Pure evil. There really is no other way to describe the dark, experimental music of Haiku Funeral, a demonic duo featuring former Racine bassist William Kopecky. If God Is a Drug, the second full-length album in Kopecky's alliance with Bulgarian...

Romanian-born Sanda Weigl remains true to tradition on Gypsy in a Tree, but in a new context. Related by marriage to Bertolt Brecht and fascinated by the wild East repertoire of the Gypsies, Weigl's deeply felt cabaret style remains intact after moving to New York...

When it comes to the heavy instrumental progressive rock of Milwaukee's Fibonacci Sequence, listeners can admire the multitudinous changes in time signature, instrumentation and ethnic influences throughout each number. And one can derive at...

When Chicago hipster Ralph Covert's family-music project Ralph's World took off (10 albums, Disney deals and a Grammy nomination), his days of recording with his fun power-pop band, The Bad Examples, seemed over...

The latest album by Wisconsin native Bill Miller goes a long way toward countering the marginalization of the American-Indian pop/folk music in which he's been esteemed for more than a quarter-century. Chronicles of Hope delivers a loose song cycle based...

Like clockwork, Mike Fredrickson releases CDs chock full of catchy songs brimming with hook-laden melodies and pithy lyrics. You get the impression that, to him, writing songs is like breathing. Souvenirs adds another chapter in the discography Fredrickson...

Rooted in Jewish and Moorish traditions, fado is the folk music of Portugal, the blues of that coastal nation. And as shown on the live album Coliseu, fado can be as soulful as Aretha Franklin and caressing as Roberta Flack. Ana Moura's performance on the CD...

With its echoes of Africa and gospel, Paul Simon's new CD often rises from familiar ground while sometimes giving way to surprise, as on the vaguely bluesy title track. As a wordsmith, Simon juggles snatches of beautiful lyric poetry with humor and irony...

Mogwai is post-rock. Mogwai is drone-rock. Mogwai is space-rock. Mogwai is quiet, melodic and beautiful. Mogwai is the loudest thing known to man. On the opening track, "White Noise," Mogwai is reminiscent of King Crimson's...

Dub originated in the recording studios of Jamaica as trippy reggae musicians experimented with the controls. In the digital age the idea of introducing the sonic dimension of dub to the stage is no longer especially remarkable, but NYC's Dub is...

La Cherga are a fine example of the sort of truly world music blending together nowadays on many European street corners—an intersection of local traditions and influences from far away. With members from Bosnia, Macedonia and elsewhere, La Cherga mixes Latin echoes with aggressive rap, Gypsy brass...

Having a signature sound is a double-edged sword for most acts. On one hand, a unique voice will always stand out against the cookie-cutter rabble. Then again, it can quickly become constrictive. Once the idiosyncrasies of your style become familiar, you walk the tightrope between pushing the boundaries...

Redbird is a rare creature: a very part-time "souper" group cooked up on a common tour but gelled as a delicious goulash at Café Carpe, the beloved restaurant-music venue in Fort Atkinson that helped birth the careers of all three of the group's singer-songwriters. Peter Mulvey's voice is like a loofah bar on your neck...

The latest release from the Johnny Cash archive covers roughly the first half of his career, the 1950s and '60s; most of the music has never been or was seldom heard on record. For music historians, disc one will be fascinating for its insights into Cash's earliest recordings. The 1955 live broadcasts from Memphis radio...

Milwaukee's Something To Do makes catchy, anthemic, horn-driven rock. Though they have released music for nearly a decade now, they still sound like teens—as snotty as they are smart, even as they pound out a stomping, reggae/marching band ode to Red Stripe Beer and remake a Billy Idol oldie whose original...

The artistry of Elvis Presley's career after his return from the army rose and fell with as many fluctuations as the stock market. His worst music was generally produced for the movie soundtracks he came to despise. The best was recorded in sympathetic settings in Memphis or Nashville in the company...

Looking at the cover of Texas-based singer-songwriter Jonny Burke's debut CD, Distance and Fortune, it's easy to mistake this for a reissue of a long-lost country-rock album from the 1970s. There's a satisfied-looking Burke—gazing off into the distance, wearing bell-bottom jeans and a too-small T-shirt—frozen in a...

No one is likely to call Heidi Spencer a country singer, but on the Milwaukee artist's new album, her voice crackles with a mountain-holler vulnerability learned from Dolly Parton and Loretta Lynn. Her idiosyncratic, poetically expressive songwriting is harder to peg, although the spirit of Dylan sometimes hovers in the...

Steve Riley slips between English and French as easily as his music slips in and out of country, rock and Cajun. With the Mamou Playboys, a swinging band whose beat has been honed at countless dance halls, Riley encompasses the sonic history of Louisiana's bayou country—and then some. Grand Isle includes...

If Bitches Brew (1969) was a significant turning point in jazz, then half of the material gathered on Bitches Brew Live was the signpost on the way. Six weeks before recording the album that opened the gate to jazz-rock fusion, Miles Davis gave his ideas a run through at the Newport Jazz Festival. Responding to...

If you're tired of the cold, this warm and fuzzy two-DVD/two-CD box of Phish captured at Alpine Valley last summer will make you forget about winter. There are few crowd shots—don't look for yourself on camera if you were there—but watching this, it's easy enough to position yourself in the front row...

The Mambo Surfers have about as sunny a name as any Milwaukee band, but their song cycle about post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) takes a sharp turn from that fun impression. Recorded live at The Coffee House, The PTSD Songbook telegraphs its somber intentions even before the laser hits the CD...

Pianist Michel Reis follows along the crystalline path of Germany's ECM label, 1970s proponents of exquisite acoustic chamber jazz. Like his forebears, Reis' compositions thrum with a cool, focused pulse; the bluesy swing of jazz is instilled with a strong harmonic similarity to Debussy and other 20th-century...

The guest artists on this recording include B. B. King, Hubert Sumlin, Charlie Musselwhite, Cedric Burnside, David "Honeyboy" Edwards and Chris Goldsmith. Todd Park Mohr, founder of Big Head Todd and The Monsters, re-names his band Big Head Blues Club and membership includes the...

Don't call the five members of Germany's oddly named Atlantean Kodex underachievers. The Golden Bough, the band's ambitious debut CD, takes inspiration from the late Scottish anthropologist Sir James George Frazer's scholarly work of the same name, which explored the notion that organized religion...