Van McCann, singer and guitarist for the United Kingdom's Catfish & the Bottlemen, has a strange relationship with the song "Homesick."

"I thought it was the worst one of the batch we did ... when we first started recording for Communion," he said, referring to the label/tour founded by Mumford & Sons' Ben Lovett. "Since then, it's become my favorite."

What changed, McCann said, was that other people liked it. And therein lies a great deal of the charm of Catfish & the Bottlemen, a band described by the UK's The Guardian as "deeply old-fashioned - and unfashionable."

McCann doesn't disagree with that assessment - whether it means an indifference toward appearance or, in a larger sense, a band more in love with the idea of playing for as many people as possible than selling lots of records or making artistic statements. When the quartet performs a Communion/Daytrotter show at Maquoketa's Codfish Hollow Barn on June 19, expect no-frills rock-and-roll with one goal: to connect with the audience.

The seminal crossover-thrash band D.R.I. released its seventh studio album, Full Speed Ahead, in 1995, and fans hungry for an eighth album ... well, they'll need to keep waiting.

Founding vocalist Kurt Brecht, in a recent phone interview promoting D.R.I.'s May 30 appearance at RIBCO, said the band isn't against the idea and has made fits and starts. It recorded four demos in 2004 and released a Web-only track from those sessions. And, he added, founding guitarist Spike Cassidy "was saying something about recording the next time we're in L.A. with the engineer that used to do our old albums when we were on Metal Blade Records."

But, he said, if something comes from that studio time, it will likely be an EP. "Not that we couldn't write a full album," he said. "It's just we've been so busy touring and stuff, we don't want to stop to put out an album. ... We're just so happy to have an unlimited amount of dates thrown at us all over the world to play, so we don't want to slow down." Plus, without a current record deal, the band is under no obligation to release new material - and getting a record deal or self-releasing an album would require energy that could be devoted to touring.

Few people would be surprised to find Julie Byrne working in the service industry. The singer/songwriter, after all, is in her mid-20s with one album to her credit, and it's hard for an emerging musician to make ends meet performing for small audiences and selling records one by one.

But if you see Byrne working at Rozz-Tox in the coming weeks, it's not for that reason. Instead, she's the first artist-in-residence at the venue, and her one-month stay in the Quad Cities - running through early June - will include a show on May 28.

The residency, Byrne said last week, originated with the idea of finding something to fill the gap between a two-month tour and her summer concert bookings. "I knew that going on such a long tour would be really wonderful and really exhilarating but also challenging just because there's no privacy and no space to reflect on these constant, rapid experiences - each day in a new place," she said. "So I was trying to figure out a calm, tranquil environment where I could exist after the tour to kind of take it all in and begin working on new material."

With the Water Liars's self-titled album - the band's third record in as many years - you could be forgiven for thinking that you're in for a jarring ride based on the song titles and the opening track's bleak but majestic riff. "Cannibal" is followed by "War Paint" and "I Want Blood."

You are in for a ride, although it's less the beat-down and carnage that the titles suggest than a careening from loud distortion to gentle Americana and back. "Ray Charles Dream" is a hooky, punk-tinged rock song sandwiched between the slow-footed guitar lament of "Tolling Bells" and the even-slower-footed piano lament of "Vespers."

"That's always been sort of a point for us," said singer/songwriter/guitarist Justin Kinkel-Schuster in a phone interview last week, promoting the trio's May 14 performance at Rozz-Tox. "Widely shifting dynamics has always been an important part of our sound ... both live and on records. ... I just always am intrigued by moving between those poles. There's something interesting about taking a ride like that."

It's not merely a sonic roller coaster. The title and sentiment of "I Want Blood" ("I want blood all the time") would seem to lend themselves to a ravenous rock treatment, but the song instead places the lyrics in a warm and ethereal musical context, making it a reverb-heavy anthem to searching and soaring. "Tension is why art exists," Kinkel-Schuster explained of the apparent contradiction. "Without tension, I don't think there's a whole lot to go on. ... Without tension you don't have a story; there's nothing to resolve."