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.

Sonata Arctica is a Finnish power metal band from the town of Kemi, originally assembled in 1996. Their later albums (particularly Unia) are also often cited as part of the progressive metal genre.

Scott Culver has made memorable promo clips for Yellowcard, Halifax, The Early November, hellogoodbye and many other popular contemporary bands, and it's often been our pleasure to share these videos with you. Culver makes the rock groups he works with look fantastic: iconic and inevitable, shooting stars in mid-trajectory. He's particularly adept at pairing great on-camera performances with striking, evocative imagery. Now, the veteran director has turned his talents to Soundside - and he couldn't have found a more appropriate canvas for his work.

For starters, Soundside shares more than just an approach with the bands Culver has worked with before - they've shared stages, too. The L.I. quartet (besides being a great band name, "soundside" is local slang for the northern half of the island) has played everywhere from the Knitting Factory in New York to the Carrier Dome in Syracuse. Their explosive live set has made them a substantial draw on the Northeastern club circuit, and they'll soon be bringing their sound to the rest of the country: the release of Seconds From Sunrise, their newest album, will be accompanied by a tour and a nationwide radio campaign. Singer Rich Arcati's backstory is one of the most notable in modern rock - he's half-Mexican and a fluent Spanish speaker, and his growing discography features an EP of Soundside canciones en Espanol. Clearly this is a band making a conscientious effort to reach as wide an audience as possible - and one with the tools and talent to do so.

Produced by Angus Cooke of The Ataris, Seconds From Sunrise is a collection of muscular, arena-ready, and immediately winning modern rock songs. It's unabashedly eclectic, too: Soundside's music is just as forceful with acoustic instruments as they are with their amps cranked, and folk, prog, and reggae(!) influences can be felt in these grooves. But the predominant sound here is both heavy and melodic, and "Loss For Words" epitomizes that approach. The song builds from an angular guitar riff to an anthemic chorus, and Arcati delivers his story with passion, power, and tremendous conviction.

Culver's Little Prince-inspired clip for "Loss For Words" finds Soundside in stratospheric territory - quite literally! They're playing on a small asteroid hurtling through space; as the stars and planets hurtle through space behind them, the curvature of their sphere is evident. But there are even smaller orbs in this firmament, and they're inhabited - one, grassy and fertile, by a little girl celebrating her birthday, and another, barren and smoking, by a young boy with a telescope. They're alone, and lonely; separated by an interstellar gulf. The boy has a net sturdy enough to catch a comet, though - and once he's got one, he rides it through the blackness to meet her on her planet.

Then again, The Exies have always been independents at heart; they're a band unafraid to take risks and make bold moves. For instance, their second 2007 single isn't an album cut at all - it's an Internet-only release, and it's accompanied by an incendiary clip that's already become a sensation on video-sharing sites like YouTube. "God We Look Good (Going Down In Flames)" is a gutsy broadside against the state of contemporary media, a critique of celebrity culture, and a savaging of that which passes for political discourse on the modern airwaves. We have, Stevens seems to be suggesting, lost our nerve at a crucial moment, and we've become distracted by sideshows. "This is the pill, the pill that we swallow," he howls, his reference to The Matrix evident, "the death of us all, the cash, the kill - they're selling us off to make the deal."

The video for "God We Look Good (Going Down In Flames)" is similarly confrontational - and similarly unapologetic. Images flash by, one after another, none lingering on the screen for more than a second. It's like channel-surfing on speed, and at this rate, every shot projected becomes near-subliminal and loaded with meaning. But none of the footage assembled by The Exies will feel unfamiliar to anybody who's got a television: we're shown the faces of complicit politicians, shots of violence, sex, weeping celebrities carted off to prison, missiles, dollar signs, works of fine art, religious symbols, guns. The words "are you ready to go?" and "sell out" struggle to surface; they're a message fighting its way through the chaos. Stevens, too, breaks into the frame from time to time, and he forces his way straight up to the camera to deliver his accusation, as if he's besieged on all sides and wants to make sure he's getting his message across. He grabs the attention of the lens and hangs on to his connection with his audience while he can, like a pit bull with its prey in its mouth. But the tilt-a-whirl of images rushes on, oblivious to objection and seemingly beyond control. Who cycles through these channels, and who stands behind the rush of content that now fills the televised airwaves? The implication here is that nobody is in control: that, instead, we're all being washed downstream by a torrent of meaningless news and gossip, one greased by money and power but generated and perpetuated by its own sick momentum.