Everyone's favorite funkdified, dancetastic bass hero, Freekbass, has teamed up with Hip Hop/DJ collective Tobotius for a slammin' couple of tracks that'll definitely get your booty motorin'.

Cincinnati singer-songwriter Moegly (a.k.a. Nicholas Moeggenberg) is one of those dreamy, skinny, intelligent boys who always go over well with the coffee shop crowd. His debut five-song (well, six with the hidden track) EP, It’s Getting Hard to Find Good People, is a smooth, gentle Indie Folk effort that sounds especially good in its jumpier moments.

It’s funny that The Fray are called what they’re called, because they hardly ever leave any loose threads or ragged edges — whether on their perfectly-produced, radio-friendly songs or live in concert. The piano rock band is so harmless and clean-cut that they probably couldn’t hurt a fly if their lives depended on it. It’s no surprise, then, that their concert at PNC Pavilion Monday night, opened by Richard Swift and alt-rock band Jack’s Mannequin, felt like a quintessentially American outdoor summer party: laid-back, pleasant and totally innocuous.

Sad news from Arizona: Covington-based "freelance bass player" Cary Jaquish was killed in a one-vehicle motorcycle accident on I-10 in Buckeye while en route to Fresno, Calif. from Phoenix on Sunday. He had landed a gig with a band and was traveling with the Ringling Bros. Barnum & Bailey circus troupe.

In discussions on Hard Rock and Heavy Metal, the phrase “veteran rockers” basically means “old dudes with electric guitars” (or “badasses turned corporate vacuoles turned money-hungry corpses in makeup writhing around on a stage” if we’re talking about Aerosmith), but as long as they’re playin’ it loud and proud, age ain’t nothin’ but a number, right? Kinda like Thruster, The Mighty Swine never fully grew out of those leather-clad and poodle-headed ‘80s Metal days of yore, a time when the guitars ran wild and so did the groupies and the V.D.

Cincinnati is not known as an Industrial music destination. Unlike San Francisco in the late ‘70s, Chicago in the mid-‘80s and Cleveland in the early ‘90s, the Queen City has never really enjoyed a love affair with the ever-morphing genre of all things dark, mechanical and dingy-sounding. Ilan Kaim is the man who intends to change that.

Michael Jackson's dead — what more can we say? The response to Jackson's death has made me revisit a long-running question that's rolled around my squishy mind for a few years now: Is it possible to separate an artist's personality and deeds from his or her creative work?

As a singer-songwriter -- although that term is pretty misleading -- Oxford-based Mission Man is one weird dude. His one-man approach to musical performance is basically the following: set a cheap-sounding, pre-programmed beat on the keyboard and slap on the bass guitar while hyperactively rapping about basketball, buddies and other everyday matters in a warbly, white-guy monotone. Throw in an occasional off-key melody for the chorus, and you've got the idea.

There was a day way back in time in the wake of a cultural phenomenon called Nirvana when major labels existed solely to give a crap-load of cash to Alternative Rock bands. It was a beautiful time when any group with a skewed approach had a shot via a (usually mishandled) media blitz that often included "marginal" radio airplay, write-ups in uber-cool mags such as Raygun, placement of releases in mall music stores like Sam Goody and Camelot and a video on MTV's "120 Minutes."

As we reached the halfway point of the festival, I took a step back and reflected a bit. I was dirty, sweaty and sleep-deprived; and yet I could not have been more excited for what was to come. Phish had whet my appetite for their festival-closing performance on Sunday, and who could forget that one of the greatest live acts in the history of music (maybe a little hyperbole), Bruce Springsteen and the E Street Band, would be rocking the stage this very night. There was a sense that truly magical musical moments were on the horizon and little did I know what those inclinations would bring.