"If you grew up with whiteboys who only look at black and Puerto Rican porno/ 'cause they want something that their dad don't got/ Then you know where you're at." It's a startling first line, and much of the ensuing verbiage on this glimpse at the upcoming Why? record Alopecia (also included on the "The Hollows" 12") is almost as provocative -- though in a more personal sense, with Yoni Wolf muttering cocky confessionals: "Blowin' kisses to disinterested bitches/ Playin' lead lay in a bad way on Broadway/ Sending sexy instant messages to my ex's new man/ 'cause I can." It all has the feel of a dawn-break post-sex-and-booze-addled comedown, and Boards of Canada remix this into even slyer territory-- they've been known to drone away at hypnotic downtempo funk before (see: "Aquarius"), but nothing on Music Has the Right to Children, much less The Campfire Headphase, would prepare fans for a slow-ride beat that sounds like it could've come off a UGK record. (At least until the psychedelic pow-wow/drumline percussion kicks in.)

The youthful East Bay hip-hop crew has traded in their Vans for tricked-out wheels. Beyond cars, we're talking girls, money, and outer space. (Via Subterranean) 

[from Based Boys; out now on Jive/Zomba]

For the remix, the DFA's Tim Goldsworthy's "Loving Hand" had an abundance of source material to rifle through, considering the Maps' original: a richly-produced, lump-in-the-throat lament packed with chimes, arpeggios, and tightly woven harmonies generously dipped in a caramelized batter of reverb. Non-essential flourishes are Maps soundsmith James Chapman's first language, and for his original piece, they serve to render fullness and pop out of a bitter take on unanswered prayers, and that vanquished sense of self called regret.

Goldsworthy, on the other loving hand, explores that emptiness by taking a scalpel to the record, dissecting its melodies over his sterile boilerplate beat. The gossamer textures and oozing sentimentalism are detached in the process, but that's just how the DFA do surgery: numb the pain, poke the wound. His approach rubs a particularly soft nerve when the subject matter is loss, and the mix pays off as it evolves. Chapman's syrupy vocals ride in in for barely three minutes out of nine. Meanwhile, the melody shifts to a plump sub-bass pattern, as the record gathers moss towards a sonically crass, yet transparent, unassuming, and above all wordless finale: a rolling tour through Nile Rodgers' neighborhood.

Indie-pop has entered its soft-rock phase, and... it sounds pretty good. Dylan Mondegreen is Norwegian singer and songwriter Børge Sildnes, whose debut album, the all-analog While I Walk You Home, just came out last month on Division. Mondegreen's current single, "Girl in Grass", should give you a good sense of what he's up to, a sound somewhere between the bedsit strums of the Lucksmiths or the Field Mice and the syrupier softness of 1970s AM staples like Bread. Nor are the results far off from the sighing pop of Swedish contemporaries the Honeydrips, whose "Fall From a Height (The Field Way)" we previously put on repeat.

In the video, a neatly-attired Sildnes can be seen picking out clean, slightly jazzy figures on a sleek Telecaster. It's a sunny day, he's standing in front of a tree, and his friends are sitting behind him. If any of this exacerbates your fall allergies, well, you still might find "Girl in the Grass" an unassuming pleasure-- and we haven't even told you yet about the dripping strings, acoustic jangle, bubblegum melody, or, shit yeah, saxophone solo. "You want your heart to break/ To feel the sweetest ache," Sildnes coos gently enough to make Sam Beam sound like a shouter, as the backdrop shifts toward night and then Halloween festivities. It all makes for an ode to beauty that isn't afraid to eschew ugliness altogether.

[from While I Walk You Home; out now on Division]

This Sunday, Oct. 28, from 7 to 8 p.m. EDT, Sufjan Stevens will premiere parts of his orchestral work "The BQE" on David Garland's radio show "Spinning on Air". You can listen online at WNYC. Garland recently filmed a run-through of the piece in WNYC's studio and posted an excerpt to YouTube. Sufjan plays piano, and this offers an early chance to hear what the piece sounds like. As Pitchfork news reported in May, the live premiere of the full piece is set for Nov. 1, at the Brooklyn Academy of Music's Next Wave festival.

Halloween is next week. Which reminds me that I need to start thinking about a costume and make some plans. I might hang out with my friend Glenn, who is probably going to dress up as Cher, like he does every Wednesday. We'll see. In the spirit of the season, Enon's new video, directed by David Yoonha Park, for Grass Geysers...Carbon Clouds' "Mr. Ratatatatat", takes place at a Halloween party. Bassist Toko Yasuda, who sings lead on this track, dresses up as a nun. John Schmersal, who sings the choruses, sometimes does so while wearing plastic fangs, which is really difficult. Everyone looks like they're having fun, but then it turns out that this isn't your average Halloween party. A gun is drawn, shots are fired, and all hell breaks loose. Maybe I'll just stay in this year.

Last week the Hold Steady played live for KEXP's podcast. The set list included "Stuck Between Stations", "Massive Nights", "Chips Ahoy!", Separation Sunday's "Your Little Hoodrat Friend", and "You Can Make Him Like You", and there's also some interview chit-chat (but not too much). The set sounds awesome-- I know it had me heading over to the shelf looking for Boys and Girls in America. A new album is coming in the spring or summer of 2008, Craig Finn says at the end of the segment.

MP3:> The Hold Steady: Live on KEXP
[Boys and Girls in America is out now on Vagrant]

The Rapture single "The Sound", which has apparently been heard out in a few DJ sets via CD-R this year, is being issued as a 12" next month on the band's label Throne of Blood, with two remixes. One of these is by Ben Trucker (aka Ben Rymer) of UK duo Gucci Soundsystem, from whom we heard most recently via their remix of LCD Soundsystem's "Time to Get Away", which found its way to the A Bunch of Stuff EP. The original version of "The Sound" is quintessential Rapture dance-punk, driven by stuttering drums, laser-beam synths, surges of guitar, and shouty vocals. Ben Trucker sands off the song's edges and climbs aboard for a smooth ride on Moroder's Midnight Express. We don't hear much identifiable from the band until almost four minutes in, at which point they pop in and their rockier approach is melded pretty seamlessly with the pulsating synths.

We're hitting diminishing returns with the Múm videos. "They Made Frogs Smoke 'Til They Exploded" did a nice job of bringing out the creepiness in the band's childlike outlook, but "Rhubarbidoo" just sort of slides past. It's an odd track to pull from the album and present separately-- it really feels more like a sketch, an interlude, meant to bridge two more complete tracks. The animation is cool, and I'm always up for a story about a family of tubers, but two minutes in, just as you're getting settled, the video ends. Directed by Overture.

Brett Gladstone wrote about this song from Dublin songwriter Richie Egan extensively back in April, when we posted an mp3 and a stream. It is being included on a new EP due next month, and here is the accompanying video. A strange and oddly compelling clip, it finds Egan being pelted with various foodstuffs in slow motion, which turns out to be the sort of thing you could watch for a long time without getting bored.

Lars Finberg plays drums and sings for Seattle noisemakers A-Frames, who released 2005's Black Forest on Sub Pop. For a few years now, Finberg has also headed up a second band, the Intelligence, whose third album, Deuteronomy, just saw release on In the Red. The new effort is the Intelligence's first with an outside producer, Mike McHugh, though with Finberg now playing all the instruments, he can't be said to have cleaned up (or dumbed down) his lo-fi ruckus.

The Intelligence have opened for the Fall, and Mark E. Smith's scruffy inscrutability is likely an influence here. But Deuteronomy's "Secret Signs" also shows some of the arty garage-punk sensibilities of Atlanta Good Bad Not Evil guys Black Lips. Fuzzed-out guitars yak back and forth between speakers, barely letting Finberg's distorted vocals get a word in edgewise over clanging drums, while an alienated variation on ? and the Mysterians organ lurks elsewhere in the mix. So of course Finberg sings something about a "favorite blanket." Damn, rest in peace, Charles Schulz.

MP3:> The Intelligence: "Secret Signals"
[from Deuteronomy; out now on In the Red]

Hell on Wheels are only just now making their way from Stockholm to the U.S., first with their third album, last year's The Odd Church, and now with this new track from Darla Records' Little Darla Has a Treat For You Vol. 25: Endless Summer 2007-08. All the elements that made The Odd Church swoop and dive like a rollercoaster-- and garnered all those Pixies comparisons-- are abundant in these three compressed minutes: As Johan Risberg taps out a rim-shot beat as steady as water torture, Rickard Lindgren sings the verse soft and nervous, and Åsa Sohlgren comes in to kick him in the shins. Their voices-- his sour, hers sweet-- blend together in an uneasy, almost antagonistic harmony that rides the addled shimmy-shake in their guitar-bass-drums din: It is, as Lindgren sings, "the sound of a mind completely obsessed."