Head of Femur's pop-prog approach is alive and well on "Leader and the Falcon", a mini-suite that changes gears a couple of times in its four and a half minutes. There are plenty of bleeping keyboards and chorused lead guitar parts and more stacked vocals harmonies than ever before. In fact, it opens with a big bed of harmonies and a twinkly little Bruce Springsteen piano part before it jumps into its riff-stuffed first section. The song's most exciting passage is the sudden tempo change in the middle that precedes a gradual acceleration to a guitar-drenched bridge. It's stuffed full of instruments from front to back, but it's not overbearing or bloated, just fat and happy.

It'd be more convenient if all music was exactly suited for the technology of the time, and today's recordings sounded best on shitty laptop speakers the way Motown was perfect for AM radio. Things are already stupidly convenient nowadays, though, with our iPods, iPhones, and flying iCars-- so take time just this once to plug in your headphones (or, jeebus, a decent stereo) for Brooklyn three-piece A Place to Bury Strangers. Singer/guitarist Oliver Ackermann makes his own effects pedals, and good gawd. You'll want your eardrums to get the shit kicked out of them at full force.

Plenty of bands have borrowed from shoegaze's poppier side, but even Ackermann's previous group, Virginia's unjustly neglected Skywave, were more interested in the head-bleeding distortion of My Bloody Valentine's famed live shows. Opening with jackhammering "Only Shallow" beats, "To Fix the Gash in Your Head" soon lashes out like a wounded jungle animal, its guitar textures wild-eyed, feral, and razor-sharp. The songwriting meets and surpasses the high standard of Skywave's Synthstatic; in a moody, industrial-stamped monotone, Ackermann explains that in order to fix that nasty gash, he's gonna wait till your back is turned, then "kick your face in." The production is just that physical, and pretty much gorgeous. If you feel a migraine coming on...buy earplugs.

José González must seem like a mellow guy or something, because all the sudden he's not the only wordsmith with a video featuring a pig-man. Recent San Francisco transplant Aesop Rock dons a pig hat himself in this clip for "None Shall Pass", the title track of the rapper's latest album. Made with San Francisco illustrator Jeremy Fish and local design team Ordinary Kids, the video is full of animated people in animal hats walking around in a collage city as a heart with wings flies overhead. "All the animals have to travel through the city to arrive at the human heart to be judged," Aesop told the folks over at MTV's Subterranean blog in an interview. The characters receive either flowers or stones depending on the final verdict. On the track, Aesop raps over a rotating synth loop as spoken-word samples interrupt, "I'm trying to help."

[from None Shall Pass; due 08/28/07 on Def Jux]

Polly Jean Harvey returns this fall with the follow-up to 2004's Uh Huh Her, new album White Chalk. She whetted our appetites last year with her quite good The Peel Sessions: 1991-2004 compilation, and now she's giving us a taste of what she's been up to in the meantme. "When Under Ether", an early stream from White Chalk, shows a new focus on fragile piano rather than guitar, singing at a high, girlish pitch about lying undressed on the bed and looking at the ceiling. "Human kindness," she sighs, and then turns toward "the woman beside" her.

Stream:> PJ Harvey: "When Under Ether"
[from White Chalk; due 09/25/07 on Island]

Guy in a tux meets the astronaut lady. We love the snare sound and also have a soft spot for the falsetto vocals, which stretch behind the track like a sheer red curtain. Sorta like the one Lily stands in front of toward the end.

It was Kanye West's DJ, Montreal-based turntable maestro A-Trak, who introduced the Louis Vuitton don to Daft Punk's "Harder, Better, Faster, Stronger". West leans heavily on the track as robotic source material for Graduation lead single "Stronger", working in his recent hypeman mode between verses positing women as interchangeable and West as quite possibly God's gift to them. "Baby, you're making it..." Kanye starts the chorus, as Daft Punk finish, "...harder, better, faster, stronger." Ask the dudes from SuperBad to explain that to you.

West has made a point in this album's press push of trying to establish himself as an MC; he initially said Graduation wouldn't include guest rappers, and more recently traded verses with the "best rapper alive" himself, Lil' Wayne. But A-Trak's remix uses West mostly as a source of spoken-word hooks, looping his most memorable exhortations and chopping up Daft Punk's vocoded vocals while leaving most of the verses on the cutting-room floor. The result is part the talk-box electrofunk of A-Trak bro Chromeo, and another part the room-shaking filter-disco of Justice, without any awkward references to "blond dyke[s]". In West's words, "Me likey." A lot.

A-Trak explains further: "I played Daft Punk to Kanye about two years ago for the first time. And he always said he wanted to flip 'Harder Better'. I was skeptical of the idea at first. But he sent me the beat when he first made it and I thought it was crazy. Then it took a few months for him to come up with all the vocals. And while I was working on recording scratches for the track he told me he wanted me to remix it too. Fast-forward to now, the remix is done and he's really behind it. They're still working out how they're going to release it (probably something on iTunes), so in the meantime we decided to leak it."

Josh Wink's mid-1990s acid-house hit "Higher State of Consciousness" has come back into focus a bit this year with the release of a new Dirty South & TV Rock remix. The UK's affair with the "nu rave" of the Klaxons and others probably hasn't hurt, either. ZZT's "original Munich version" of 2007 single "Lower State of Consciousness" could be heard as a schizophrenic, midtempo rejoinder to Wink's watershed track. ZZT is actually a collaboration between Munich-based DJ Florian Senfte's Zombie Nation and Canadian DJ Tiga, who give the track schizophrenic details you might expect from Japan's Cornelius. Emphasis is liable to shift from video-game bleeps to brawny bass to choir-like oohs with each passing beat.

Did we say "brawny"? You probably know by now what to expect from French duo Justice, the machine-men behind this year's Best New Music-ified †. Their "Lower State of Consciousness" remix rearranges the original's air-raid sirens and fax-machine squeaks, distorts them to head-banging force, and makes sure when the beat hits it feels like a kick to the head. Nor are Justice shy about cutting out the 4x4 stomp or sending the synths to another room for a while to let the track build properly to its frenzied conclusion. Once again, they've taken an interesting studio exercise and converted it into a dancefloor anthem. Do the dance? Don't mind if we do.

[from the "Lower State of Consciousness" 12"; out now on Turbo]

Especially if your first class isn't until 1 p.m. and you have Fridays off, one thing a college student probably doesn't need to study up on is the importance of some quality Z's. So New York University student filmmaker Antonio Campo was probably well prepared to direct the video for the Shins' "Sleeping Lessons", culled from this year's Wincing the Night Away and now premiering over at MTVu. Campo shows us a young woman who paints the cityscape and eventually manages to control the city lights, which twinkle along with the arpeggios and shuffling electric guitars. One piece of advice from the Shins, incoming freshmen: "You're not obliged to swallow anything you despise." But it's good to keep an open mind.

Video:> The Shins: "Sleeping Lessons"
[from Wincing the Night Away; out now on Sub Pop]

HBO viewers may already be familiar with the partiers, horndogs, and lonely hearts of the cable network's "Taxicab Confessions". The premise seems to be that people, especially drunk people, will tell almost anything to their cabbie. London's "The Black Cab Sessions" transposes that logic to musicians, getting intimate performances out of such artists as Daniel Johnston and, here, Smog's Bill Callahan-- live, from the back seat. Callahan gives a spare rendition of Smog classic "River Guard", from 1999's Knock Knock. As the driver dodges bicyclists and double-decker buses, Callahan serves out prison metaphors in this stately ballad about a guard's observations when he takes the inmates to the water. "Every breath is death-defying," Callahan intones in his rich baritone. His acoustic strums refuse to keep pace with traffic.

[from Knock Knock; out now on Drag City]

A new compilation is coming. It's called Minicomp 2. The songs are very short. Pitchfork's Dave Maher says so. Short songs? Sweet. Bonde Do Role's new song? Short and sweet.

"Montagem do Cabra" has beats. They're electro-funky. Marina Ribatski stutter-sings. She sounds cheerleader-punky. Pete and Repeat were in a boat. Pete fell out. Who was left?

MP3:> Bonde Do Role: "Montagem Do Cabra"
[from Minicomp 2; due next month on Sneakmove]

Few gestures are as reliably condescending as a Real Artist copping to pop music. In 2007, of course, this isn't a problem; not touting the aesthetic validity of, say, r&b is as gauche as it might've been 15 years ago to even consider it anything more than cheap vaudeville (before cultural studies programs enshrined cheap vaudeville). David Byrne talked doe-eyed about how neat Texas was; "Blue" Gene Tyranny actually lived there. Out of the Blue, originally from 1977 and reissued this year, never looks down its nose at pop, which actually makes it hilarious and revelatory-- Tyranny sounds like a foreign traveler who, not knowing the language properly, manages to do things with grammar and syntax a native speaker couldn't. The album's "The Next Time Might Be Your Time"-- I will spare the b.s. about how it could be a single from another planet, etc.-- is an orgy of weird ideas about what can and can't belong: a mix of light country swing, Eno-esque guitars, and peepshow sax; aloof stoner chatter like "What would the world be like when we see each other clear of all circumstance?" crammed into verse structure like bulbous taxidermy; and a long outro where everything speeds up, swirling into a twilight of poppin' bassoons and reggae stick guitar. Some might call it "proggy" until they realize, hell, it's just a tic leftover from Phil Spector's audio soap operas, remembering a time when feelings were Basic, Plenty, and Important, but not necessarily ground down to a formula or held with tongs.

[From Out of the Blue; out now on Unseen Worlds]

Matthew Houck, the Brooklynite behind Phosphorescent, is a rootsy singer-songwriter with a gothic sensibility and a way with a tune. But he also demonstrates an interest in pure sound. Stately countrified weepers dominated his 2005 album Aw Come Aw Wry, as dry production emphasized the Will Oldhamesque cracks in his voice. But then there were tracks like "Endless Pt. 2", which added Beach Boys-style harmonies and toyed with the structural conventions of song.

These latter inclinations move to the fore on his forthcoming Pride, his third full-length and first for the Dead Oceans label. Although a few tracks like "Cocaine Lights" proceed in a more orderly verse/chorus fashion, elsewhere Houck shows a pronounced bent for the abstract and ethereal. He's got that wild mercury sound working beautifully here on album opener "A Picture of Our Torn Up Praise", with its spaciousness, delicate, intertwining strands of voice, and general sense of looseness and possibility. "I'll be in the yard still taking pictures in the dark," he sings, his tone sounding like he's conversing with a ghost, and then the music cuts out and percussion drifts away slowly like chains clattering down the hall.