Director Sean Donnelly perfectly captures the camaraderie and energy of Northern State in his partially-animated clip for "Better Already." It opens in a typical urban apartment; Sprout is mixing drinks and Hesta Prynn sits on a sofa and sketches a rough picture of her in ballpoint pen. It all seems familiar - until Spero pulls open the window shade on a cartoon wonderland. The three rappers soar out the window and into the phantasmagoria; they ride unicorns and giant butterflies, play with marshmallows, make a visit to a "space mall," and soar through the ether. The visual effects are bold and bright, but they're outshone by the pure glee of the members of Northern State. Donnelly keeps flashing the word "friendship" on the screen, but he really doesn't need to - their joy in each other's company and the music they make together is wildly apparent.

Nurses play indiepop and have operated from bases in Chicago and San Diego, but there are no Beach Boys harmonies or Byrds jangle-guitars in these tracks. These four musicians are Californians and Windy City residents by way of small-town Idaho, and big skies and mountain weirdness hang heavier over their music than does the summer sun. Nurses songs twist, turn, and wander, incorporate sound effects, repeat sections, and end abruptly; odd instrumentation is introduced and just as soon withdrawn; thickets of wiry guitar and piano snare the unwary; tantalizing melodies and intriguing lyrics beckon listeners closer.

"And Now The Curse Of Marjorie", the Wurlitzer-driven lead single from Hangin' Nothin' But Our Hands Down, is Nurses's most approachable track. But catchy though it is, make no mistake, it's still enigmatic and haunting. Behn Fannin's expressive clip for "Marjorie" is no less cryptic. A man with a bag over his face places a strange diorama on a stack of boxes in a back alley, turns an antique key, and switches on the device. A tiny screen opens up to reveal a two-dimensional, cardboard cut-out version of Nurses, performing "Marjorie". Paper balloons and a grinning sun hang in the background, and the musicians are haloed with light. We're also shown another view from the back of the diorama; here, we see the backs of the two-dimensional figures and the face of the man in the bag, staring through holes at the band as they play. He runs through the streets with the box in his hands, and the entire stage jiggles as he does - soon, there are bombers in the sky, dropping smiling warheads in the spaces between the bandmembers. During the choruses, the faces of the Nurses appear in a picture-frame, surrounded by blackness and (quite literally) singing their heads off, much like Queen in the famous "Bohemian Rhapsody" clip. Throughout, Fannin makes elaborate use of hand-held camera techniques and choppy, digital filters: it all creates an encroaching feeling of destabilization that perfectly suits the eerie and dramatic "Marjorie".

Like a genetic splicing of The Sex Pistols and The Beatles, Oasis rose to fame on the back of the surging excitement of Noel's songs, full of hedonistic euphoria and almost football terrace-like choruses, delivered with a perfect rock 'n' roll sneer by Liam. Oasis were perfect for the post-rave era, they made people feel that, like the era of 60's, they were living through special times.

It'll be a busy summer for of Montreal - never in the ten-year history of the band has it been so popular, or so well-respected. Hissing Fauna, Are You The Destroyer?, the latest album, has been hailed as a raw, emotionally explicit masterpiece by the rock press, and seems destined to be remembered as one of the vital, must-have releases of 2007. On the heels of the criminally-catchy "Heimdalsgate Like A Promethean Curse" ("come on, chemicals!") comes "Suffer For Fashion" - a piece of immediate and irresistible power-pop that might just vault this group of lovable oddballs onto the Billboard charts for the first time.

Thanks to Scandinavian animator Sigrid Astrup, they've got a clip for the song that merits some serious attention. Now, of Montreal videos are always wildly imaginative, but they've outdone themselves this time around. Astrup specializes in the art of creating the illusion of movement through sequences of still pictures, and, in the process, investing ordinary household objects with an eerie significance. In the "Suffer For Fashion" clip, Astrup, plays with textures and incorporates other animated effects, and projecting images on small screens-within-screens that never seem to stand still for long.

Themes of self-negation and destabilization are present in the mind-bending clip for "Gronlandic Edit". Images shake, shudder, and glow; the hues themselves seem to be restless. It's an in-motion version of an Of Montreal album cover, illustrated in bold color and busy with provocative figures. Barnes himself is portrayed as, among other things, a sleeping, shirtless penitent (in football pads), a monkey, and a vampire bat. Throughout, he is chased by skull-masks - and the snarling, fanged head of a tiger, approaching and receding from the red circles that haunt the backgrounds of these tormented frames. The intricately-drawn mandalas that decorate the cover of Hissing Fauna, Are You The Destroyer? spin through the "Gronlandic Edit" video, too. This can be perfectly explained by the fact that the video was directed by the same person who designed the album artwork. This person also just happens to be David Barnes, brother of Kevin himself. The clip is crammed with sun-symbols both welcoming and chilling; elsewhere, strange and disquieting Hindu imagery haunts the clip. A man is shown stripping naked, and then to his muscle-structure, and then down to his skeleton. But the bones aren't interred - on the contrary, extra arms blossom from the shoulders, and the undead creature begins to dance.

Not many bands truly merit comparison to Eighties underground pop legends like Let's Active, Game Theory, Wygals, the B-52's, and the dB's. But Chicago's Office has the attitude, the spark, the chord vocabulary, the gender balance, and, above all else, the tunes. Frontman and songwriter Scott Masson is a master of melody and a sure-handed craftsman of pop hooks - but as skillful as he is, he's willing to go wild on the microphone to make sure his listeners are receiving his songs with the proper spirit. The Windy City has always supported its independent power pop bands, and Office's self-released albums and EPs built the band a devoted hometown following.

But talent knows no geographical confines, and fans of strong songwriting will hunt down pop gems no matter where they're buried. "Wound Up", a track from an indie Office album, was named an iTunes single of the week, and the band spent the better part of 2006 in the music website's Top 100. Appearances at Lollapalooza and SXSW followed - and then James Iha's Scratchie Records snapped up the quintet, set them on tour with the like-minded Earlimart, and will soon release A Night At The Ritz to a national audience. Ritz contains "Wound Up" and several other songs that long-time fans of the band will recognize, including the maddeningly-catchy "Oh My".

Now it's here, and it's exceeded expectations. We can't even count all the positive reviews for The Stage Names we've seen so far; suffice to say that if a publication covers music, chances are, it's printed or posted an Okkervil River rave in the past few weeks. Pitchfork loves The Stage Names; Spin, All-Music Guide, and Entertainment Weekly have sung the praises of this resolutely independent band to mainstream audiences; The New York Times continued its strenuous advocacy of the group; hometown paper The Austin Chronicle called the album "the modern world, revealed". But none of that has been as important - or as telling - as the overwhelming response to the songs on The Stage Names by independent webloggers, fans, and ordinary music listeners lucky enough to catch Okkervil River's incendiary stage show. Billboard tells us that The Stage Names made its debut in the U.S. Top 100. Impressive for sure - but more importantly, we know that it's #1 in the hearts of everybody who follows this group.

What's the new album about? Life on the road for a modern indie rock band, voyeurism and pornography, the blurry line between fiction and nonfiction, kicks, illusions, "the scene", the desperate need to connect, and much more. Sheff's formidable intelligence and emotional generosity are in full force; meanwhile, years of energetic late-night performances have turned Okkervil River into a fierce rock outfit. "Our Life Is Not A Movie Or Maybe", the lead track on The Stage Names, is an absolute fireball: the band crashes through the verses as Sheff howls about the ache of the mundane, and its refusal to conform to a narrative trajectory. "It's got a calm clicking", he sings of the clock on the mantelpiece, counting out the seconds, "like a pro at his editing suite takes two weeks stitching up some bad movie." Once again, Sheff and the band prove that neither a cerebral approach nor a big vocabulary is any impediment whatsoever to rock and roll intensity.