1. Destroy Rebuild Until God Shows - D.R.U.G.S.

“For their first step up to the plate, Destroy Rebuild Until God Shows have done an admirable job reconciling personal motivations with their fans’ expectations. “Sometimes hate can be so beautiful,” Owens sings on “The Hangman,” but as time progresses, his worldview will hopefully have changed significantly and he won’t feel any need to visit the muse of retribution in an effort to strike back lyrically at those who may have done him wrong. At the end of the day, the bottom line is this: Listeners who still feel they have to take sides between D.R.U.G.S. and Chiodos’ Illuminaudio need to hit the closest bottle of chill pills. Because everybody’s better off, and the world’s MP3 players are twice as rich because of it.” —Jason Pettigrew