Wailing guitars and screaming Rock stars have their place in the hearts of many Americans, but they’re certainly not needed to make great Rock music. A quick listen to Hoots & Hellmouth will prove exactly that. The boys of Hoots make music that may be different from what graces Top 40 radio, but it’s far from unique. They’ve fashioned their tunes after stuff we’ve listened to for decades.  

People about to change the world rarely look like people about to change the world. Take Gold Shoes — central casting didn’t assemble a new millennium Monkees to storm the music world with calculated precision. Gold Shoes is comprised of oddly yet perfectly meshed parts.   

 Australian Pop/Rock band Men At Work hit me — and many other music fans around the world — at just the right time. I was 12 when the single “Who Can It Be Now?” exploded onto the charts. I was intrigued by the group’s quirkiness, but it was singer/guitarist Colin Hay’s voice that initially drew me in.  

While many bands spend years toiling around, looking for their place within the music scene, Rise Against found their niche over a decade ago. They lead the way in making mosh pit-stirring music with actual substance.   

The latest edition of the School of Rock franchise — which has 80 other schools for young, aspiring Rock musicians in the U.S. and Mexico — opens this weekend in Mason. Like the other facilities, School of Rock Mason provides lessons for students ages 7-18, including the chance to play real venues in front of real audiences.    

 Since releasing his Nick Lowe-produced classic debut, Howling Wind, back in 1976, Graham Parker keeps delivering his vintage brand of spiked lyricism and jangly Pop Rock in potent doses. Thirty-plus years into his dynamic, underrated career, Parker still stands tall among his more commercially successful peers.   

Officially, Philadelphia-rooted Psychedelic/Garage Rock outfit Purling Hiss consists of three members, but the brain stem of the whole affair is undoubtedly singer/guitarist Mike Polizze. The project is  the product of Polizze messing around with a grab bag of elements, from sound levels to white noise to the song structures.  

Some guitarists form in the womb and emerge ready to push their instrument’s limits and in turn be pushed by them, using their childhoods as a proving ground for the brilliance to follow. That is not Cincinnati’s Natalie Wells.    

One spin through Pete Dressman’s new album, Vol. II, might give the impression that the Cincinnati singer/songwriter and his band, the Soul Unified Nation, are unrepentant lovers of contemporary classic Rock icons like Pearl Jam who wouldn’t be the least bit out of place opening for locally-based Psych Rock trio Buffalo Killers. And you’d be right.