Ponytail have gone and let their hair grow long. The Baltimore four-piece's 2006 debut, Kamehameha, used frothy, candied art-punk, with surf-splotched guitars and ricocheting drums, as a shiny playpen for vocalist Molly Sigel's improvisatory farm-animal ululations. As with a lot of what's been coming out of their city lately, that shit was weirdly compelling. "Celebrate the Body Electric (It Came from an Angel)"-- the lead single from Ponytail's forthcoming follow-up, Ice Cream Spiritual, for Baltimore imprint We*Are*Free-- stretches out the fun-fueled chaos to an epic seven minutes of crests, eddies, tsunamis, and hey wowie wow, even a few seconds of limpid tranquility. Giving a Deerhoof-like scissor kick to traditional song structure, the track jerks froms No Age's loose, trilling ambience to wiry, explosive bursts, with spaghetti Western backing vocals and Sigel chirping something like, "Awaywegonowawaywego!" There's calm eventually, too, as Sigel's rooster crow turns into a canary coo, but before long everything goes berserk again. It's all enough to make you believe in the spirituality of ice cream. Away we go to 31 flavors.

[from Ice Cream Spiritual; due 06/17/08 on We*Are*Free]

Amazing what you can overlook for a good riff. Neither junk mail band name, nor suspect new-rave associations, nor the execrably trendy haircuts the two (turns out, wrongly) conjured in my mind could keep me from latching onto the dumb slab of monotone guitar at the foundation of UK band Does It Offend You, Yeah?'s-- sorry, overlook this, too-- "With a Heavy Heart (I Regret to Inform You)", from the forthcoming You Have No Idea What You're Getting Yourself Into. There's also an equally rudimentary bass line, some handclaps, electronic screeches, sub-"House of Jealous Lovers" shouts, and other party favors, but that tangle of six-string distortion is the warm center of gravity that keeps the whole thing from shaking off into the electro-punk void-- tireless and insistent, the guitar takes on a vocoder-like touch in places, and turns up the volume to change the dancing into moshing in other places. There's a quick break where the track lunges into Klaxons-like harmonies, too, a direction I'd be interested in hearing explored more. "I loved her," the track begins, and then I stop noticing the actual words for a while, just the timbres and throat-scratching vocal tics. But when the track ends, any love still sounds pretty much past-tense. And the riff (spoiler alert!) collapses into feedback. That offends me, you bet, yeah.

MP3:> Does It Offend You, Yeah?: "With a Heavy Heart (I Regret to Inform You)"
[from You Have No Idea What You're Getting Yourself Into; due 04/15/08 on Almost Gold]

The second time-traveling video today from MTV's Subterranean blog is less flashy and a bit more futuristic than the MC Justin Timberlaked-out clip for Gnarls Barkley's "Run" a couple of hours ago. Del the formerly Funkee immerses himself in a studio that might as well be a space shuttle and plugs himself full of wires in the clip for "Workin' It", from his forthcoming The 11th Hour. Then he appears in a hat and shades like some kind of stylish old-style soul crooner, with a phonograph keeping the title phrase revolving. The track itself is a lot less adventurous than the previously posted "Bubble Pop", though there are still some "Jetsons"-like electronic squiggles around the hollowed-out beat, vinyl hiss/scratches, and occasional guitar hits. Del doles out extended metaphors in quick, measured phrases: "Punish ya if/ You're comin' to get / Some of my chips/ I summon the blitz." For all the sci-fi/retro visuals, this Homosapien's got another thing to say, too: "I'm a real dude."

[from The 11th Hour; due 03/11/08 on Definitive Jux]

Are circles really different in Russia? Or did that end with the fall of communism? Chicago's Russian Circles aren't telling, comrades. They're instrumental like that. "Harper Lewis" is from the band's Suicide Squeeze debut Station (the follow-up to 2006's Flameshovel-issued Enter), and it's cold and vast like a certain Eurasian nation-- or just their local Lake Michigan for a few months around this time each year. Drummer Dave Turncrantz sets a militant tribal groove, while newly recruited bassist Brian Cook (of These Arms Are Snakes) drops anchor with a forbidding, slightly overdriven drone. That lets guitarist Mike Sullivan plot out slow post-rock builds, clicky headphone-panning arpeggios, and thrashing metal chugs overhead. If you sketched that all on a graph, the shape might be a circle, whatever country you're coming from-- or it might look like one of those plot structure charts from English class, spread out over seven minutes. If that's considered a circle in Russia, no wonder they lost the Cold War to the 1980s version of Fred Thompson.

[from Station; due 05/06/08 on Suicide Squeeze]

When it comes to bodies, tell yours it's what's inside that counts. "No Kinda Man" is a brand new Junior Boys original taken from Body Language Six, the Canadian duo's addition to Berlin imprint Get Physical's mix series, and it gets physical by getting, like, contemplative-- though the pristine bass, dreamy washes, and distant echoes surrounding Jeremy Greenspan's elegant, pathos-ridden croon do hit with concrete (if downtempo) force. If So This Is Goodbye's breathy, radiant "In the Morning"-- Pitchfork's #13 track of 2006-- walked home expensively rum-and-Coke-buzzed in the, um, morning, then "No Kinda Man" wanders the moonlit streets, lost and staring at its own breath. "In my hands, in my skin, I'm alone," Greenspan murmurs against the frigid r&b-like backing. About four minutes in, the drums cut out, and synths threaten to explode like rockets ahead of an ominous, orbital instrumental outro. You can get a bit of a sense for what to expect from the track based on where Junior Boys put it in their mix. It's between Parisian DJ/producer Chloé's dubby, eerily minimal remix of German electronic band Rework's detached bass-pulser "Love Love Love Yeah" on one side, and former Junior boy Johnny Dark's current project Stereo Image with the melodic and, you know, dark electro-pop song "Dark Chapter" on the other. So, haunted and drained of love-- not an unsophisticated sensation, but one you feel in your gut anyway.

[from Body Language Six; due in the U.S. 03/11/08 on Get Physical]

If sexy never left, then why is everybody on Justin Timberlake's shi-i-it? That's J.T. as goofy, "Yo! MTV Raps"-ready old-school throwback introducing the first video for Gnarls Barkley's follow-up to 2006's St. Elsewhere, the forthcoming The Odd Couple. Directed by filmmaking team Happy, the clip shows the duo of Cee-Lo and Danger Mouse performing their soul-style, horns-emblazoned new song "Run", as a TV audience of dancers shake their daisy dukes in the background. Get ready for plenty of dizzying special effects, and a retro vibe that feels like it reaches as far back as Austin Powers' 1960s despite all the day-glo colors and Timberlake's "That was crazy fresh" shtick. Man, I never noticed how much that dude sort of looks like Screech. (via MTV's Subterranean blog)

[from The Odd Couple; due 04/08/08 on Downtown/Atlantic]

The Roots' rep since the early days has been tied to the live instrumentation of their hip-hop band concept. But they rhyme, too, man. So "75 Bars (Black's Reconstruction)", from upcoming 10th album Rising Down, is just what its title suggests-- rapper Black Thought spitting what probably adds up to 75 bars, reconstructing whatever you want, no hooks. With politically percussive epithet use and lines like "Smooth like that dude Sean Connery was playing," the extended rap picks up a methodical, cold-blooded force, though the specific content-- was that an Arsenio Hall joke?-- mostly isn't the kind of thing you'll be quoting to your buddies. Even if your weed's as good as Black Thought's. Nah, the interplay between ?uestlove's muted, minimal drumming and Tuba Gooding Jr.'s sousaphone bass lines is what murders on this one. The Rik Cordero-directed video takes a stark, lo-fi approach that involves a lot of time watching the shadowy, shades-wearing MC rap-- first on a van, and then in some kind of film-cliché interrogation room, where cigarette smoke hangs in the air while a bound and gagged old white dude waits to get his ass kicked. Damn, 75 bars and still enough breath left to smoke 'em if you got 'em.

[from Rising Down; due 04/29/08 Def Jam]

"O, Calendar" is a small piece of a much larger puzzle. The track appears on the Jet Age's second album, What Did You Do During the War, Daddy?, an ambitious, ambiguous song cycle about an American suicide bomber. The Washington, D.C., power-indie-pop band manage to sympathize with the character's outrage without condoning such violence, while acknowledging that the old means of protest-- marching on Washington, taking to the streets, even to some extent writing songs-- no longer work in the Bush era. Compelling in its convictions and streamlined in its storytelling, What Did You Do is just the sort of album Ted Leo ought to be making.

To its credit, "O, Calendar" may be a lynchpin track on that album, but it stands up well on its own. Beginning with Greg Bennett's pulsing bass and Eric Tischler's urgent rhythm guitar licks, the song bursts to life with Pete Nuwayser's boisterous drumming, which sounds like he's got four arms and twice as many toms. Nuwayser antagonizes Tischler's vocal melodies, relenting only when they reach the sing-along clap-along bridge. "Your arms-- languorous and lithe," Tischler sings as the other instruments fall away, "hold me close, make me feel alive." Out of its album context, "O, Calendar" sounds like an urgent expression of romantic contentment, with only a hint of darker times ahead.

Chan Marshall performs "New York, New York", from Jukebox, at the NBC Studios in beautiful downtown Burbank.

[from Jukebox; out now on Matador]

Another video from the Best New Music-designated album Devotion by Baltimore's Beach House, this one for "Heart of Chambers", and it's a lot goofier than its predecessor. I think they stole Bubbles' shopping cart. Victoria's brother Alistair Legrand directs.

[from Devotion; out now on Carpark]