This year's MidPoint Indie Summer concert series — free, every Friday on Fountain Square — puts focus on great local acts and a few notable touring act, singer/songwriter Tracy Walker returns this week with her first recording in 10 years, the album Coetaneous Vibrations, and get the latest on this fall's MidPoint Music Festival, including news of an initial lineup announcement later this wee.
  

A South African music festival announced new "beer drone technology," whereby fans order by phone and have their order dropped from a drone above, will debut at August event. Plus, Jay-Z gets a mini-roast from the President at the White House Correspondents' Dinner and Swedish Doom Metal band Ghost B.C. treats fans to a sacrilicious new box set, complete with band-branded sex toys.
  

Lucero frontman Ben Nichols seems destined to be a Rock & Roll lifer, a guy who revels in playing 200 shows a year for a relatively small but passionate fan base.
  

MilkDrive’s latest album is called Waves and it swings with a fun, light and breezy mid-1960s feel. The band brings mostly original music to the table, but they will also put a jazzy twist on songs by The Beatles and others along the way.  

Olly Murs makes pure Pop gold. His third No. 1 single, “Dance with Me Tonight,” is as perky and dance-ready as music can be. (Expect to hear it on Cincinnati radio sometime in 2014.)  

Goatwhore's fifth album, the brutally thunderous Blood for the Master, was released early last year to overwhelmingly positive response, including an 8/10 review from Metal bible, Decibel Magazine. If you like your Death Metal with a side of Motörhead, a splash of Jägermeister and more than a touch of evil, Goatwhore is your cup of black tar tea.
  

Unlike many groups who may draw a “music lesson” crowd that tends to sit on its hands and complain when somebody dares to stand up and trance up, Mule audiences rock it from note one. The band’s upcoming gig at the Taft Theatre this weekend should be no exception.  

The biannual Heights Music Festival slims down slightly for its 2013 spring event, with no fall event planned this year so organizers can work on making the fest even bigger in better in 2014. The Heights Music Festival — perhaps the best fest in the area for checking out a wide variety of new Greater Cincinnati musical acts — goes down this Friday and Saturday in Clifton Heights.
  

After giving "tastemakers" (and Ryan Seacrest) a go at it first, the "Twitter #music" app finally makes its way to the public; an Elvis impersonator got into a 30-hour police stand-off in in Des Moines, Iowa, and another Elvis impersonator (who also apparently does an excellent Kid Rock as well) was in the news recently as a suspect in the send-poison-letters-to-the-President plot.
  

Hip Hop sensation Richard Colson Baker, better known as Machine Gun Kelly (or MGK), announced his current Lace Up tour in novel fashion; he became his own street team.
  

It is always a fun endeavor to go to a smaller venue and see a band on the rise, to take in a group that has the potential for bigger and better things. That is the scenario for this week’s concert by Ivan & Alyosha at the Mayday in Northside.  

Billed as primer for the Chicago quartet Disappears’ fourth full-length, to be released later this year, the freshly minted three-song EP Kone is a hypnotic dose of psyched-out Post Punk, an ominous soundtrack to a world that seems as dangerous and disturbing as ever.    

 Forget “love at first sight.” A cappella group Pentatonix had harmony at first sight. Recently, they found viral-video success with “Evolution of Music,” a medley of music from Gregorian Chants to contemporary Pop. Now, let them wow you.   

Billy Bragg has been proffering his brand of topical Folk Rock for more than 30 years now. Curiously, Bragg’s first album in five years, Tooth & Nail, is a wistful, less politically inclined affair anchored by the tasteful production work of Joe Henry.   

Beach House’s gauzy head-trips are marked by the hypnotic voice of frontlady Victoria Legrand. Within the band’s recorded output — which is now at four increasingly ear-pleasing albums after the release of 2012’s Bloom, its second for SubPop — Legrand comes off as an otherworldly figure, an ethereal being who emits dreamy, mood-altering songs rife with ambiguous lyrics and enough atmosphere to fill a Terrence Malick triple-bill.