Local band Wooden Robot couldn’t be more mysterious. First, there’s their undeniably spooky sound: Think haunted Old World carnival or, better yet, a vodka-drenched dance party with your dead Polish-babushka grandmother. Then there are the places they usually play: dimly lit bars, crowded houses of friends and dark corners in cramped basements. The band’s performance at Turner Hall Ballroom on July 26, opening for Secret Chiefs 3 with The Demix, will mark a rare appearance in the spotlight.

The band name We’rewolves resulted from a misunderstanding between the group’s members, Eliah Koerner (vocals, keyboard), Dan Perlstein (drums) and Ryan “Smitty” Smith (bass). “I said, ‘Let’s call ourselves The Vampires,’” Perlstein recalled. “And Smitty said, ‘How about werewolves?’ and I thought he said ‘we’rewolves,’ like ‘we are wolves.’” The contraction was subsequently expanded into a song in which the group chants “We are all wolves!” over and over. I interviewed the band before a recent show at Mad Planet. It was raining, and they stood huddled under . . .

Gavin Rossdale was never a particularly convincing tortured soul to begin with, but with each passing year of domestic bliss with his superstar wife, Gwen Stefani, each picture of the photogenic couple and their beaming son, and each celebrity tennis tournament, it became even harder to buy the sun-tanned family man as the embodiment of existential despair. The former Bush frontman gave his old tormented persona one last spin in 2005, teaming with members of Helmet to record a lone album of thrashing, seething alternative rock with a short-lived new band, Institute . . .

The Brahms symphony, considered to be one of the 19th-century com poser’s most emblematic works, gave Lesh a musical appreciation and grounding in a broader compositional discipline unusual to rock musicians. It also led the Berkeley, Calif. native on an impressive musical journey that preceded his chance mid-1960s...

Like just about everything in the city, Milwaukee’s hip-hop scenes are divided by racial and geographical boundaries. Populated largely by college students and graduates, the East Side’s hip-hop scene favors conscious and alternative rap, lionizes Talib Kweli and heralds the ’90s as rap’s golden age. Milwaukee’s grittier North Side scene, on the other hand, is more in the moment, drawn toward contemporary club rap, much of it fashioned after hits from the South. Separated by just a few miles, these two scenes exist with little overlap.

It’s not hard to get Kenny Wayne Shepherd to talk about cars, especially the Detroit muscle machines of the early 1970s. The Shreveport, La., blues musician, in fact, seems to have as much respect for Chrysler and Plymouth products from the V8 era as he does for some of the blues giants that inspired the searing, rapid-fire guitar riffs that have become his trademark. “I grew up with Hot Wheels and Matchbox cars,” says Shepherd, 31. “As an adult, I’ve had the chance to indulge that interest.” Shepherd’s passion for high-performance autos led him to join the 2008 Hot Rod Power Tour, a public driving event sponsored by Hot Rod magazine that left the Arkansas State Fairgrounds . . .

Online Exclusive - Although the Emancipation Proclamation called for the liberation of confederate slaves, its effects weren’t immediate. The final slaves in Texas didn’t learn of their freedom until June 19, 1865, a full year and a half after the emancipation took effect, when the Union army rode into Galveston to enforce Abraham Lincoln’s executive order. The anniversary of June 19, or Juneteenth, has been sporadically celebrated in the south as a black independence day ever since, but the tradition never had a presence in the northern states before Margaret Hennsingsen brought it to Milwaukee in the early 1970s.

High school friends Amy Ray and Emily Saliers parted ways to attend Vanderbilt University and Tulane University, respectively, but the two eventually found themselves collaborating musically back home in Georgia at Emory University. Performing together under the name Indigo Girls, Ray and Saliers honed their skills in the same college music scene that cultivated R.E.M. and The B-52s. Twenty years later, the duo has sold more than 12 million records and garnered seven Grammy nominations. “We just keep going,” Saliers says. “We’ve been doing it for so long that we just think about what’s coming next. If I do stop to think about it, I feel really grateful for it. In this business, where it’s hard to stay alive musically . . .

On April 23, the Echo Base Collective prepared for what they thought would be a quiet Wednesday night of folk and performance groups. The 20 people who showed up had just heard a New York spoken word group, Batter Recharger, and were waiting to hear a Chicago band and the local group Dharma Bumz. Members of Dharma were loading equipment through a garage door on the side of the building when two police officers appeared. “I told them they should talk to Dave,” said Keith Armstrong, singer for the Dharma Bumz, referring to Dave Casillas, the organizer of Echo Base. “They said they already had and were already in the building.”

Call them Panic at the Disco 2.0. In the short time between their blockbuster debut album, A Fever You Can’t Sweat Out, the band almost entirely reinvented themselves. They dropped the pointless exclamation mark from their name; they gutted their overblown, circus-themed live show, and, most importantly, they exorcized their music of almost all its emo excesses. On their recently released sophomore . . .

For every band that finds wealth, stardom and happiness after signing to a major label, there are countless others crushed by the experience. Rilo Kiley doesn’t quite fall into either camp, guitarist Blake Sennett explains. The band’s tenure on Warner Bros. has been pleasant enough—marked by friendly, helpful people and devoid of interference from calculating executives or other horrors—but, Sennett concedes, “In ways, we probably shouldn’t have made the leap to a major label. “It seemed like the next natural step, something we had to do to reach people, but I think it was probably a miscue,” Sennett adds. “I’m not going to say it was a mistake, but I’m not going to say it was … well, the opposite of a mistake.”

With her acoustic guitar, Daria sunglasses and poetry-laden lyrics, Laura Veirs certainly fit the mold of a typical modern folk singer-songwriter. For her most recent album, however, Veirs broke that mold, aggressively smashing it into tiny shards. Recorded with her newly christened backing band of the same name, Saltbreakers is a sometimes fierce, rock-driven album detailing—yup, you guessed it—a break-up. Veirs is currently on the road doing solo shows behind the record, and she took some time to chat with ExpressMilwaukee from Denver in advance of her Milwaukee performance Wednesday night.

It is often taken for granted that hardcore punk is—and perhaps should be—the domain of the young. Young adulthood is a scary time for most of us, and what better way to express one’s youthful angst than by identifying with a music scene that embraces those feelings of alienation and confusion? I don’t think I would have made it through adolescence with my sanity intact without records like Black Flag’s Damaged and Minor Threat’s Out of Step. Those albums provided me with a useful outlet for my youthful rage and, perhaps more importantly, made me realize that I wasn’t the only one feeling so, well, out of step. At a time when one’s identity is incredibly unstable, any sense of community becomes paramount, and hardcore punk became the one place where I felt truly accepted.

Marty Willson-Piper takes a hands-on approach to his career these days. He keeps watch over the business dealings of his longtime band, The Church, and micromanages every aspect of his solo career and many side projects. He spends as much time behind the merch table as he can, and for the current tour behind his new album, Nightjar, he’s selling homemade EPs he burned to CD-R himself. He even designed the artwork. Of course, he honed his business acumen the hard way. “Ohhh,” he moans when considering what his life would be like had he been as involved behind the scenes during The Church’s early years. “I’d be dining at the Ritz right now!

As Chris Dangerous tells it, The Hives formed with expiration in mind. “We always had these plans to record three of the best punk albums ever, then just break up,” the group’s drummer says. Of course, those plans changed after their single “Hate to Say I Told You So” became an international hit, making The Hives a bankable commodity—or, to put it in words the infamously self-aggrandizing group would use, one of the biggest bands in the world.

Songwriters have long understood the poignancy that results from exposing their less-becoming side, but Tegan and Sara take self-disclosure to masochistic extremes. On their latest album of hyper-dramatic, uncomfortably autobiographical power-pop, The Con, the singing identical twins unabashedly cast themselves in the vilest light possible. “Sara and I both have this very self-deprecating, almost abusive way of looking at ourselves,” Tegan Quin explains. “We both feel like we can be very destructive and very pessimistic and very tortured and very weak, but in a weird way those are some of our best qualities.”

After a year and a half of inactivity, the Milwaukee hardcore band Since By Man made it official, announcing plans to break up following one last show this Saturday. Band members have already begun moving on to other careers, projects and cities. That it took them months to settle on a date for their long-planned farewell show speaks volumes about how divergent their paths had become. “We still enjoyed playing together, and our shows were great,” explains singer Sam Macon, “but the writing process was becoming stressful, and we were having difficulty coming up with material for our third album. Creatively, we were growing apart.”

Jay-Z had it easy. He faced few restrictions in his quest for money and stardom. Unapologetically driven by material desires and founded on a platform of social Darwinism, Jay-Z’s ascent to mogul-hood represents capitalism in its purest form. Like most rappers, Talib Kweli wants what Jay-Z has—money, esteem, an audience—but in his pursuit of these goals he’s been held to a much stricter standard than Jay-Z. Long ago labeled a conscious rapper by his fans, Kweli is expected to be above the perceived vanity of mainstream rap. While rappers like Jay-Z can play anything-goes, Tammany Hall politics, Kweli must adhere to restrictive campaign finance regulations or risk alienating his idealistic fans.

Though her solo efforts coexisted with The Moldy Peaches, Dawson’s songwriting retains the pared-down, do-it-herself instrumentation of her former band without the Peaches’ scatological humor.

What is a young artist to make of a post-Giuliani, post-9/11 New York City? Some credit the former mayor’s strategic employment of the “broken window” philosophy in fighting urban crime and blight—along with a police force that, putting it kindly, ignored many of the subtleties of community relations—with helping the city to clean up its act. Many old haunts that once housed angst-ridden musicians are being developed into condominiums and shopping centers (it was, for example, recently announced that the former site of CBGB is being converted into a store for upscale men’s fashion designer John Varvatos). At the same time, the horrific events of 9/11 have created both a newfound sense of community among many New Yorkers and an intense preoccupation with all things safety-related. The grime, danger and sin historically associated with New York have seemingly been wiped off the cultural landscape of the city, creating a new atmosphere marked by a cleanliness that threatens to erase many aspects of the region’s checkered history.

"Murderer," the climactic highlight of Low’s latest album, Drums and Guns, reads like the transcript of one of the president’s most disturbing talks with God. “One more thing I’ll ask you, Lord,” singer Alan Spearhawk impassively volunteers, “you may need a murderer/ someone to do your dirty work.” “Don’t act so innocent!” Spearhawk seethes, turning accusatory. “I’ve seen you pound your fist into the Earth . . .

Mike Doughty had one main goal while creating Golden Delicious, his latest release. “I really went in there with the intention of making it more pared down, to make good songs and make the happy, happy sound,” the former Soul Coughing frontman says wryly. This simple rhyme of an answer displays his sardonic wit and quirky lyricism, the defining traits of his music. Since Soul Coughing split in 2000, Doughty has refined his distinct, syncopated vocal delivery through his solo work, most notably on 2005’s Haughty Melodic, which yielded a radio hit in “Looking at the World From the Bottom of a Well.” The album was Doughty’s first with a backing band after a series of sparse, self-released acoustic efforts.

For anyone who still associates Bob Mould with Midwestern punk, the cover of his latest solo album, District Line, may come as quite an eye-opener. The art focuses entirely on the sights of Washington, D.C., with allusions to the city’s color-coded Metro subway lines and a photograph of one of the never-ending escalators that service this underground transit system. Such aesthetic decisions, which Mould describes as “a nod to my almost six-year hometown,” immediately make clear the impact that living in the nation’s capital has had on Mould and his art. This doesn’t mean that District Line is filled with political rants aimed at those living and working in Mould’s back yard (though Mould remains civically responsible: Charmingly, he apologized for delaying this interview because he had spent the early morning voting in the D.C. presidential primary).

In many cultures, Black Lips are considered unbecoming because they “tend to cast a sad reflection on one’s shoddy lifestyle,” according to the beauty and lifestyle magazine I Love India. Fittingly, then, few bands on the indie-rock radar are as notorious for troublemaking and excess as the Black Lips, a noisy, bluesy foursome from Atlanta. First there’s the band’s name, which could be viewed in a not-so-friendly light, especially after a few drinks. There’s also bassist Jared Swilley’s drunken driving charge, which keeps the band from crossing the Canadian border legally.

Isaac Hayes released his first album in 1967, but when Hot Buttered Soul hit the charts he made his indelible impression on popular music. In 1972, the singer and songwriter, became the first African-American composer to win an Academy Award, for the Shaft soundtrack. He was the creative grist behind Otis Redding and Sam & Dave, including co-authoring “Soul Man.” Hayes, 65, has emerged as an actor, radio celebrity and restaurateur, triple talents he combined in his role as Chef on “South Park.”