Last night as I entered the Ace Bar for Shoe Groove, I was greeted by Old Shoe’s manager Mike Kaiz.  He saw that I was burdened with my arms full of stuff and gestured to the back booth.  Reflecting back upon this, not only was this show a great summer skin showing show, but also an entire club where everyone could set their stuff together.

In a music career spanning over three decades, Frank Zappa put out over 60 albums. Some call him a genius. Those who don’t simply do not understand (pardon me and my asshole opinion—but I am right). Zappa has always had top-tier musicians in his line-ups, many of which have looked at his music charts and shuddered under the pressure.

For the record, I believe that Pretty Lights Music (the label) represents the future of independent electronic music, offering digital, freely available releases to the public and paying the way with goodwill and a collective reputation for putting on tight live shows.

The McCauliffe Brothers Band’s debut full-length, It’s Likely, is, to be quite frank, a mixed bag. A self-described rock/funk/jazz/improvisation/pop act, the North Carolina band treads the line between genres with varied success throughout their first album. To be sure, some listeners will find fault with the band’s musical schizophrenia or the lack of definition in their sound. For my part, though, I enjoyed the set as a whole.

On his second solo release, entitled Apocalyptic Love, Slash shows us that he can still shred the guitar like a beast. Did we ever have any doubt?

Justin Jones' new album Fading Light is an Americana opus, full of deep emotion, musical mood swings, and heartfelt playing.

There are those things they teach you in school about poetry, things like rhyme schemes and stresses and metrical feet. Things like sonnets and pastoral poetry and the epic. Regardless of all those rules and terms though, poetry can be one of the most free-form arts, allowing the writer to take on a poetic license, which is really to say that the author can do whatever he pleases.

The Devil Makes Three live release, Stomp and Smash is more than a title; it’s a review in itself. Recorded over two sold-out nights at the Mystic Theater in Petaluma, CA, these bluegrass Santa Cruzaders’ are hell bent with a raucous punk spirit. Spewing a sound about as smooth as whiskey, this trio of Pete Bernhard, Cooper McBean, and Lucia Turino are propped up by acoustic guitar, banjo, and stand-up bass.

On his seventh studio album, Spirit Bird, Xavier Rudd’s gritty voice rises like dust from underneath the dancing feet along an ancestral Songline. In a modern world of industrial landscapes filled with neon signs, it’s hard to “imagine if the trees could tell us where to go.” Yet, Rudd introduces listeners to Australian Aboriginal mythology with songs such as “Creating a Dream”. Dreaming is the sacred era of ancestral Totemic Spirit Beings who formed The Creation.

As far as supergroup side projects are concerned, PHILM is a strange beast, and their debut album, Harmonic, follows its creators’ suit like a bipolar demon-child on acid. PHILM, consisting of Gerry Nestler (vocals/guitar, Civil Defiance), Dave Lombardo (drums, Slayer), and Pancho Tomaselli (bass, War) has a rawness to its sound that plays well with each musician’s individual style.