After the tumultuous revolution of The White Stripes, the twisted Pop/Rock convention of The Raconteurs and the Blues/Indie Rock gene splice of Dead Weather, there was nothing left for Jack White to do but to hang his own name on the marquee and go the solo route. There is an argument to be made that every White project is an extension of his musical persona regardless of the personnel he surround...  

Consistently exciting and breathtakingly brilliant Portland Cello Project mixes original compositions with powerful baroque Classical rearrangements of slamming Hip Hop tracks. PCP’s new album, the just released Homage, features cover art that leans in the direction of Rousseau while pumping out Mozart-y versions of Lil Wayne’s “She Will,” Kanye West and Jay-Z’s “That’s My Bitch” and Outkast’s smash hit “Hey Ya,” which one might suspect will have you shaking it like a Gainsborough oil portrait.   

When Maps & Atlases dropped Perch Patchwork, their 2010 debut full-length and first album for Barsuk Records, the Chicago-based quartet was just beginning to explore the intersection of their adoration of Post-Punk Math heroes like Don Caballero and their father-tilted love of ’70s Prog avatars like Jethro Tull and Mahavishnu Orchestra. M&A’s introductory EPs — 2006’s Tree, Swallow...  

For the past 40 years, Bonnie Raitt has made a success out of nearly everything she’s attempted. The red-haired daughter of a Broadway icon, Raitt was an unlikely champion of honest-to-Robert-Johnson Blues, but her incendiary guitar skills and unquenchable passion for the form won the respect of some of the genre’s legends; B.B. King famously cited Raitt as the greatest slide player ever.
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Remember the first time you saw Erika Wennerstrom sing in front of the Heartless Bastards and watched amazed as she pummeled her guitar and sang with a ferocity that made her neck veins dance like a cobra in a snake charmer’s basket? Brittany Howard approaches her role fronting Alabama Shakes with a similarly wrought intensity and to a familiar result.
Like the Bastards and Grace Potter &amp...  

If Jack White is Indie Rock’s most prominent attention deficit multitasker, his Raconteurs bandmate Brendan Benson is his lesser known Indie Pop counterpart. The Detroit native’s band work with the Well Fed Boys and the Mood Elevator received good notices, but his solo output (1996’s One Mississippi, 2002’s Lapalco, 2005’s The Alternative to Love, 2009’s My Old, Familiar Friend) has ga...  

When the phrase “guitar hero” gets tossed around, it’s naturally in reference to some of the greatest six string figures in Rock history. But if there is a subset of that hallowed group — guitar heroes in waiting, as it were — then Natalie Wells surely deserves to be included on that hop...  

  Like the star-crossed events that improbably introduced peanut butter to chocolate, the universe conspired to match Susan Tedeschi and Derek Trucks at a beautiful personal and professional crossroad.  

It’s been an eventful three years since Matthew "M." Ward last gave free rein to his solo muse on 2009’s much heralded Hold Time. Ward, doing a brisk Indie Rock business under his first initial and last name, has been almost psychopathically busy in the interim, from recording and touring with Connor Oberst, Jim James and Mike Mogis under their Monsters of Folk banner and performing similar du...  

During the past decade and a half, guitarist/vocalist/songwriter Tim Kasher has served as the reeling ringmaster for the dark, wonderfully dysfunctional circus known as Cursive. A constantly fluctuating membership has resulted in Cursive’s fascinatingly malleable sound, from the Indie Rock gravity of 1997’s Such Blinding Stars for Starving Eyes to the denser and more conceptual Early Summer: Semantics of Song in 1998 to the string-driven Burst and Bloom and The Ugly Organ in the new millennium.