghost Rider,” but it is almost indistinguishable from the original, except M.I.A.’s pseudo-political karaoke dropped on top. I wanted to...

Cabbage furthers the Celtic quintet’s absorption of multiple influences, including rock, bluegrass, Jamaican, African and Middle Eastern music, but its strongest cuts remain its firmly Gaelic instrumental rave-ups (“Blind Monkey,” “Jimmy’s Bucket” and “Crazy Eyes McGullicuddy”). Part of the Titanic house band’s...

While most rock artists of the 1960s faded to mediocre long ago, Richard Thompson remains vital. A batch of new songs recorded on tour, Dream Attic recapitulates many familiar elements of his sound without succumbing to redundancy. Echoes of West Coast psychedelia ride alongside the Anglo-Celtic folk rock he...

One of the best reggae albums of recent years, Black Gold was cut with a spot-on band in the Virgin Islands by the songwriter and singer Toussaint. While he can vocalize commandingly in reggae style, Toussaint also has the chops of a testifying soul singer and R&B balladeer. Much of Black Gold moves in...

A groundbreaking rock’n’roll musician, Dick Dale made his electric guitar sound like an oud, the stringed instrument of the Near East. The tonalities of the Lebanese-American surf instrumentalist lead the way to pychedelia, but his emphasis on the power inherent in amplified guitars also pushed toward heavy metal...

Orcha is all over the place, often in listenable ways. The Milwaukee quintet may have jam-band inclinations, but the group keeps things relatively focused on its debut CD. Lost Out in the Abyss mixes New Age acoustic guitars with heavier rock sounds alongside nimble piano and bombastic organ chords...

California-based singer-songwriter Ruth Gerson is the archetype of today’s creative do-it-yourself artist. A single mom, vocal coach, music producer and inventor of The Singingbelt—a bio-feedback device created to help teach singers diaphragmatic breath support, the proceeds of which she says “make it possible to be...

Los Lobos is in a bluesy mood on Tin Can Trust. The latest album by the Los Angeles band that reconnected rock ’n’ roll to its Latin roots features two songs in that mode, the rollicking borderland polka of “Mujer Ingrata” and the deep South American groove of “Yo Canto,” but much of Tin Can’s sound...

Some bands simply evolve more than others. Over six years and three albums, The Mighty Short Bus has come barreling out of Madison, touring the Midwest as one of the city’s hardest-working DIY groups while consistently redefining its sound...

Milwaukee has long been an on-again, off-again hotbed for what's amorphously defined as punk polka. For a band bereft of a drummer and rich in accordion, Ando & The Jolly Barrels is punkier than most. Andrew "Ando" Ehlers' barbed vocal attack— like a junior Jello Biafra—and handling of the torso-encompassing...

Balkan brass band music captivated California clarinetist Peter Jaques after he discovered the genre by exploring one of its cultural cousins, klezmer. Like his models in the Serbian Gypsy bands from the former Yugoslavia, Jaques’ group found the melancholic yet raucous Eastern sound elastic enough to embrace...

It’s been two decades since Stevie Ray Vaughan, a swaggering blues revivalist with a thick and recognizable style, played his final concert at Alpine Valley on Aug. 26, 1990. He then jumped into a helicopter that crashed minutes after takeoff and killed everyone onboard...

The Milwaukee/Kansas City aural sculptors (as Cyberchump calls itself) decided to remix the electro-acoustic amalgamations of their first two CDs. Enter Milwaukee laptop music-maker Janzyk. The collaboration birthed a collection of eccentric ambient and intelligent dance tracks—or, rather, beat-driven...

Micah Olsan incorporates so many styles into his folkiness it's enough to make one's head spin. And that might be the folkie-funky Milwaukeean's aim on his second CD. Into his intricate acoustic guitar work he integrates classical, jazz and Latin flair to augment what might otherwise be standard coffeehouse picking...

Irish rockers The Answer enjoyed recent success in the United States with a retro, Led Zeppelin sound. Now, The Answer’s fellow countrymen in Glyder hope American listeners are craving more throwback rock. Glyder proudly worships at the altar of Thin Lizzy—and, in fact, made its public debut in 2004 at...

One of the most spine-tingling recent rock albums has roots going back 3,000 years to the ancient folk magic of the Near East. Charming Hostess draws many of its lyrics from ancient Jewish texts, their images of a leviathan in the boundless deep and the firmament overhead powerfully sung by Jewlia Eisenberg in the...

During the 1960s, folklorists searched the back roads of America for an earlier generation of blues musicians, most of them known only for recording a few 78 R.P.M. discs in the 1920s and ’30s before disappearing. Like many of those “rediscoveries,” John Jackson found a second career on the blues festival...

Milwaukee's multicultural funk/disco/rock quintet China Shop Matador revisits the post-punk dance proffered by early ’80s New York City labels such as 99 and ZE, with a healthy appreciation for the edgier accessibility of Prince and Milwaukee's multicultural funk/disco/rock quintet China Shop Matador revisits the post-punk dance proffered by early ’80s New York City labels such as 99 and ZE, with a healthy appreciation for the edgier accessibility of Prince and...