The young women of Girl In A Coma have named themselves after a Smiths song that needs no introduction here, and frontwoman and guitarist Nina Diaz has more than a little Morrissey in her powerful, elastic singing. But she may also remind you of Billie Holliday, Patsy Cline, Patti Smith, Karen O, and even Joey Ramone. Diaz's voice is classic: robust, immediate, capable of expressing great sorrow and anger while simultaneously conveying punk attitude. It's the sort of voice that announces the coming of a major band - a wail of emotional solidarity, and an arrow that penetrates a listener's heart.

We've included two Girl In A Coma clips on this reel - a video accompanying "Clumsy Sky", the lead single, and another for the aching "Road To Home". Both songs contain more musical moods and ideas than what can be found on most indie rock full-lengths, and Nina Diaz's singing performances are spectacular throughout. Jim Mendiola - best known as the director behind punk rock films Pretty Vacant and Ozzy Goes To The Alamo - is another proud San Antonio weirdo, and in the "Clumsy Sky" clip, he coaxes the desert-Texan strangeness and charm from Diaz's artful songwriting. Mendiola shoots the band in a dusty dive bar, and turns the room into a hangout for some of the freakiest characters in the Lone Star State (the three members on Girl In A Coma fit right in, of course.) These aren't hipsters: they're devoted music listeners, young and old, who casually express their personal styles under the smoky lights of the San Antonio nightclub. In other words, they're a Girl In A Coma crowd.

The young women of Girl In A Coma have named themselves after a Smiths song that needs no introduction here, and frontwoman and guitarist Nina Diaz has more than a little Morrissey in her powerful, elastic singing. But she may also remind you of Billie Holliday, Patsy Cline, Patti Smith, Karen O, and even Joey Ramone. Diaz's voice is classic: robust, immediate, capable of expressing great sorrow and anger while simultaneously conveying punk attitude. It's the sort of voice that announces the coming of a major band - a wail of emotional solidarity, and an arrow that penetrates a listener's heart.

We've included two Girl In A Coma clips on this reel - a video accompanying "Clumsy Sky", the lead single, and another for the aching "Road To Home". Both songs contain more musical moods and ideas than what can be found on most indie rock full-lengths, and Nina Diaz's singing performances are spectacular throughout. Jim Mendiola - best known as the director behind punk rock films Pretty Vacant and Ozzy Goes To The Alamo - is another proud San Antonio weirdo, and in the "Clumsy Sky" clip, he coaxes the desert-Texan strangeness and charm from Diaz's artful songwriting. Mendiola shoots the band in a dusty dive bar, and turns the room into a hangout for some of the freakiest characters in the Lone Star State (the three members on Girl In A Coma fit right in, of course.) These aren't hipsters: they're devoted music listeners, young and old, who casually express their personal styles under the smoky lights of the San Antonio nightclub. In other words, they're a Girl In A Coma crowd.

Santa Cruz, CA's seminal punk veterans Good Riddance are back with their 7th full-length album entitled My Republic. this latest and most fervent recording to date saw the band reuniting not only with punk producers extraordinaire Bill Stevenson and Jason Livermore (Rise Against, Anti-Flag, NOFX), but with former drummer Sean Sellers as well. the result will undoubtedly go down as the quintessential Good Riddance album and is sure to become a classic representation of the California punk sound. Driven by soulful passion and political savvy, My Republic is sure to satisfy Good Riddance fans everywhere with Luke Pabich's blazing guitars, Chuck Platt's pounding bass and Sean Seller's thundering drums, all of which are complemented by vocalist/songwriter Russ Rankin's biting social commentary and melodic personal refrains.

In an era where pop music has been processed and packaged to oblivion and rock has regressed to the point that it's pretty much lost its way, Hope Of the States are signposting a way forward. Their debut album doesn't follow rock's conventions. There are 'rock' songs that eschew verse-chorus in favour of almost classical structures; blasts of pure noise that somehow coexist with beautiful, sublimely bittersweet melodies and walls of guitar nestle happily alongside trumpets and strings. It is unashamedly, triumphantly epic and could well have people struggling to find comparisons in everything from obscure noise bands to film soundtrack composers. Perhaps most impressively, their album The Lost Riots confirms that - in a year of sallow easy-listening and lyrically-bankrupt songwriting teams - Hope Of the States are a band with something to say.

Incubus is a five-piece alternative rock band based out of Calabasas, California. The band has enjoyed great success over their sixteen-year long career, with singles like "Drive", "Are You In?", "Wish You Were Here", "Megalomaniac", "Talk Shows on Mute", "Anna Molly", "Pardon Me", "Warning" and "Dig" making them household names in today's musical climate. Incubus enjoyed multi-platinum album success with albums such as 1999's Make Yourself , 2001's Morning View and 2004's A Crow Left of the Murder. Incubus released their latest studio effort Light Grenades on November 28, 2006. On release, the album went straight to the top of the charts in the United States due to the success of first single "Anna-Molly". Their new hits include "Dig","Love Hurts", and "Oil & Water".

Ray Davies, Ian Dury, Jarvis Cocker, Mike Skinner, Alex Turner. To that list of great English storytellers, you can append the name Jamie Treays - or, as he's better-known, Jamie T. Most statesiders aren't hip to him yet, but it's only a matter of time: in the U.K., he's stormed from obscurity to the pop charts in a matter of months, and the U.S. release of Panic Prevention, his revelatory debut, is happening this September. Zane Lowe, Britain's most influential deejay, loves him. Lily Allen is a fan; she's already appeared on a remix of one of his songs (the US bonus track "Rawhide"). Jamie T has ridden three singles into the U.K. Top 20, and Panic Prevention hit #4 on the album charts. He took home the Best New Artist trophy at the NME Awards this year, and best of all, Panic Prevention has been shortlisted for the Mercury Prize. Why has Jamie T's ascent been so steep? Start with his delivery - conversational, instantly identifiable, smart without resorting to cleverness, tough without being brutal. Like Skinner of The Streets, Treays seems to speak for disaffected working-class youth, but he's the possessor of a skewed, fatalistic, and darkly humorous perspective all his own. Then, there's his bass playing, which anchors his grime and rap-influenced music in the rock tradition; it's unstudied, sure, but it's aggressive and melodic, and Treays coaxes a tone from the instrument that scratches a very deep itch. Finally, his pop smarts are unquestionable: his songs invariably feature big, infectious beats, and a madly-catchy chorus. Take, for example, "Sheila", his first U.S. single, and a song with a hook massive enough to hoist it up the British charts not once but twice over the past year. But irresistible though it is, "Sheila", like most Jamie T numbers, is deadly serious and often downright moving. Here's the tough, articulate urban realism that Treays has become known for - it begins with a story of the drowning of a drunk woman, segues into a tale of a drug dealer on the run, and culminates in a late-night shooting. Jamie T delivers his stories with empathy and understanding, but there's a trace of criticism in his young voice, too. Just like the aforementioned giants whose shoulders he gratefully stands on, his social observations, however witty, are awfully poignant. The clip for "Sheila" is strangely moving, too - especially considering the fact that it stars a pair of baboons. The two trained monkeys turn in remarkable performances as a typical suburban couple living together in an entirely ordinary city apartment. We know one is male and the other is female because of their color-coded keychains; when the "man" grabs his briefcase and heads for work in the morning, he takes the blue ring off of its hanging and leaves the pink one there for his mate. She pushes a vacuum cleaner and cleans up after him - but mostly she waits for him to return. When he does, he puts his arm around her and watches the telly, but he also hits the bottle hard. As the days flip by, the male baboon's drinking gets harder and harder, and often the blue keychain is missing from the wall hangings for nights at a time. The sadness of the female baboon is startlingly rendered; some of the shots of the neglected wife, staring out the window, are positively heartbreaking. Finally, she has enough of him - gathering her courage, she packs and marches out, leaving him alone to tear up the flat.

Cadence vs Hugo Varvoglis", the cut that closes Fleur de Lily, has been transformed into the ghostly centerpiece of the Carbon Lily Remixes by Greek dance-music auteur Hugo Varvoglis. This set of inspired reinterpretations of Fleur de Lily songs features mixes from nations all over the world - an appropriate gesture, considering Dalton's timely subject matter. Varvoglis is the star of the set, though: he's reworked four Fleur tracks, and it's his ethereal and propulsive drum and synth programming that gives Carbon Lily so much of its delicate-yet-dangerous character.

Justin Staggs (NOFX, The Soviettes, Strike Anywhere) makes videos that are dark fantasies - he loves to set iconic images against black backdrops, and juxtapose these with images of attractive performers in action. Here, the winsome Dalton provides the beautiful face, and Staggs does the rest. Well, that's not entirely accurate - Dalton has lovely hands, too, and the "Cadence vs Hugo Varvoglis" clip contains plenty of over-the-shoulder shots of the young pianist at work. The room around her is abuzz with sinister and enchanted life: cardboard moths flicker around a suspended lightbulb and a single candle, marionettes shake to attention and then hang, hunched over and poised for their strings to be pulled by an unseen hand. Stuffed animals float from the floor to the ceiling, and surround a masked ballerina as she pirouettes in place. It's all a bit like a young girl's toybox gone mad: childhood memories animated by ghostly rhythms.