Coheed & Cambria, Blood Brothers, and Dredg

Please welcome tonight's three contestants for accolades, riches and fame. From Los Gatos, CA, we have Dredg, whose meandering, oceanic compositions hint of ballad-oriented modern rock. The guitars swirl while singer/guitarist Gavin Hayes croons and swoons over the top like Matchbox Twenty covering Oasis. The band's third release for Interscope, Catch Without Arms, might be its last. Seattle's Blood Brothers are the dark-horse, underground favorite. Their cacophonous squall of hardcore intensity, manic, spazz-guitar freak-outs, and dual shrieking vocalists is aggressive and disorienting like early Sonic Youth. Their sound's continued to evolve, and the spiky rhythmic undercurrent, dark-edged melody and howling vocalists of last year's debut V2 release, Crimes, sound like an apotheosis of dance-punk, metalcore and emo. But Kingston, New York's Coheed & Cambria are tonight's odds-on favorites to advance to rock stardom. They've got a visionary leader, singer/guitarist Claudio Sanchez, who's penned a nearly inscrutable high-concept sci-fi story that stretches across three albums and counting. Sanchez's crisp, high-pitched vocals are perfect for this operatic melodrama, and their Universal debut amplifies the quartet's already strong prog-rock tendencies, dispatching many of their emo ticks in favor of what can only be described as the post-millennial answer to Rush.