Keep your eye on these Vegas artists

Don't put down that bear claw just yet, you've got more important things to do.

Around this time every January, lots of you are trying to stick to your New Year's resolutions -- you know, lose some weight, quit drinking beer for breakfast, stop throwing rocks at schoolchildren, etc.

But forget all that. You only need to resolve to do one thing: check out some of these up-and-coming Vegas acts who are poised to make some noise in '08. These are the artists you need to keep an eye on in the coming months:

Red Sparrow: He quotes French artist/poet André Breton, and true to that father of surrealism, Max Supera infuses his works with all the unlikely tangents and juxtapositions that the movement was posited upon.

Supera's a scene fixture who's played with such local notables as The Corlene Machine, and as a solo artist, he alternates willowy acoustic ruminations with spectral campfire tunes. His voice is soft, delicate but sturdy, like spider's silk. It haunts his songs, which are spare yet textured, with tendrils of piano, guitar and harmonica ricocheting through the mix like pretty bullets aimed at your sense of well-being.

Captivity: They describe their sound as "Chewbacca dropping a deuce," and Captivity's plasma-coated death metal is suitably gnarly, raw and festering, like an infected wound.

Laying off the blast beats in favor of a midpaced rumble with plenty of huge, crushing breakdowns, these dudes' modernist grind pairs the requisite vocal vomits with chugging, gut-churning riffs that rumble by like a herd of elephants trudging through quicksand. It's some catchy stuff -- kind of like the bubonic plague.

Caravels: You can almost hear the polyps form on their frontman's vocal cords as Caravels' singer shrieks with the desperation of a dude trying to survive a grizzly bear attack.

The band's dusky, dramatic post-hard-core often starts on a tranquil note, with limber, understated guitars lines intertwining themselves around one another, before the calm is shattered with violent vocal outbursts that come on like a brick hurled through some beautiful stained glass window.

It's an exercise in restraint and release, think Hot Water Music set to a boil.

Se7en30: Hard times, harder rhymes. That's what you get with this rugged MC with a voice as deep as his struggles.

"I know I ain't livin' for nothin' " he growls on "Up," a song about struggling to make it while raising a 6-year-old daughter.

Se7en30's working class hip-hop is by turns grave and affecting, a hooky, hard-eyed study in existential angst set against a backdrop of old school soul samples and stabs of funk guitar.

"What am I here for?" he later asks on "Up," and the answer's a simple one: to make more moving, menacing tracks like this one.

Jason Bracelin's "Sounding Off" column appears on Tuesdays. Contact him at 383-0476 or e-mail him at jbracelin@ reviewjournal.com.