Andrew Miller

Mellowness might be anathema to Louisville's Coliseum, judging by its reckless velocity and nihilistic harangues. "My lungs are filled with fumes... There's no air in this city/I need something pure," Ryan Patterson sings on 2004's "This Mind Locked Inside This Body." The anti-authority lyrics and relentless backbeat qualify the group...

When a friend asked Owen Ashworth for a collection of gloomy original tunes, the fledgling composer responded with a mixtape he christened Casiotone for the Painfully Alone. The name stuck when he began playing solo gigs, accompanied by gently pulsing electronic beats and tinny melodies from chintzy synthesizers. Ashworth's vocals...

Metalcore representative Killswitch Engage combines a blitzkrieg bottom end that hunts with the springing fury of Pantera, labyrinthine Scandinavian metal melodicism, and agile yet sophisticated structures that showcase the band's hooks with more enthusiasm than a high school trophy case. The band's sound is anchored by Berklee College of Music...

To visit Whole Wheat Bread's MySpace page — which pairs a profile photo of three unsmiling black men with streaming strains of fast, melodic punk — is to suspect an elaborate hoax. Not because black dudes can't play punk (Bad Brains obliterated that silly stereotype two decades ago), but because...

No Doubt's best record, Return to Saturn, played like an unofficial Bridget Jones soundtrack. Gwen Stefani is jealous of cuter women, greets her birthday with grim gravity, clings to an unfaithful man, and frets: Who will be the one to marry me? Her pathological insecurity is absurd but never insincere...