The music appears to float above the fray and combines with searching lyrics (not searching too hard, mind you) that assures us this band will never make eye contact.

"Sissy New Age Cowboy" lets you know what Amaker thinks of designer-wearin' C&W posers ("the Rodeo is here to kick your ass").

It is truly a daunting task to rise above the glut of singers with guitars draped off their shoulder.

Garfield glides fragilely from end to end throughout Ace of Hearts, sometime alone, sometimes alongside guitarist/vocalist Ste Rasch.

Broken Land say they have their sights set on a new territory called hindie rock: Hindustani rhythms and alternate tunings uniting under a rock and punk flag.

"Supreme Girl" is a love song based on our lovely President George Bush and one-time Supreme Court nominee Harriet Myers.

Owing a great deal to the statuesque genre known as shoegazing, Conqueror may lack a bit in hooks and shifts, but makes it up thanks to low key vocals and song-crafting.

Eastern Conference Champions is a trio that sounds thoroughly British yet hails from Pennsylvania.

With its origin harkening back to Kensrue's days playing for spare change on the street corners of Southern California, Please Come Home is a stripped down, rollicking folk record that is fairly impressive and largely successful.

The band's patented shoegaze gauze is shot through with fuzzed-out garage guitars on opener "Know," only to dissolve into a two-minute-long coda of brushed drums.

Quite simply, this is the best electronica work I've ever heard by an unsigned musician.

The sound of the Velmas is the sound of every radio rock band of the last ten years or so shoved in a blender, resulting in a homogenized mush of everything "alternative."