Two Tongues, 'Two Tongues' (Vagrant)

Emo yin and yang transcend embattled genre's clichés.

Operating like two halves of one brain, this Warped Tour fantasy group -- Saves the Day's Chris Conley and David Soloway plus Say Anything's Max Bemis and Coby Linder -- flood their debut album with opposites: dark/ light, quiet/loud, mid-period Replacements and obscure, angular '90s emo.

Anthony Green, 'Avalon' (Photo Finish)

The Warped generation's own pope of mope goes it alone.

Like Sunny Day Real Estate's Jeremy Enigk, Circa Survive singer Anthony Green is his band's most influential (and enigmatic) member, with a nation of emo kids finding solace in the stratospheric vocal lines and elliptical lyrics that mark his band's proggy epics.

Slipknot, 'All Hope Is Gone' (Roadrunner)

Metal's not-so-merry men expand their antisocial growl.

Masked or otherwise, Slipknot's members have rarely seen eye to eye creatively, but without that friction, the nine-member band's self-titled 1999 album and 2001's Iowa (the closest death metal has ever gotten to mainstream rock) wouldn't have been so memorably volatile. Still, between 2004's softer, stylistically uneven Vol.

Omar Rodriguez-Lopez, 'Calibration (Is Pushing Luck and Key Too Far)' (N2O)

Relax -- nobody else knows what the hell they're doing either.

With the fourth in a series of albums written during a creative burst in Amsterdam, the Mars Volta guitarist forgoes his usual proggy pyrotechnics for a trek into dubby textures and hard drum breaks.

P.O.D., 'When Angels & Serpents Dance' (Columbia)

The thinking man's Limp Bizkit not so thoughtful anymore.

Despite reuniting the band with guitarist and cofounder Marcos Curiel (who split in 2003), P.O.D.'s seventh album rehashes the same slickly metallic, middle-of-the-road rap-rock sound that defined the band's later, post-Curiel years.

Monotonix, 'Body Language' (Drag City)

Riff-dripping lust for lifers bust out of the Promised Land.

This Israeli garage-punk trio's live show -- an orgy of unhinged, id-driven frontman behavior, amps on the verge of collapse, and the occasional flaming drum kit -- doesn't lend itself to studio constraints.

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