At this point it’s fair to recognize songwriter Mike Jarvis as an elder statesman of Milwaukee’s pop music scene. In addition to a résumé that includes time with The Blow Pops, Root Cellar, Simpleton, Chicago’s Green and three albums with The Lackloves, guitarist/vocalist Jarvis has toured Europe and Asia. The Lackloves’ latest album, Cathedral Square Park, marks a lineup shift back to the band’s original trio incarnation after spending much of its existence as a two guitars/bass/drums quartet. Drummer/vocalist Tommy Dougherty and newcomer bassist/vocalist Kevin Ponec round out the current lineup.

One of Bay View’s rootsiest bands has just gotten rootsier. The Championship’s 2005 debut album was a more modern exercise in Americana, firmly grounded in contemporary folk-rock and alt-country, but there’s little about the group’s rustic new album, Midnight Golden, that couldn’t have been recorded decades ago. “We wanted to get back to that late-’60s, early-’70s, AM gold feel,” explains singer/songwriter Joe . . .

Let’s run through it one more time, then listen to the CD,” Danny Price says to his band, The Loose Change. They are practicing a set of mostly covers for a St. Patrick’s Day show at a Riverwest bar known simply as The Pub, and are trying to master a cover of a traditional song, “Sinnerman,” made popular by Nina Simone. It is an intensely soulful, rolling piece. “When I first heard her version of ‘Sinnerman,’ there wasn’t another song I listened to for a week,” Price says. The Loose Change—Paul Setser, keyboard, Ben Rousseau, bass, Russ Nadasdy, guitar, and Ken Zanowski, drums—are crowded in Setser’s living room in his secondfloor flat. The drum set is by the couch, the keyboard by the TV and everything else somewhere in between. All the band members have a glass of wine within arm’s reach.

In recent years, DJ Aaron Wade’s “Late Night Hype Show,” 91.7 WMSE’s independent hip-hop program— by most accounts one of the longest running of its kind in the country, and certainly one of the best—had begun to feel less like a labor of love and more like a public service. Wade has often voiced his disillusionment with the state of hip-hop, and he could never muster the same affection for modern rap as he felt for the classics, so it was to great disappointment but not much surprise that he announced plans to end the show this March.

EMC were in their tour van, en route to a Los Angeles concert this January, when they heard the news: A full two months before its official release date—and just four days after it had been mailed to the media— their debut album, The Show, had been leaked online. “We were angry, especially since we think we know who leaked it,” says Stricklin, the Milwaukee rapper who makes up the group along with veteran lyricists Punchline and Wordsworth and golden-age icon Masta Ace. “We rushed to the hotel so we could get an Internet connection and find out more.” Thanks to the Internet, you can watch the band work out their response to the leak in real time . . .

Twenty years,” Paul Cotter offers with a disarming grin. He’s speaking of St. Patrick’s Day 2008, the 20th anniversary of McTavish, Milwaukee’s first Irish rock band. “It’s hard enough to keep a band together for a year or two.” I’m seated across the table from Cotter (vocals, guitar) and McTavish co-founder Mark Shurilla (vocals, guitar). We’re not in an Irish pub, but a Mexican restaurant, which may say something about the porous boundaries of the postmodern world or perhaps the sometimes-tense relationship between McTavish and some of Hibernia’s local gatekeepers. “We’ve never kissed the ring of the Irish establishment,” Shurilla says gleefully. “We do what we want to do because we like it.”

Nowadays rock is everywhere. Real rock ’n’ roll, however, has become a rarefied taste. It may be going the way of the connoisseur, the path of bebop and pinot noir. Meanwhile, Milwaukee’s Aimless Blades are doing their part to keep rock ’n’ roll alive and in the moment, delivered with unpretentious intelligence and grit, with their fourth CD, Rara Avis. Released on Madison’s famed Boat Records, Rara Avis features guitar riffs of surging melancholy over solid yet forward rolling rhythms. The lyrics suggest more than they say, opening the window in the listeners’ imagination that began to close with the advent of literal-minded music videos. There are echoes of swampy Creedence Clearwater Revival, The Stooges‚ serrated psychedelia, Bob Dylan’s husky twang, even the stately folk rock of Fairport Convention.

The Rusty Ps don’t talk much about scoring a major record deal these days. “We gave up those pipe dreams long ago,” says Adam Haupt, who raps with the group under the nom de plume Phantom Channel. “Once you actually start dealing with the music industry, you see how crazy it is. So we’re not making music to try to blow up anymore; we’re making music just for the love of making it.” But Haupt admits the band once had lofty dreams of breakthrough success. “When you put your first real album out and it gets picked up for distribution by the first label you send it to, that gets your hopes up,” Haupt says. In 2000, during a time of high interest in independent hip-hop—but before inexpensive software enabled every laptop owner to cut their own rap records—the Rusty Ps released “Tread Water,” a 12-inch featuring some fortunate friends the band made while touring: The Pharcyde’s Imani and Minneapolis’ then-burgeoning Atmosphere. The single had reach far beyond just the merch table. Thanks to the emergence of Napster and file sharing, any college student hunting down Pharcyde and Atmosphere rarities discovered the Rusty Ps.

"We aren’t a dance band, but we all like to dance,” drummer Michael Stewart says of his band, Fable and the World Flat. “We like music that makes you feel good. “We don’t just want audiences standing around with their arms crossed,” Stewart continues. “It’s a lot more fun when people are moving. We want to bring audiences that same feeling they’d get every time they hear the Jackson 5’s ‘I Want You Back.’” That’s an ambitious mission statement considering that Stewart’s band grounds its sound not in sunny indie-pop or uptempo electro-clash, but rather in the somber, jazzy indie-rock of turn-of-thecentury groups like Karate and Aloha, bands more likely to crush spirits than lift them.

Colin O’Brien’s songs are timeless. Many of the numbers on his new CD, Dancing by the River, sound as if they lived in the ether for centuries, only to be channeled finally through his own imagination. “One of the biggest compliments I can get when I play is, ‘Did you write that song?’” he says. O’Brien has played in a variety of settings since the ’90s when he studied American finger style guitar at the Wisconsin Conservatory of Music, including with duos and a popular string band, Salt Creek. Lately, he’s been making a living as a soloist.