You should be, in a word, embarrassed if you have not yet heard of any of these bands: October Dave and the Silicon Werewolf Masks, The Peaking Beaks, Shaq Attack, Soup Kitchen, Paternity Case: Mine or Yours?, Philadelphia Keno Vendor: Wallabee Neck, The Detroit Muck Rake, and Slim Barry and his Manufactured Beatbox.

These bands, all of which hail from unique locations from across our United States of America, have all, in their own inimitable ways, slapped the popular music industry in the face with a fresh slab of t-bone and have blazed their own trail down a path of experimentation and unbridled uncertainty.

Each band is resourceful and many employ unconventional instrumentation in their quests for fusion supremacy.

How would one categorize this rock revolution, you ask? Take Sigue Sigue Sputnik's hypothetical seed, split it into a million separate swimmers and fertilize, in a test tube, the eggs of a thousand and one ancient queens.

Take that spawn and expose he or she, from birth, to the musical styling of the earliest techno drones, the hottest hip hop beats, the best of the Beach Boys, the worst of the 80's, the top 100 songs of the 90's, the sound of helicopter blades and the smell of rotting meat.

Do that and maybe, just maybe you'll achieve the brilliance of these trendsetters. But I assure you that, regardless of my use of the word in the previous sentence, these bands are not trend but the future.

So, like Dylan once said of the arrival of the Mighty Quinn, everybody take a dose, relax, and spin these records till the needle needs sharpening or till it tears through the vinyl and ruins the record, in which case you will need to go buy the record again, thus further supporting these wonderful bands.