Describing Mantis, Umphrey's McGee bassist Ryan Stasik doesn't mince words about the band's ambitions: "This record was like our opus, ... withstanding of time and complex and progressive and still a little heavy with aspects of pop."

It is not a "summer fun" album, he said, and despite the Chicago-based outfit's reputation as a jam band, Mantis is daring, tight, and expertly played.

That's different, however, from saying it's concise or disciplined. "Complex and progressive and still a little heavy with aspects of pop" describes not only the album but pretty much every song.

When the group plays the Capitol Theatre on Thursday, it will be debuting the Mantis material in the Quad Cities - a departure from its typical road-testing of material. Fans of Umphrey's are used to knowing the songs by the time they've been committed to a studio album, but Mantis is different. The group worked on the recording for two years and didn't play the songs in front of an audience until it was released in January.

When the National Weather Service issued a Particularly Dangerous Situation tornado watch on May 25 last year, Terry Swails was in an unusual position: He could chase the storm - and not via a radar from the confines of a television newsroom.

He was in Iowa City that Sunday, coming home from a storm-chasing trip in Kansas during which he saw three tornadoes.

That Sunday storm produced the EF5 tornado that hit Parkersburg, Iowa - the strongest tornado in the state since 1968.

His wife Carolyn dissuaded him from chasing it - she'd had enough of storms - but for the first time in nearly three decades, Swails has been able to indulge his love of weather directly instead of through the technology of a television station. "When the storms came, I had to work," Swails said last week. "I was always inside."

On Monday, Swails returns to the airwaves after an 18-month absence, doing weather on WQAD's 6 p.m. weekday newscasts. It's a part-time gig, meaning that Swails can devote more time to the actual weather and to his Web site.

For WQAD, this is a bold partnership that will almost certainly erode KWQC's local-news dominance and could start a sea change. Channel 8 will allow Swails to directly promote TerrySwails.com on the air, and in exchange it will get the Quad Cities' most recognizable weather personality.

The Listener engenders confusion.

Is it Listener, or the Listener Project? Yes. But not anymore.

The albums Whispermoon (2003) and Ozark Empire (2005) sure sound like hip-hop, but their creator prefers the term "talk music." "What we do is not hip hop," said Dan Smith, the Arkansas-based performer who is the Listener.

So in advance of the Listener's July 5 show at Fireworks in Moline, let's clear a few things up.

Singer, songwriter, and slide-guitarist Roy Rogers is not a blues purist. He could write a song in the style of Robert Johnson - the reason he became a blues player in the first place - but what would be the point of that?

"I'm just trying to stretch it," he said in a recent phone interview.

So on his new recording Split Decision - his first studio album with his Delta Rhythm Kings trio in seven years - there's the instrumental "Your Sweet Embrace," with a flamenco section by Ottmar Liebert, and "Rite of Passage" has a warm, funky jazz groove before taking a guitar-solo detour into the blues. "Bitter Rain" deals with Hurricane Katrina and has what Rogers called "almost kind of a tempest riff," and closing instrumental "Walkin' the Levee" features sax and a guitar tone simultaneously fuzzy and razor sharp. "River of Tears" is an irresistibly upbeat pop number despite its theme of sadness.