Writing about My Morning Jacket's set at the Austin Music Hall last Thursday night, Pitchfork's Dave Maher said, "A solid My Morning Jacket show is a bankable commodity at this point, and the band delivered with its evening set at Austin Music Hall. Most of the night was occupied with material from Z and debuting new songs, and from what I could tell, the new material has a noticeable r&b bent to it. It's a little hard to process when one of your favorite bands decides to focus on playing new stuff, but when Jim James and co. returned to something from It Still Moves or At Dawn, it was just as shiver-inducing as ever." Well, you can give the new stuff a listen for yourself: NPR was on hand to record the whole thing, and they've got it streaming on their website.

Stream:> My Morning Jacket Live in Austin at SXSW

What the hell happened to Joe Cocker, anyway? The video for "Lover in the Snow", from Weezer frontman Rivers Cuomo's solo album Alone: The Home Recordings of Rivers Cuomo, starts with some faded Polaroids and spoken-word reminiscences that could've been followed by the opening credits from "The Wonder Years"-- except they're, well, not just a TV show. Instead, Cuomo goes on to share an inspiring story about a problem the doctors discovered with his leg when he was 12, and how that caused him to turn his attentions from his beloved sport to music. After Weezer's success, Cuomo explains, he set aside 13 months for a procedure to fix his leg, and afterward he was finally able to play amateur soccer. The rest of the clip depicts how Cuomo overcame his fears and achieved a lifelong dream playing in Mia Hamm's Celebrity Soccer Challenge. His stirring tale draws attention away from the song, a fine power-pop tune with spare percussion and chunky electric guitar. "You fall and hit the ground," Cuomo sings, harmonizing with himself. Sometimes you land on your feet. The video ends with a link to Hamm's non-profit charitable foundation.

[from Alone: The Home Recordings of Rivers Cuomo; out now on Geffen]

Nice arc on this one, the Tom Campbell-directed video for "Where Da G's", put together to commemorate the forthcoming Def Jux Stateside issue of Maths + English. We open with a shot of a plane landing, some luggage is offloaded, and before you know it we're in a car and Bun B is driving Dizzee into a grim-looking Houston ghetto, presumably looking for an answer to the song title's question with the aid of G-detecting hardware. RIP, Pimp C, you are missed. (via Subterranean)

[the U.S. version of Maths + English is due 04/29/08 on Def Jux]

Have you seen Les Savy Fav play live? For more than a decade now, fans of the Rhode Island-spawned rockers' scorchingly impressive recorded output have compared the band's albums to their gigs, and sighed a little bit to themselves when the discs couldn't quite bring the same catharsis. Greedy bastards. So if a live album was probably inevitable eventually, unveiling the forthcoming After the Balls Drop at a time when Les Savy Fav continue to reach for new heights of jagged, expertly played guitar rock-- dispelling fears of a potential breakup with Pitchfork's #44 album of 2007, Let's Stay Friends, and even donning their capes for a TV network owned by General Electric-- well, that's piling "holy shit" on top of "fucking awesome." Or something.

With its echoey, water-torture lead guitar, urgent rhythm section, and frontman Tim Harrington's hoarse, deceptively eloquent shouts, "The Sweat Descends" remains one of the highlights of the Les Savy Fav catalog. Compiled on singles collection Inches, the song wound up at #27 on our top singles list that year. The live version bristles with the energy produced by that chemical bond between an audience and performers at the top of their game, Harrington's exhortations occasionally obscuring the lyrics (we've got last year's Art of Manila cover for those, anyway) as the guitar notes grow from a trickle to a scalding torrent. But no, you can't see the band's famous live antics here. It's an mp3. Damn, you gotta find fault with everything.

This video premiered on Portishead's official website yesterday afternoon, but you had to sign up for their mailing list in order to see it. Some kind soul has posted it to YouTube. "Machine Gun" pops out when you listen to Third, with the mesmerizing industrial grind of its percussion riff, even as the plaintive wail of Beth Gibbons brings us back to more familiar territory. The video looks like something from one of Radiohead's webcasts-- a security camera may well have captured the crude blue-tinged images of the band performing. (via The Yellow Stereo)

[from Third; due 04/28/08 in the UK on Island and 04/29/08 in the U.S. and Mercury]

Just like that, the Atlas Sound Music Group-- a Kranky supergroup of sorts comprising Deerhunter's Bradford Cox, Valet's Honey Owens, White Rainbow's Adam Forkner, Nudge's Brian Foote, and Atlanta-based drummer/guitarist Stephanie Macksey-- have finished their tour. "Alone again, naturally," reads the Love-referencing quote on Cox's Atlas Sound MySpace page. Before their previously reported stops in Chicago and at SXSW, the band fought off van problems, the flu, and worse on the East Coast leg of the tour, still managing to maintain a sense of humor (if not, understandably, regular blog posts) throughout.

Forced to leave much of their own gear behind before a recent Atlas Sound gig at Johnny Brenda's in Philadelphia, the group borrowed equipment from fellow Best New Music vets Dirty Projectors. As seen in this video shot by Mark Schoneveld, the new setup helped emphasize the spry Afro-pop flavor of the guitar line on "Cold as Ice", which uses a sampled lick by Deerhunter guitarist Lockett Pundt in its original version on Atlas Sound debut Let the Blind Lead Those Who Can See But Cannot Feel. "Hey Dave, I just want to let you know this song sounds a little bit like a Dirty Projectors song," Cox says, ostensibly to Dirty Projectors main man Dave Longstreth. "But I'll pay you royalties on it."

[from Let the Blind Lead Those Who Can See But Cannot Feel; out now on Kranky]

I must confess that I'm not the biggest Death Cab for Cutie fan in the world, but their new record Narrow Stairs is coming in May-- their first full-length in three years-- and their sizable fanbase is understandably excited. "I Will Posses Your Heart" is the first single from the record; it seems an unsual choice for that position and is not what comes to mind when I think of the band: eight minutes long, slow to build, more mood and suggestion than tune, with Chris Walla's production sounding like he's been listening to Daniel Lanois. But then Ben Gibbard's voice enters about halfway through, and it could be no one else.

Stream:> Death Cab for Cutie: "I Will Possess Your Heart" (Real) (WM)
[from Narrow Stairs; due 05/13/08 from Atlantic]

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]