This is a fucking sad song, and maybe not the obvious one to play on Conan. Reportedly written about the murder of Richmond musician Bryan Harvey and his family, it's a somber, midtempo meditation on tragedy, revenge, and the idea of heaven as an infinite Saturday morning. It's also arguably the best Patterson Hood track on Brighter Than Creation's Dark. As Shonna Tucker's backing vocals shadow Hood's lead, the band adds tender country flourishes of keyboards and pedal steel. It may sound like Mike Cooley flubs his banjo part, but he's actually providing a reminder that it's just a song and meaningless tragedies don't have happy endings. Heady stuff for a comedy show.

[from Brighter Than Creation's Dark; out now on New West]

Last summer, early reports surrounding Wu-Tang Clan's then-forthcoming fifth album 8 Diagrams listed "You Can't Stop Me Now" among the song titles to expect, but when the record eventually leaked around Thanksgiving, the track was nowhere to be found. Maybe RZA really is as crazy as everyone says. Recently unveiled for a RZA solo LP coming this summer in the rapper/producer's Bobby Digital guise, "You Can't Stop Me Now" rides hard for the soulful hooks and the psych-funk guitars that had fellow Clan members Raekwon and Ghostface so incensed over 8 Diagrams-- and there's nothing about its production to explain why it would've been an also-ran. So, crazy like a fox, then.

The sample is lifted from a version of "Message From a Black Man", a Barrett Strong-Norman Whitfield composition best known in its 1969 recording by the Temptations. It was previously most famously sampled by MF Doom as King Geedorah on 2003's Take Me to Your Leader (Pitchfork's #20 album of 2003 and #82 album of 2000-2004). In a pre-release 8 Diagrams album breakdown for Scratch Magazine, RZA likened "You Can't Stop Me Now" to a "black Western", and the rattlesnake percussion sure fits that description, while the guitar-- which on 8 Diagrams, at least, was to have been played by John Frusciante-- is more Dead Man than Clint Eastwood. Horns bat lazily against the murky bass, and children's sing-song counters the original r&b singer's ghostly confidence. Bobby D's verse is a Staten Island reminiscence of sorts: "In 93 Wu Tang dropped the first LP." Inspectah Deck shouts about his own painful memories, then vows to keep up the fight. He's no Ghostface Killah, the Clan member originally touted as appearing on the song. Still, the message is clear-- and not really that crazy.

Stream:> RZA as Bobby Digital [ft. Inspectah Deck]: "You Can't Stop Me Now"
[from Digi Snax; due summer 2008]

Float like a butterfly the Boy Least Likely To might like to box up; sting like Sonic Youth. Norwich, England's Bearsuit are a clamorous, madly swerving indie-pop sextet who earned high praise from the late John Peel, and on 2005's Cat Spectacular they successfully bounced between the Go! Team's overstuffed excess, Deerhoof's fizzy song fragments, and Bis' recorder-wielding glee. In other words, those zinesters from Los Campesinos! probably already love 'em. "Foxy Boxer", one of the highlights on the band's soon to be no longer UK-only latest album OH:IO, isn't a dramatic departure, just a further refinement on plenty that's unrefined. Start-stop drum patterns collide beneath buzzing guitars, multiple UFO synths, crunching bass, handclaps, and boy-girl vocals that can rise to screams before going as cool as a Long Blonde on the line "she's got hips like mahogany." In fact, for all the melee, singer Iain Ross sounds almost like Room on Fire-era Julian Stroke on the minor-key, synth-soaked pre-chorus, intoning expensively, "I don't know what's right/ I don't know what's wrong anymore." It's Lisa Horton and another female vocalist who deliver the knockout, though: "Don't understimate the power of a punch from a foxy boxer." Can't hunt-and-peck, seeing stars. (There's also a video for OH:IO's "More Soul Than a Wigan Casino.")

MP3:> Bearsuit: "Foxy Boxer"
[from OH:IO; out now in the UK on Fantastic Plastic and due in the U.S. 03/25/08 on Happy Happy Birthday to Me]

Maps, a show on Italy's Radio Città Del Capo (we saw the Wombats on the program a while back), recently had Los Campesinos! in the studio to perform three tracks from Hold on Now, Youngster in a low-key acoustic setting. You'd think such a high-energy outfit would lose something packed into a small space, sitting down while huddled around a single microphone, and you'd be right. But they only lose a little. The songs are still there, and this is a good way to see exactly how they're put together.

Los Campesinos!: "Death to Los Campesinos!"

Los Campesinos!: "We Are All Accelerated Readers"

Los Campesinos!: "Knee Deep at ATP"

[Hold On Now, Youngster! is out now on Wichita/Arts & Crafts]

Welcome to Jamrock couldn't even top "Welcome to Jamrock", so it's understandable that it's been three years since Damian Marley pretty much reclaimed mainstream reggae from stoners with fraternity paddles. He did, however, quietly drop the Bollywood-tinged anti-poverty banger "One Loaf of Bread" on Tuff Gong compilation Gang War last year. "Christ feed the multitude with only one loaf of bread," Marley proclaims, as a clattering, bass-heavy dancehall beat settles in behind dramatic strings and sinuous woodwind chirps. Singing directly to "poor people", Marley delivers a message of hope, with the biblical allusions and prophetic air of, yup, his father-- an earnest solemnity that rarely gets pulled off so well, or can claim such a lively arrangement. (Although, to be pedantic about it, even Jesus needed five loaves of bread-- and two fish-- to feed the multitude. What'd you want, a miracle?) Not that "Junior Gong" is totally back to the fierce urgency and real-life righteousness of "Welcome to Jamrock", nothing quite like that. Still, the track is a good reminder to get excited (or at least curious) about Marley's expected appearance on Mariah Carey's new album next month. And the video, shot and directed by Jason Goldwatch for Deconmedia, humanizes Marley's message, with scenes of children and daily life in Haiti and South Africa, interspersed with images of the bearded, dreadlocked singer. Encircled, OK, by a cloud of smoke.

[from Gang War; out now on Tuff Gong/Ghetto Youths]

The Sound of Arrows list their location as "Pop Heaven", Stockholm, and the newest Labrador signees' first mp3 holds the promise of a stairway to just such a place. Jens Lekman would be there. Saint Etienne, too. The Tough Alliance. And the Avalanches-- any act that marries a mix-and-match, genre-hopping aesthetic to irrepressible melodies, the kind that put Swedish pop on the musical map in the first place. The Sound of Arrows are Oskar Gullstrand and Stefan Storm, and "Danger!" is a taste of their forthcoming debut EP, a nine-song affair due in April. Storm's reverb-laden vocal sounds a hook-filled warning blatantly contradicted by the music, springy pop that's also in keeping with labelmates like Club 8 and Sambassadeur. Triumphal string snippets, floaty synths, beaming trumpets, and incomprehensible vocal chatter place the track in a lush pop dreamworld gilded with harp glissandos, sort of like the sunny-day inverse of Pylon's dubby Gyrate frightmare also called "Danger" (or "Danger!!" in the "Jamaican" version). A sample-oriented approach frees the duo to move in slightly new directions by track's end, with guitars, glockenspiel or xylophones, and possibly harmonica lilting across a house-tinged bassline. "I feel so dangerous," Storm concludes, at last pinpointing the source of the supposed danger. If that means the stairway to Pop Heaven is actually just another escalator to nowhere, then, well, fuck. But I hope not.

Performing under the name Sissy Wish, Bergen-based Siri Ålberg wears Chucks and leotards on stage, sports a fierce bob, performs tap dance solos, and sings like a banshee approximation of Betty Boop. Obviously, she's got the pop-star image thing down, but more importantly, she and her band craft indie pop songs with an exaggerated sense of motion and movement, drawing from a range of sources: Siouxise & the Banshees, Cyndi Lauper, Karen O, Devo. Ålberg plays them to the rafters, insistent and intense.

"Dwts", from last year's Norwegian Grammy-nominated Beauties Never Die, now being released as a single, stands for "Do what they say." "They" could be some sort of discotarian regime or simply her sharp backing band, or it could refer to a song's beats and rhythms that translate to human movement. But she might as well be singing in first person instead of third: ""The rhythm makes it groove / I wanna move and spend my time on what it's for," Ålberg sings, as guitars pulse and new wave synths swirl around her. She wants to dance, damnit, and she wants you dancing with her. Ålberg uses the bridge for what's it for: to marshal the band's force and launch a much stronger attack on the chorus: "The city is on fire!" she sings ominously, before launching into a string of Yeah! Yeah! Yeah!'s so exuberant they're almost martial. On its final push, "Dwts" makes dancefloor conformity sound like an act of defiance.