The inaugural Bunbury Music Festival — three days of top-shelf Alternative music at Cincinnati's riverfront Sawyer Point Park — is just four days away. All this week, CityBeat's music blog will be featuring samples from some of our "sleeper picks" for the fest, artists who some may not...  

Recorded over 10 days last summer, Cincinnati Indie Pop quartet Pomegranates' new album Heaven doesn’t stray impossibly far from the stylistic Art Pop structure that has served Pomegranates well since their energetic debut — a jittery love of Talking Heads, Brian Eno, Sparklehorse and ’50’s/’60s Pop and R&B.  

In 1997, members from two popular Notre Dame University bands explored their inner Jam children, concocting a new entity dubbed Umphrey’s McGee. Although UM quacked like a Jam duck, they incorporated more Prog, Metal and Hard Rock influences than their gentler brethren, expanding the Jam palette considerably. In recent years, UM’s Prog leanings have expanded in the studio and he band also showed it could dial things back for the acoustic quietude of 2006’s Safety in Numbers.


  

At 22, Lydia Loveless is a melodic songstress with the nuance to coax the sweet out of a sugar bowl and the power to start a fistfight between thunder and lightning. Since her 2011 MidPoint Music Festival appearance in Cincy, Loveless has been working up brand new songs and forging them in the fires of her relentless tours. Her Friday gig should be even more incendiary.  

Cincinnati’s Alone at 3AM recently released its third album and first for respected Colorado-based indie label, Suburban Home Records.  

Any band with decent musical aptitude and a passion for the days of sheet music stores, phosphates and the Charleston can churn out covers of songs gleaned from thrift shop 78s and attract a sizable, loyal audience. The real gift is taking that Hot Jazz/Country Blues/Ragtime/Western Swing inspiration and translating it into original and completely contemporary songs; Pokey LaFarge and the South City Three possess that gift.
  

On their first three albums together, Grace Potter & the Nocturnals impressively balanced influences from four decades ago with a bluesy Rock ethic as fresh as an indie blog posting. On The Lion The Beast The Beat, the quintet amazingly expand their genre parameters without losing the blistering essence of its Blues/Soul/Rock core.

  

If great reviews and the respect of your peers were tangible income, Warren Buffett would be paying 30% tax on his income as Alejandro Escovedo’s secretary.
From the start of Escovedo’s solo career — after a brief stint with the Kinman brothers in Rank and File and a turn in his own shoulda-been-huge True Believers in the ’80s ...  

Although Art vs. Science fairly shivers with the ghosts of early XTC, Devo and Shriekback, it was actually a 2007 Daft Punk show that moved keyboardist/guitarist/vocalist Dan McNamee to abandon Indie Punk and adopt a dancier Electronic Rock ethic.   

Jesse Elliott pursued a variety of ventures — international human rights law, economics writing, community non-profits, deli service — before returning to songwriting, his first and best love. Elliott formed These United States and embarked on a sonic mission to craft complex and engaging story-songs set to a soundtrack that somehow touches on a dozen different contemporary musical styles.