I was listening the Little Steven's Underground Garage the other evening. You gotta love any DJ who would follow Dion singing "Donna the Prima Donna" with a song by the Donnas. The show is a fun mix of modern garage rock, obscure tracks by famous artists and songs that just don't get played on the radio very often any more. In other words, it is music selected by a person with eclectic taste, not by a market research consulting firm.

One regular feature of the show is the "coolest song in the world this week." Introducing a track by Finland's Flaming Sideburns, he commented that finding songs is easy nowadays but would have been difficult just two years ago, when it felt like rock was dead. The resurgence in good new rock bands hit me, but I felt the previous dearth on other ways. I spent several years lamenting my inability to find good young bands. Most concerts I was attending were by artists I'd been following for years. Even my newer discoveries were musicians around my age, like Moby and New Bomb Turks. So it's been refreshing in the last year or so to find great bands still in the throes of youth - the Hives, the Mooney Suzuki, Interpol. I'd been a fan of Ash since their 1995 debut but went about six years without hearing or seeing them; they bounced back with Free All Angels, and they're still in their mid-20s. The music industry may be struggling, but the young talent is still there.