R. Kelly isn't the only performer comparing himself to a modern-day Muhammad Ali. Common intends to compete for the honor through the final round, as the video for "The Game", from his forthcoming Finding Forever, reminds us. "I never kissed the ass of the masses," the Chicago rapper asserts with an intense but steady flow. "They tried to box me in like Cassius/ Clay, hey, I'm like Muhammad when he fasted/ Opposing the fascists."

Produced again by Kanye West-- whom Common calls "the new Primo" on Finding Forever's "The People"-- "The Game" also features scratching from the old Primo, DJ Premier. First in front of the mirror, then in the tunnel from the locker room, and finally on a small club stage, Common promises he "ain't fazed by fame." The hook: Like lotto, "You gotta be in it to win it." Pow.

[from Finding Forever; due 07/10/07 on Geffen]

Jay-Z closed out last year in a surprising (and lackluster) union with longtime rival Nas, but 2007 has so far been without a Big Rap Moment. If on Lil Wayne-less days it looks as if Nas might've been right, then no longer. Texas rap gods UGK hook up with Atlanta rap gods Outkast for "International Player's Anthem", the single from the forthcoming UGK: Underground Kingz album, finally (supposedly) out July 17. The track's been circling the internet for what I'd rather not say has "been a minute," but the just-released video makes it feel like an event.

A wedding, to be precise. I guess the horn-luxuriant sample of Willie Hutch's "I Choose You" should've tipped us off. Keeping up his recent string of strong guest appearances, a kilt-clad Andre 3000 (he's got Scottish in his family) is prepared to give away all this pussycat in his lap for the love of the right woman. But Dre's best man isn't the only one yelling, "Too soon, too soon." It's an impressive return, both for UGK's Bun B and Pimp C-- two veterans on top of their game-- and for Outkast, who can now say the same despite their Idlewild indulgences. One of the best videos of the year? Let's get hitched.

[from UGK: Underground Kingz; due 7/17/07 on Jive]

The new album by erstwhile "Swedish Strokes" Shout Out Louds, entitled Our Ill Wills, comes out this fall on Merge. If first single "Tonight I Have to Leave It" is any indication, Capitol execs will soon have yet another reason to curse budget troubles (and of course, those no-good downloaders!). Produced by Peter Bjorn & John's Bjorn Yittling, the track hopes for real love from the perspective of leaving it behind. Singer/guitarist Adam Olenius declaims his thwarted passions like a Swedish Robert Smith, going "oh-oh, oh-oh" atop cheery acoustic guitar, piano, and the kind of percussion Kanye West might decide to slaughter on his next mixtape. The video, directed Tom and Ted Malmros for Oktanfilm 2007, follows a young man's voyage at sea.

At least as good as the single is this remix by Stockholm-based Andreas Kleerup, whose "With Every Heartbeat" (ft. Robyn) set many a frosty Pitchfork heart aflame last winter. Kleerup keeps the bells but swaps the violins for clipped bleeps and silly-putty synth runs. The extra space Kleerup gives the tune, particularly on the chorus, leaves Shout Out Louds' loveless and -lorn protagonist sounding still more unfulfilled. "It feels so much better now that it's done," Olenius sings resignedly.

[from the Tonight I Have to Leave It EP and Ill Wills LP; due 6/5/07 and 9/11/07, respectively, on Merge]

Sure, Spoon have had brushes with mega-stardom before, but if any song is gonna catapult them to the big time, it's this one. Produced by Jon Brion, "The Underdog" is the exuberant centerpiece of Ga Ga Ga Ga Ga, a celebration of strutting horns and handclaps begging for one of those videos where the band is playing while walking down the street, and before they know it, a whole parade is behind them. 2007, meet your "Float On".

MP3: > Spoon: "The Underdog"
[from Ga Ga Ga Ga Ga; due July 10 on Merge] [Pre-Order]

There's no sex in America's "Sick Sick Sick" video. Just Queens of the Stone Age rocking a thrashy highlight from their forthcoming Era Vulgaris, and a woman overeating to the point of yuck. But Germans have been seeing a different video for the song, and now those of us stateside can watch it, too.

Directed by Liam Lynch, who also helmed the first "Sick Sick Sick" video, this clip shows Wendy Rae Fowler (who also appeared in QOTSA's Lynch-directed "Burn the Witch" video) dancing with only a leather jacket and nipple-covering bits of tape to cover her torso. Josh Homme, the Palm Desert, Calif. band's frontman, shouts away his ills ills ills against a flickering backdrop of city traffic. He's in color, Fowler's in B&W, and other figures dance around in garish neons. It's all a bit weird, but hardly "Sick Sick Sick". Unless you're the FCC, one imagines.

[from Era Vulgaris, out 06/12/07 on Interscope]

As sample manipulation goes, Odd Nosdam's music feels partly like the tinkerings of a shut-in who lives in a windowless basement apartment filled with electronic junk and partly like, say, Boards of Canada. Much of the Anticon fixture's previous work has approached BoC's efforts to extract beauty from color-faded debris, but he doesn't work as hard to scrub off the mildew, and the instruments in "The Kill Tone Two" sound like they're struggling to push through a half-inch layer of nicotine stains, dust, and radio interference: a harp is rendered tinny and rust-coated as it passes through what sounds like a Game Boy's sound chip, a low buzz drones in the background like a broken refrigerator before manifesting itself as an occasional bassline, and the beats all sound coated in stiff cellophane. The Anticon site also says there's supposed to be a violin on this track somewhere, but it's hard to tell where it is, exactly-- in all likelihood, it's been warped beyond recognition into one of those dying machine sounds. It all sounds a bit like an AM dial that's only halfway tuned into an actual station, with all the attendant desolation that implies.

There's voices, too, though they're disorienting in a more predictable way: Why?'s Yoni Wolf flatly mutters poetryish pseudo-nonsense about staring in the mirror and experiencing some kind of philosophical malaise or another ("Good luck is a dead duck"?), and Tunde Adebimpe's voice fights through the static just enough to register as another, slightly more tuneful layer of noise. The vocals almost seem superfluous, especially since Odd Nosdam's music works best when it sounds like there's nobody else around to experience it.

[From Level Live Wires; due 08/28/07 on Anticon]

"Recorded live in Lisbon," is becoming a familiar refrain with the odds and ends we've heard from Panda Bear's Noah Lennox this year. This particular excerpt from a 2004 show (the track runs 16 minutes in its full version) lays the man's sample-happy pop loop aesthetic bare, as he improvises a new melody worthy of Goffin and King over a captured fragment of Sam Cooke's "Chain Gang" and then slides into a booth next to Scott Walker to riff on a housed-up version of the ghostly epilogue from "Two Ragged Soldiers". The audacity in these appropriations is heartening, but even more exciting is the depth at which Lennox is listening to pop history, his obvious understanding of the mix and where he fits in it.

It's easy to imagine the Rapture (the Christian day of reckoning, not the band) sounding like a Wolf Eyes album. But the new indie-Christian vanguard-- Sufjan Stevens, Page France, et al.-- tend to cast it in softer tones: Gentle acoustic strums, sweeping strings, pliant horns, and breezy glockenspiels. This sweetness makes sense for those who'll be floating gracefully skyward; those of us left to thrash about in our rivers of blood might be forgiven for taking a less rosy view.

To this lineage we can now add Sweater Weather, who know their way around a gentle acoustic strum, and when they're thinking hard about their own lives, rather than contemplating the impending apocalyps. Cue "The Pains of Relocation", where simplistic youthful romanticism is at odds with the calamities of adulthood, foreshadowed here by the death of a friend's sister. Trela's voice climbs up and down a simple arpeggio as his bandmates push in intermittent embellishments: Dramatic, minimal percussion, booming bass accents, twinkles, twitters, and trills guide the song toward its emphatic climax, a non-denominational rapture of interfaith utility.

Good things sometimes come in fours. Celebrating the release of majestic fourth album Boxer, New York grower-rockers the National turned in a four-song set for AOL's Spinner blog. While they didn't read Pitchfork aloud, singer Matt Berninger and his Ohio chums did take time for an interview, discussing their album title, matrimonial cover art, and shift away from screaming on the new album. Counting the songs and the chat, then, I guess that means good things come in fives. Which shouldn't come as a surprise to fans who attended the National's, yup, five-night stand last week at New York's Bowery Ballroom. You guys could consider this an encore, without the weird quasi-suspense.

Video:> The National: "Mistaken for Strangers", "Apartment Story", "Slow Show", "Start a War", and interview

Sorry, Albuquerque. But if you live just about anyplace else, expect the White Stripes to be thumping ickily this year in a venue near you. In the meantime, the duo have gone on the UK TV show hosted by ex-Squeeze keyboardist Jools Holland to preview a couple of songs from their new album, Icky Thump (due June 19 in the U.S. on Third Man/Warner Bros.).

The title track remains a thunderous, Zep-minded rocker, with Meg White getting a deep, lumbering beat out of relatively simple drumming and Jack White telling pimps they can't also be prostitutes. Mid-tempo heartbreak song "Effect and Cause" modifies a 12-bar blues on an acoustic guitar, with Jack hollering new Stripes maxims-- "If you're headed to the grave, then you don't blame the hearse"-- where singers from Eddie Cochran to Alan Jackson would sing "Summertime Blues". Finally, Jack picks up bass and Holland takes the keys for a loose, lively rendition of "My Doorbell", from 2005's Get Behind Me Satan. They don't even make Jools find something red to wear.

The White Stripes: "Icky Thump"

The White Stripes: "Effect and Cause"

The White Stripes: "My Doorbell" [ft. Jools Holland]

It's Monday mornings like this when the harsh reality finally sinks in: We're not from Barcelona. Fuck. Guess that means we missed the Catalan capital's Primavera Sound Festival for another year. Grizzly Bear aren't from Barcelona, either, but the woodsy art-poppers were on hand as performers, alongside the likes of Battles, Sonic Youth, and the White Stripes, and they closed their set at the three-day fest with tambourine help from Beirut.

In this video from the performance, Grizzly Bear singer/guitarist Edward Droste leads the band through the lurching, harmony-laden introduction to "On a Neck, On a Spit", a highlight from last year's gorgeously constructed Yellow House. When his strums herald the song's uptempo second half, the crowd's renewed energy level can be measured in sights of bobbing heads and sounds of clapping hands. Thanks to reader Spyros Fotiou for the video and the tip. Does this mean we don't live in Glastonbury, either?

[originally from Yellow House; on Warp]

Aa's GAame comes with a DVD of videos and visualizations for the album. In March we featured the video for "Thirteen", which had footage from one of the band's renegade Brooklyn shows. "Walk Again" is far from the best track on GAame, but the video-- directed by Professor Murder singer Michael Bell-Smith-- improves it. Here pixel animations flicker and move with the track's vocal samples. "Walk Again" has no drums or instrumentation beyond the synth ticks and human shouts. GAame's rhythms made each song hypnotic, and the greyscale visuals pick up the slack here. The flashes are still vague though: road disappearing behind a car, a sphere rotating in space, stylized TV static? It's hard to tell.