Music in Milwaukee - The Pushers Shake Things Up

Music in Milwaukee suffers from a lack of defined identity. It isn't only that any mention of the Milwaukee music scene doesn't cause any particular type of music to spring to mind. It's that there really doesn't seem to be a group that brings to life the spirit of Milwaukee, a local group that plays music that is unmistakably and uncompromisingly the sonic portrait of the Thrillwaukee experience.

That may have been true before The Pushers came to be. Their straightforward interpretation of the Midwestern blues tradition is honest, pulls no punches, and is similarly fitting as theme music for a bar crawl on the East Side as it is oozing out a radio on the job site. The music is pulsating with energy, but it does not simply release - Rather, it churns beneath the a misleadingly tranquil and low key surface. There is something in there that a Milwaukee native instinctively understands.

The compositions' subjects are inclined to to center around on simple ideas, but in a deeper way. The band's smash hit, and famous hard-rocker 'Heartbreaker' mixes blues slide guitar and hard rock balls to narrate the struggle of a infamous love 'em and leave 'em type whose talent for making the ladies head-over-heels fall in love with him is at once a gift and an affliction - the audience can't know for sure if the protagonist is boasting or expressing regret as he illustrates the forever shifting roster of women whose momentary obsession makes him forget that in spite of what it looks like, he is painfully alone.

Principally contributing to the framework of The Pushers' sound is Nathan Rogers's guitar technique. It is both phenomenal but unobtrusive - he slings infectious guitar licks and smoldering solos alike with the identical purposeful nuance, all beneath vocalist Cooper's aggressive bark. The singer, whose persona not only is the perfect representation of the everyman hero portrayed in the songs' words, brandishes a blues harp. Not only does simply including a blues harp seperate the Pushers from fellow regional rock groups, the way it maniacally scorches alongide the guitar shatters any similarity to blues groups also. The Pushers churn out tunes that are so unrelated to other music in Milwaukee.

The rhythm section, bassist Blackburn and drummer Cejka lock into seething downtempo grooves, belt out attention-grabbing stops, and straight-ahead rock, with no sign of any hiccup or second thought. They build the kind of backdrop that is usually absent in the majority of of today's actual hard rock: one that commands people to actually want to jump up and MOVE. The success of a lot of music in Milwaukee is usually based on a band's capacity to keep the drinking and party masses happy, and The Pushers do it without losing any of their integrity. That is due to the fact that their music so perfectly captures the experience in this city, both the good times and the bad.

If you are searching for a perfect example of music in Milwaukee, check out The Pushers. They are the ones to watch over the next few months.

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