POSTED // Dec 20,2012 - The Atomics, comprised of the four Smith siblings, ages 14 to 19, look like the poster children of teenage fashion, seemingly cut from a designer’s book and placed here at City Creek Center.

POSTED // Dec 13,2012 - One Christmas, Justin Shandor’s mother gave his father some Elvis cologne. “He never opened it,” says the 28-year-old Elvis impersonator.

POSTED // Dec 13,2012 - To the untrained eye, Los Angeles-based Ozomatli’s multicultural musical soup might look like the kind of dinner you’d make with whatever leftover ingredients you have in the fridge.

POSTED // Dec 13,2012 - It’s the heartbreak of letting someone down, having never been able to fulfill one of their final wishes. It’s the guilt of procrastinating beyond the point of action and living with it.

POSTED // Dec 7,2012 - Even when it’s out of season, alternative Xmas music is a riot. But when the stores break out the cinnamon- pine-cone stench and equally noisome Christmas muzak and maudlin mainstream country covers, it’s essential.

POSTED // Dec 6,2012 - As a young, wannabe garage rocker in the late ’80s, Tyler Monks got a dose of reality when he moved from Sacramento, Calif., to Orem, where he says there wasn’t an outlet for rock & roll,

POSTED // Nov 29,2012 - Nick Como has a tattoo on each of his forearms: one of the Statue of Liberty, the other of the New York City skyline.

POSTED // Nov 29,2012 - Megadeth’s 13-album discography is littered with similar songs, where Mustaine laments puppet politicians, the military-industrial complex, censorship, poverty and the environment. Dude’s a liberal, right?

POSTED // Nov 23,2012 - In From the Top of Willamette Mountain, James deals in the currency of mysticism, trading thoughts of life’s repressiveness and his misgivings about organized religion for a search for the holy, a personal quest for transcendence or something similar. He does it openly on this, his third album.

POSTED // Nov 21,2012 - The gift of music is a mighty thing. Music and songs hold memories, much as a smell can bring you back to “that one time.” And they offer us the potential to either lose ourselves or become more ourselves through expression. There isn’t a more powerful present.