Performing at the East Moline venue on his “30 Years of Mayhem” tour, Chad Gray headlines a May 30 engagement at the Rust Belt, this powerhouse vocalist behind Mudvayne and Hellyeah lauded for decades for the intensity and grit that helped define modern heavy metal.

Fresh off his two-month tour of Southern California, Matt Barber returns to Davenport's Grape Life Wine Store & Cellar on May 30, the gifted crooner and Rock Island High School graduate performing a thrilling repertoire of jazz, pop, and '50s-'70s classics alongside Quad Cities musicians and brothers Kellen Meyers on keyboard and Logan Meyers on drums.

Traveling the country in support of their acclaimed springtime release Ritual Fever, the experimental musicians of Water Is the Headline headline a May 30 concert at Rock Island's Rozz-Tox, Psychotropic Wonderland describing the group's recording as "an endlessly evolving balancing act between timeless, rustic, and haunted-sounding samples and alternately understated and epic-sounding synthesizer motifs.”

Debuting their new cantata for the first time in Iowa, the vocal talents of the Quire of Eastern Iowa brings Sincerely Yours, Pauli Murray to the Coralville Center for the Performing Arts on May 30, celebrating the pioneering Civil Rights activist, lawyer, poet, and Episcopal priest whose work helped shape modern movements for racial and gender equality.

Presenting a panel discussion on the new Jane E. Simonsen book about Rock Island's Augustana College, the Davenport Public Library's Eastern Avenue Branch, on June 2, hosts a talk on the fascinating nonfiction Called to Reckon: Replacing History & Reclaiming Mission at a Midwestern College.

With Stephen Holden of The New York Times calling the film "so verbally dexterous and visually innovative that you can't absorb it unless you have all your wits about you,” Waking Life enjoys a June 4 screening at Rozz-Tox, Oscar-nominated filmmaker Richard Linklater's animated 2001 classic the latest presentation in the Rock Island venue's popular Filmosofia series.

Hailed by the New York Daily Mirror as “a hit you must see” and by the Los Angeles Times as “a handsomely staged case for miracles,” playwright N. Richard Nash's 1953 classic The Rainmaker enjoys a June 4 through 14 run at Geneseo's Richmond Hill Barn Theatre, this optimistic charmer famed for its beloved 1956 movie adaptation starring Burt Lancaster and Katharine Hepburn.

Every year when the Legislature arrives at mid-May, it’s always tempting to look around, see the absence of real bicameral movement on legislation, and conclude that nothing’s gonna happen in time for the scheduled May 31 adjournment. Succumbing to that temptation this year may not be a bad bet, but things can change. Right now, though, evidence of major movement is super-slim.

There are so many smart, promising ideas floating around in the comedic horror of Obsession that it almost doesn't matter that few of them feel properly explored, and that writer/director/editor Curry Barker doesn't seem to have entirely figured out either his principal characters or his film's overall tone.