Adam "Doseone" Drucker has hinted at a more pop-friendly direction for his anticon.-and-pals trans-genre supergroup Subtle, but times are just about mixed-up enough for pop-skewing indie (and vice-versa) that such a declaration could mean just about anything. If you don't feel entirely comfortable creating a "???" genre tag in your MP3 collection, you might want to designate "Unlikely Rock Shock" as "electro," even if its percussion is straight-up live drumming: there's a half-acid synth wobble that takes up most of the bassline duties, and the hook for this is all short, sharp party-rock chants that sound just about ready to be fed into a vocoder. It could also fall under the indie rap rubric; Doseone's mosquito-buzz voice delivers the first verse in this low, fast-rap grumble that sounds a bit like Lyrics Born though clenched teeth. Then again, you might as well tag it with the same thing you tag your Gnarls Barkley MP3s with, since Doseone eventually slips back into that familiar hallucinogenic Cee-lo wheeze of his, and with a dance groove as insistent as this behind him it's never sounded more radio-ready.

MP3:> Subtle: "Unlikely Rock Shock"
[from ExitingARM; due 05/13/08 from Lex]

Whenever I think of Jason Forrest aka DJ Donna Summer my mind immediately goes to "10 Amazing Years", the closing track of his 2004 album on Sonig The Unrelenting Songs of the 1979 Post Disco Crash. It's one of my 30 or so favorite tracks of this decade, and probably my favorite mash-up/remix/collage-type thingy of all time. Forrest combined the Who, the Beatles, Van Halen, and a few others into a pounding anthem that served as a monument to the joy of listening. Forrest is a busy guy and he's released plenty of music under his own name and his Donna Summer alias since; he also runs the Cock Rock Disco label and issues a steady stream of unauthorized sugar-overload remixes just for fun, like this one. There have been dance remixes of this track before (and hey, in some bars people used to dance to the album cut, believe it or not), but Forrest puts his own stamp on it, and kinda makes you wish Axl would look him up for remix help on Chinese Democracy.

MP3:> DJ Donna Summer: "Sweet Assed Child O Mine"

A brilliant performance of "Patty Lee" last night on Conan. (video from RedLasso, via Stereogum)

[original track from Let's Stay Friends; out now on Frenchkiss]

In 2004, the Swedish d-beat pioneers Disfear first touched down on American soil. Since their inception, in 1992, they'd lost one vocalist, Jeppe Lerjerud, and gained another, At the Gates' Tomas Lindberg. When they arrived in Philadelphia for the Pointless Fest that was their stateside debut, the American scene they'd helped spawn was waiting. As the quintet (bulked up by the new addition of Entombed's Uffe Cederlund) looked on, the bands who'd worshiped them from afar-- Tragedy, Kylesa, Artimus Pyle, even their countrymen Victims-- paid tribute.

Four years later, Disfear have taken the American adoration to heart. Live the Storm, their first release since 2003's Misanthropic Generation, was recorded in Massachusetts, by Converge's Kurt Ballou, and sounds it-- it's louder than anything they've done before. The quintet haven't strayed from the Discharge worship of their past, but they've added a few things as well. On "Get It Off", melodic leads mix with Motorhead-large riffs, gangs of furious Swedes sing backup on the choruses, and Linberg sounds ready to lead a mob. As he told Decibel in November: "I try to look at it all like it's still just hardcore rather than just defining a genre from a drumbeat...Then again, we have Disfear t-shirts that say 'Defenders of the D-beat,' so we're probably guilty of that as well."

"I feel like Psychocandy is the last significant event in pop music production," the Magnetic Fields' Stephin Merritt told The New York Times recently. "It's the last album that sounded shockingly new, to me anyway." Although that statement woefully overlooks huge advances in genres from hip-hop to electronic and experimental music, while also seriously underrating the best achievements in pop and rock over the past couple of decades, it's an understandable way for someone like Merritt to feel. Particularly in an era of overtly Jesus and Mary Chain-influenced noise-poppers from New York's A Place to Bury Strangers to Leeds, England's the Manhattan Love Suicides. Fronted by singer Caroline McChrystal, the latter quartet emphasized the tender vulnerability cocooned within the JAMC's violent feedback barrage on their 2006 self-titled debut and last year's sadly underrated Kick It Back 7" EP, both on Portland-based Magic Marker.

The squealing clamor of Psychocandy or follow-up Automatic continues to crash into the Manhattan Love Suicides' C86-tinged melodic sweetness on "Heat and Panic", from the group's forthcoming Clusterfuck 7" EP on Leeds' own Squirrel Records. Now that such noise no longer shocks us, it works, as Pitchfork's Jason Crock wrote of Ohio rockers Times New Viking's fuzzed-out production, "like a security blanket-- a way of creating not just a distinctive sound, but of putting up an awning of safety over them and their listeners." Considering the sugary bubblegum lyrics and McChrystal's girlish twee-pop vocals peeking out from amid all that gorgeous racket, it's a kind of safety that suits the Manhattan Love Suicides well once again here. And that's not a distortion.

Stream:> The Manhattan Love Suicides: "Heat and Panic"
[from the Clusterfuck 7" EP; due in late February on Squirrel]

The Cribs have needs, men have needs, women have needs, whatever. Let's be realistic here. The video for the UK band's "I'm a Realist", off of last year's Men's Needs, Women's Needs, Whatever, suggests that men and women both need to spend plenty of time in various states of undress. "I'm a realist/ I'm a romantic," frontman Ryan Jarman sings, as a boy lip-syncs the first part and the girl lip-syncs the second, in split-screen. The two have a date tonight, you see: "2 tickets 4 the Cribs tonight." The song itself is an energetic buzzsaw rocker of the kind English bands have been churning out since the Libertines, although its playful examination of gender relations is a bit of a twist. The narrator will be leaving town soon; surely at least one gender in the clip is hoping the other one's needs don't include keeping pants on. See, there is modern romance.

"Free Not Free" is the first single from Do It, the fifth album from the Liverpool-based Clinic. As heard here in the song's video, singer Ade Blackburn androgynously lisps his way through the tune, in full-on chanteuse mode, and the arrangement-- ride cymbal, bongos, tremolo'd guitar, flute-- sounds like a John Barry composition for a scene set in a cabaret. The clip, directed by Nick Brown, mirrors the slinky, swinging feel of 1960s pop, as the band performs in a room streaked with trippy psychedelic lighting, projections of colorful fish swimming around on the walls. Inside it all, there's Clinic, in their trademark surgical masks, grooving away. "Free Not Free" is available for free download starting tomorrow, Februrary 1.

[from Do It! due 04/08/08 from Domino]

New Orleans' duo Belong, whose underrated drone opus October Language we Recommended back in 2006, are returning with new material this year-- two EPs and another full-length on Carpark are said to be in the pipeline. This track comes from one of the EPs, Colorloss Record, a limited-edition vinyl record that contains four covers (more or less) done in Belong's richly textured, minutely detailed style. Some of the tracks are "covers" only in a more distant sense, like, say, Fennesz' version of "Paint It Black", referring to and gazing upon the song in question more than playing it. But here you can hear the ghost of Syd Barrett's song clearly beneath the fuzzed-out din (though Belong say they're actually covering a version by early-1980s psych outfit Cleaners from Venus). As a thick wave of distortion both muscular and delicate sketches out the chords, you can hear a disembodied voice singing the tune, coming like a crackling transmission through a Heathkit Shortwave's circuitry.

MP3:> Belong: "Late Night"
[from Colorloss Record; due 02/19/08 from St. Ives]

The racket coming out kids' bedrooms changes, but there will probably always be songs about having, as the Beach Boys put it, "a world where I can go and tell my secrets to." On "I'm Very Scared Buster, Yes At Last", Oxford, UK-based George Pringle gives a dramatic monologue about everyday youthful lovesickness over digital beats, wordless backing vocals, and a spare bass line provided by an iBook G4 she's named Truman. "I'm off to hibernate," she sings in between spoken-word verses, and it's easy to picture her heading up to her room to LiveJournal her weekend, messing around on GarageBand and fighting an awful cold. The typewriter sound effects seem anachronistic.

Pringle's lyrics are strikingly detailed, mostly avoiding the common melodramatic pitfalls. Pringle conveys her malaise through descriptions of everything but the boy (though she does mention males' "hearts of stone"): the wind gripping her neck, the scratchiness of her throat from cigarettes, the sun hitting panes of glass on a beautiful Sunday. She ends by naming off the items she sees around her, as the computerized cymbals grow glitchier and more frenzied: "Iron, book, remote control/ Hope I die before I get old/ Jumper, CD, glasses case/ I haven't got a heart to break," Pringle repeats. Meet the new kids, same as the old kids. In their rooms causing a different commotion. (via RCRD LBL)

Stream/MP3:> George Pringle: "I'm Very Scared Buster, Yes At Last"
[from the Poor EP, Poor EP Without a Name... EP; due to be self-released in February]