The Sea and Cake has never been too dedicated to any one concept. Fundamentally, the Chicago four-piece could cozily fit into your average Indie Rock festival, but the group’s not really interested in sticking to an aesthetic palatable for just that one subculture.   

 For musicians interested in showmanship and persona building, self-awareness and humility are rare commodities. John O'Regan — the glammed-up, Kraftwerk-adoring Toronto resident behind Diamond Rings — is a refreshing exception to this rule.   

Post Rock Brooklyn quartet Bear Hand's sense of humor is bannered up front with their name and extends through their playfully weird lyrical content, which often addresses serious subjects from a skewed perspective (or vice versa).   

When I told a friend via cell phone that a band called A Lull was about to take the stage at the recently completed Pitchfork Music Festival his response was, “A what?” Possibly uninspired moniker aside, Chicago’s A Lull went on to deliver a dynamic, percussively driven set that drew heavily from the band’s 2011 full-length, Confetti, and this year’s EP, Meat Mountain.  

If you’re looking to dust off your dancing Keds or run a diagnostic test on your pacemaker or combine your aerobic activities with your club regimen, Izzy and the Catastrophics, the pride of Brooklyn, N.Y., should be your soundtrack of choice.   

On their first three albums together, Grace Potter & the Nocturnals impressively balanced influences from four decades ago with a bluesy Rock ethic as fresh as an indie blog posting. On The Lion The Beast The Beat, the quintet amazingly expand their genre parameters without losing the blistering essence of its Blues/Soul/Rock core.   

Long before Jack and Meg White made it fashionable, Scott Lucas and Joe Daniels made serious waves as Indie Rock duo Local H. Anything’s possible at a Local H show; tickets for their 2007 morning gig at Cellular Field were available only by finding Lucas on the street and addressing him, “Attention all planets of the Solar Federation, we have assumed control.” The countdown is on.  

Baltimore Noise Punk foursome Dope Body introduced itself to the Indie Rock world with the donkey punch that was last year’s Nupping, the band’s first full-length. A chaotic barrage of guitar harmonics, muscular drum/bass pummeling and howling vocals combine in Dope Body’s assault.   

 What happens when you put two of Dayton, Ohio’s best music writers in a band together? Turns out, you get Smug Brothers, a highly melodic lo-to-mid-fi Indie Rock band with great songs and more than one connection to the city’s godfathers of Indie, Guided By Voices.   

 For this band who self-identifies as “Coincidence Pop” (the frontman once explained his music as “really just a combination of fuck-ups that coincidentally sounds pleasant”), things are coming together.