http://www.nytimes.com/2012/01/01/arts/ ... &seid=auto

[quote:37d69yv6][b:37d69yv6]Look Out, _____ Is the New Grunge![/b:37d69yv6]

FEAR not, rockists: all is not lost. Just because the mainstream, as buffeted by major labels, has been resistant to new ideas for several years doesnÂ’t mean it canÂ’t be infected. Bubbling below the mook-rockers, the Â’90s revivalists and the toothless oldsters are plenty of microscenes, any one of which could be seized upon by A&R executives looking to reboot their labelsÂ’ approach to rock. Here are a few of the most promising options.

College Rock 2.0

Today it would probably be referred to as “blog rock,” or “what hipsters like,” or “what I learned about from Pitchfork” — which is to say the bands in this category are united by audience and distribution arc more than by sound. This year’s signature example was “Helplessness Blues” (Sub Pop) by Fleet Foxes, a lush, rustic and irritating album that could easily be inflated for larger audiences. Same goes for Bon Iver’s self-titled second album (on Jagjaguwar), an achingly beautiful record, wholesome and lonesome, that shows off the singer-songwriter Justin Vernon’s fluency with grand-scale feeling, clear even on these small songs. But the most translatable and malleable sound may belong to Girls, whose second album “Father, Son, Holy Ghost” (True Panther) was a notch off its debut, but whose fragile frontman, Christopher Owens, is perhaps as close to a modern-day Kurt Cobain as indie rock now has.

Grown-Up Warped Tour

Nowhere has the soul of rock been up for debate more than on the Warped Tour, the annual traveling summer carnival of punk, post-punk and meta-punk. In past years it’s been ground zero for emo and screamo, and lately has embraced the many variants of post-hardcore, as well as the emergent, and very soft, world of electro-punk, in which the punk part isn’t any harder than the stuff you can buy at the mall. Still, this scene has produced some exciting bands. Take the committedly juvenile Brokencyde, which verges on slapstick parody, or Never Shout Never, which works the opposite tack, updating emo minimalism through an electronic folk lens. The best band in this space may be Breathe Carolina, which on its album “Hell Is What You Make It” (Fearless) made scream-punk songs masquerading as rave anthems.

Metal and Its Many Tributaries

One of the most unexpectedly consistently popular bands on the Billboard Rock Albums chart is Five Finger Death Punch, a ham-handed agit-metal outfit whose new album, “American Capitalist” (Prospect Park), made its debut at No. 2 on the Top Rock Albums chart, and at No. 3 on the overall album chart. It’s not the most artful of metal bands, but it shows a potent hunger for heavy music. Still, metal as an umbrella category has been the most creatively fertile slice of rock in the last five years. Black metal is testing its boundaries thanks to bands like Liturgy, whose album “Aesthethica” (Thrill Jockey) was among the year’s best, and the scene is home to an increasing number of small, innovative labels. On the more aggressive end is the subsubgenre deathcore, which melds the technical aggression of metalcore with the gloomy clouds of death metal and is home to some of the most vibrant and arena-ready bands around, like Suicide Silence, Despised Icon and Whitechapel.

Christian Rock

The longest-running album on the most recent Billboard Top Rock Albums chart, at 121 weeks, is “Awake” (Atlantic) by Skillet, a Christian rock band that specializes in tepid anthems. While Christian music has rarely been at the forefront of changes in the sound of rock, it reliably jumps in when the waters have been tested — witness Christian emo, Christian metalcore, and so on. With promising releases this year like “Kingdom Days in an Evil Age” (ANGR), by the Christian hardcore band Sleeping Giant, and “The Anthem of Angels” (BEC) by the melodic hard-rock band Seventh Day Slumber, it’s not unthinkable that we could be heading toward a moment similar to the one when quasi-Christian bands like Creed and Evanescence were among the most popular bands in the country.

Dubstep

In which the traditional definition of rock gets tossed out the window: what hair metal was to the 1980s and jock jams were to the 1990s, dubstep — specifically the high-test, pneumatic drill version offered by the multiple Grammy nominee Skrillex and his ilk — is to today. Forget Korn’s much-maligned flirtation with the genre as a comeback device on its latest album, “The Path of Totality” (Roadrunner). What’s been intriguing about the rapid rise of dubstep is how quickly it’s become unmoored from its roots as subtle British body music and recast as anthemic global jackhammer music, whether on its own in the sounds of Flux Pavilion and Nero, or through the American pop and hip-hop that’s taken to sampling it. Most crucially dubstep has already achieved a scalability in live settings that, say, hip-hop still has difficulty with after three decades of trying. It’s already trying to fill the arenas of tomorrow, just as soon as those guys with guitars clear out.[/quote:37d69yv6]