Indeed, the San Luis Obispo quartet is no Internet phenomenon. They're Warped Tour veterans, and they've played to sold-out houses all over America; they are currently on tour with Mae and Relient K, and later this summer, they'll be hitting the road with Motion City Soundtrack. Their much-loved 2005 debut album Sing, But Keep Going announced the arrival of a multifaceted combo: a contemporary band that loves The Beach Boys as much as The Get-Up Kids, and who've got the rich vocal harmonies and sun-drenched California melodies to prove it. Alternative Press named them one of "22 underground bands that won't stay underground for very long", and the band will be appearing alongside MySpace head honcho Tom Anderson on an upcoming edition of TRL. On A Different Light, they've added dizzy synths to their modern rock, and the resulting hybrid is something singular - reminiscent at times of hellogoodbye's romantic electro-pop or Rooney's psychedelic beachscapes, but more elastic than either of those excellent groups. "Song In My Head", the lead single, is the undeniable rock anthem and inevitable radio hit, but A Different Light also contains letter-perfect electropop ("The Best In Me"), fascinating electronic experiments ("Alley Cat"), dazzling summer-funk ("Give Up!") and pure statements of purpose ("A Different Light"). If you find another 2007 modern-rock album that covers more territory with grace, we'd certainly like to hear it!

Directed by Sherwood guitarist Nathan Henry with help from his bandmates, the video for "Song In My Head" is a sun-drenched reverie, and a whimsical look at the "making" of a band. In the clip, the four members of Sherwood are imagined as paper-doll cutouts animated by a pre-school kid. The child constructs a shoebox diorama on the floor of his suburban home; inside the "room", the musicians are dressed in brown paper and given huge cardboard instruments to play. Scraping their fingers over strings drawn on by magic-marker, the quartet moves like marionettes. Later, the boy brings the shoebox out onto a lawn - and when other kids start to chase him, the four members of Sherwood are flung against the brown paper walls of the box. A twig tossed into the diorama becomes a gigantic log crashing down on the cardboard drumkit; a little girl stops to lend a hand and dresses the figures in roughly-cut pink floral outfits. Finally, the little boy and girl carry the band with them as they race off into the sunshine - their song still echoing across the open meadows.

Shout Out Louds are lucky to have their own in-house director: bassist Ted Malmros, whose production company (that also includes his brother Tom) has shot clips for many popular Scandinavian bands. His animated video for "Young Folks" by Peter, Bjorn & John became one of the best-loved spots of 2006, received international acclaim (and thousands of downloads on social-networking sites), and won the bassist and filmmaker a Swedish Grammy. The Malmros brothers-directed clip for "Tonight I Have To Leave It" - the lead single from Our Ill Wills - is described as a documentary, and it does indeed have the intimate feel of a video diary or an exploration journal. Shot aboard a giant transport ship, it follows the story of a young man's journey across the ocean. All the seafaring details are here: the cramped quarters and steamy mess-hall, the white-bearded old captain, the arcane navigation equipment, and the clouds of steam and frost that hover in the air after the crewmembers exhale. Life aboard an oceangoing vessel is shown in a few bold, rich strokes: exciting and mundane, dull and surprisingly beautiful. Below the deck, the members of Shout Out Louds (they've taken this trip, as well) gather to sketch the skylines of the cities they've seen. In fact, the video itself is based on a dream of the band's to tour the world on a ship and do shows at every port!

They've brought along their instruments, too. The quintet sets up in the cargo hold, and the cold grandeur of the gigantic room perfectly suits the cinematic sound of "Tonight I Have To Leave It". Produced - as is all of Our Ill Wills - by Bjorn Yttling of Peter, Bjorn & John, it's a gorgeous synthesis of Scandinavian indiepop and classic Head On The Door-style alt-rock. Shout Out Louds deliver a sweeping string arrangement, rattling percussion, a dark and engrossing lyric wedded to a potent melody, and an impassioned performance by frontman Adam Olenius. Wide-eyed and urgent, Olenius sends his song up to the top of the cavernous hold, as his band fills the shadows behind him with echoing harmony.

For the "Impossible" clip, Shout Out Louds bassist Ted Malmros reprises his double-role as the band's video director. Malmros won a Grammi (the Swedish Grammy Award) for his endearing video for Peter, Bjorn & John's "Young Folks", and we hope he's got room on his mantelpiece for another. "Impossible" is a gorgeous piece of filmmaking as well as the perfect accompaniment to Olenius's tale of romantic despair. It's a chronicle of a long Scandinavian night - the sort of too-bright evening that complicates longing and compounds midsummer disorientation. Malmros catches the band under the whirling lights of an amusement park; they arrive separately and leave the same way, but gather in the arcade to keep each other cold company. One Shout Out Loud shoots a target and wins a stuffed Pooh bear, and the poor doll spends the rest of the clip staring upward from a bicycle basket. The carnival rides crash and spin under the never-dark sky, and the five bandmembers wander as if in a dream. The coin-op claw, fishing for prizes behind a glass case, becomes a metaphor for the futility of romantic connection; the inexorable rush of the rollercoaster suggests the speedy approach of the future. Throughout, Malmros's colors are bold, dazzling, and hypnotic, and the red-stained faces of the Shout Out Louds are tremendously expressive in their impassivity. Heartbreak seeps through the frames, and radiates from the winsome faces of the young musicians.

Sia Kate Isobelle Furler, also simply known as Sia, is an Australian pop singer. She is noted for her work with Zero 7 and her two major label solo albums.

If you were there, you know it's true: SXSW '08 was bigger and better than the festival has ever been. And if you were in Austin this year, chances are, you've heard the name Sink to See. The Los Angeles quartet emerged from South by Southwest with the sort of buzz that any publicist would kill to manufacture for their clients. Their shows in Austin were a celebration: head-turning performances that felt like affirmations of the power of rock and roll. But although the members of Sink to See are young still carving out their place on the American musical landscape, theirs is no overnight success-story: they've been honing their sound for years, touring steadily, and opening shows for some of the biggest bands in the indie rock underground. They've shared bills with The Breeders, ImaRobot, Black Rebel Motorcycle Club, and other like-minded rockers, and have developed a stage set that is at once explosive, meditative, and inspiring.

The band's self-titled debut puts all of those qualities on bold display. The independently-released Sink to See, a collection of sharply-performed and bracing rock songs, has been compared by critics to Radiohead, The Killers, and Sugarcult. Frontman Jason Napier's voice roars out of the speakers like a thunderstorm; Donie West's guitar scalds, snarls and stings; drummer Tariq Mills and bassist Shawn Bathe are rock-solid, energetic, and poised. The licensing execs at MTV are already notable appreciators of the band's cinematic sound: they've placed songs from Sink to See in episodes of Newport Harbor and The Hills. Sink to See have become favorites of adventurous Cali radio deejays, too, winning heavy airtime on L.A.'s influential KROQ. And they've accomplished all of this on their own - they're true indies, handling everything from production to booking to merchandise on their own.

"Speakers", the lead single, is a statement of faith in the transcendent power of sound. "You feel the speakers pumping", sings Napier - and right on cue, a synthesizer riff rises, snake-like, from the mix to join the fuzzed-out guitar and pounding drums. The song promises an escape into the lush soundscape; its empathetic video does, too. Directed by Tanya "Lynx" Brown - another up-and-coming Los Angeles artist - the "Speakers" clip wraps a narrative of rock and roll initiation around footage of Sink To See in performance. The video opens with an establishing shot of a typical suburban house. Sounds of a domestic squabble are heard from inside; a mother is telling her grown son to get out of her home and to take his rock and roll records with him. But there's another son living here, too - a kid, maybe seven or eight years old. On his way out the door, the elder brother grabs a forbidden record, brings it to his younger sibling, and whispers "this will change your life". As soon as the mother has left the room, the little boy takes the record from its cache, slips it onto a turntable, and dons headphones. His eyes widen, the room turns from black and white to full color, and the picture of Sink to See hanging on the wall comes to vivid life, and begins to play. .

Sirenia is a gothic metal band from Stavanger, Norway which incorporates a mixture of gothic metal and symphonic metal, as well as extreme metal and death metal elements. The vocals consist of death grunts, operatic female vocals and a clean male singer. The lyrics, written by Morten Veland, tell a loose conceptual story that began at Widow's Weeds, while he was still a member of Tristania.

The band uses melodic instrumentals, synthesizers, and distorted guitars with female vocals, male death vocals, clean male vocals, a choir, and violins. The lyrics are concerned with human existence, emotion, and mental states.

Of course, that meant he was the hardest-partying member, too - and considering the well-chronicled exploits of Tommy Lee, Vince Neil, and Mick Mars, that's really saying something. Nikki Sixx's walks on the wild side are the stuff of Sunset Strip legend, and have inspired some of the Crüe's most harrowing songs: "Kickstart My Heart" (about the night he was declared legally dead and had to be revived by paramedics), "Dancing On Glass" (about the time he was thrown, unconscious, into a dumpster by a security guard). Now older and wiser, Nikki Sixx isn't exactly proud of these experiments in wild debauchery, but neither does he disavow them. They were part of a path toward enlightenment, and they've granted the bassist a singular perspective. And with Sixx A.M., Nikki and a new group of inspired musicians are turning those memories of Eighties excess into something altogether more edifying.

The Heroin Diaries were discovered by accident: Sixx was cleaning out a closet and chanced upon notebooks he'd scribbled during the height of his addiction. Realizing that the diaries constituted an astonishingly honest (and, to be fair, black-comic) chronicle of the long slide into drug madness, Sixx decided that they deserved to be shared with the world. The Heroin Diaries will be published on September 18 - and not content with the written word alone, the bassist assembled Sixx A.M. to compose a soundtrack. "Life Is Beautiful", the hard-rocking lead single, deals with themes made explicit in the book: the desire to break through into an altered state, the attraction of chaos, and the wisdom that comes from pushing yourself to the limit.

There's plenty of footage of Sixx A.M. in performance in the expressive video for "Life Is Beautiful"; Nikki Sixx, in particular, rocks as hard as he did with Mötley Crüe. He looks great, too: poised, dignified even! A face on metal's Mount Rushmore, a grizzled rock and roll survivor. Yet there's evidence of Sixx's new literary turn all over this clip: shots crumple up like pages of a book, and words, scrawled in red ink and culled from the lyric, float over the band as they play. The video opens with Sixx reciting a remarkable line from the diary - "there's nothing like a trail of blood to help you find your way back home" - and ends with the bassist offering another spoken reflection on the price of knowledge. Mötley Crüe once gave the impression that they were a band that could care less about lyrics; now, their leader, spokesperson, and principal songwriter wants to make sure that you catch - and understand - every last word.