Ssion's cult of Ffun (as Andy Beta pointed out five years ago, it rhymes) needs converts. In this case, per the YouTube blurb, Cody Critcheloe's mom has got it goin' on. The Ssion frontman has a background in visual art as well as in music, and he brings both sets of skills to bear in the clip for Fool's Gold's "Ah Ma", which he wrote and directed. Critcheloe appears in the trashy, decadent, and mustachioed guise you might recognize from the Fool's Gold album cover, terrifying an androgynous "Ma" figure with a bleach-and-booze makeover. Then it's time for a cigarette and a skronky guitar solo over the rickety, reggae-flavored backing. "Now, I'm a mama's boy, but I still wanna cuss and fight," Critcheloe sneers as the video goes from black-and-white to somewhere over the rainbow. So there's nothing left to do but enjoy an Oedipal slow dance with mannish Mumsy. "That's what I do," the guy who brought you "Street Jizz" concludes. "That's who I am." I'm just a little disappointed he didn't name this "The Mother Load".

[from Fool's Gold; out now on Sleazetone]

Aw, sayonara, Robyn. Best known for collaborating with the Swedish pop pixie on her recent UK #1 (and Pitchfork's #57 single of 2006) "With Every Heartbeat", producer Andreas Kleerup has made like Bonnie "Prince" and found a new partner for his latest single. Replacing Robyn's lilting vocals, though not her blend of pathos and spunk, is fellow Swedish singer Titiyo, who happens to be the younger sister of trip-hop leading lady Neneh Cherry. Musically, Kleerup's "Longing for Lullabies" is more in keeping with "With Every Heartbeat" than his Shout Out Louds remix, though the verses add what sound like gentle acoustic-guitar strums to the pounding house beats and luxurious synth washes. As sequels go, it's no Empire Strikes Back, but Titiyo's unobtrusive presence is still way better than Hayden Christensen in pretty much everything except Shattered Glass.

As with the original "With Every Heartbeat" video, however, the visuals don't add much to the song. A shadow-shrouded Titiyo sings in a dark, club-like space as multi-colored lights pulsate and flash behind her. Then she emerges from the darkness and sings to us close-up. Images become blurrier as the video goes along, perhaps imitating the effects of a wild night out. At times there appear to be two silhouettes, one of which might belong to Kleerup. Fredrik Skogkvist and Marcus Engstrand direct.

[from the "Longing for Lullabies" single; due from on EMI]

Brazil gave us bossa nova, Tropicália, and baile funk, and there's a lot more where those came from-- as compilation after compilation after compilation continues to show. São Paulo's Télépathique have already toured in Europe, and now the duo are poised to bring their groove-based blend of electro-pop, rock, house, and baile funk to the U.S. with their new Love & Lust EP, on the way via Control Group. The best place to start isn't the English-language title track, though, but rather "Eu Gosto", which a cursory Internet search would suggest means "I like it." If not for the fact it's in Portuguese, a language I definitely don't speak, it'd be difficult to determine the origins of this solid uptempo dance-pop track. Opening with a robotic kick drum, a winding synth sound, and haunted-house creaks, the song soon adds post-punk guitar stabs and the matter-of-fact vocals of Mylene, who along with drummer, turntablist, and programmer Erico Theobaldo makes up Télépathique. Her words echo on both sides as live and electronic drums rise in intensity. The beats drop out during a clanging, alarm-like bridge. When Mylene's vocals return, they're even harder to understand.

MP3:> Télépathique: "Eu Gosto"

[from the Love & Lust EP; due on Control Group]

Hmm, I would've gone the John Hughes route. Or at least stuck to Black Kids' mis-under-estimable charms and done something lo-fi that people would forward to their friends. In any event, the indie-poppers from Jacksonville, Fla., now have a video for the new single version of "I'm Not Gonna Teach Your Boyfriend How to Dance With You", which originally appeared on last year's Best New Music-stamped Wizard of Ahhhs EP. A fanciful streak runs through Black Kids' songs, from their playful self-regard to the way they toy with sexuality (among siblings, no less!), and that's what this clip lavishly indulges, throwing together Enlightenment-era wigs, laser fights against a colorfully animated backdrop, and, um, actual cheerleaders doing the song's cheer-like shouts. The song itself, at least, remains pretty un-fuck-with-able.

[from the "I'm Not Gonna Teach Your Boyfriend How to Dance With You" single; due 04/07/08 on Almost Gold]

Grizzled alt-rock veterans Greg Dulli and Mark Lanegan, aka the Gutter Twins, appeared on Letterman last night to sing Saturnalia's lead track "Idle Hands". They're right up Dave's alley, from the sound of it. 

[Saturnalia is out now on Sub Pop]

It's not supposed to be this simple. Is it? So far Jeremy Jay, the Los Angeles-based singer/songwriter signed to K Records, has covered a lot of ground without revealing much specific about himself, his influences, or where he might ultimately be planning to take us. On the title track from his 2008 Airwalker EP, he sings about, um, walking on air-- with the echoey, vaguely ominous lockstep of an early Factory 7". On "Beautiful Rebel", the first single from full-length debut A Place Where We Can Go, he sings about a beautiful rebel-- with garage rock's scuzz and Jonathan Richman's wide-eyed 1950s romance. And on latest non-album single "Alpha Rhythm", Jay just wants you to "dance, dance, dance."

Now, Jay might not be the type to overshare, but his limited output so far rarely fails to tap into some of pop's fundamental ideals, funneling them through a distinct, noirish aesthetic. "Alpha Rhythm" takes its title from the regular oscillations of human brain waves, and metronomic drums that wouldn't have been out of place on the last Shocking Pinks album set the pace, beneath "Airwalker"-like clockwork guitars, some haphazard lead-guitar fills, fingers snapping, and Jay's brief, mostly wordless vocals. If it's about dancing, it's also about being about dancing-- or else it's about not having to be "about" anything at all. Jay's terseness, like the lonely spaces of his austere production, reveals as much as it withholds, trusting the singer's secrets to pop archetypes and our own wandering imaginations. That's where I'm a Viking.

Hard to believe it's been thirteen years since "Drop" closed out Red House Painters' Ocean Beach. Obviously, things have changed dramatically since then, Mark Kozelek's voice perhaps most of all. He sang the originally with a wounded forcefulness that drew the song out to nearly ten minutes. On this live version, recorded recently at Union Chapel in London-- which appears on the rarities CD that accompanies the book Nights of Passed Over, a collection of song lyrics and setlists from throughout Kozelek's career-- his voice has grown deeper, more resigned and introverted. He's no longer casting recriminations on "Drop", but mulling over a predicament, his words reverberating throughout the venue as if sung by the voices in his head. The matter-of-factness with which he delivers the central lines is absolutely chilling: "All the love in an instant makes my life stop / But then my hate for you makes my feelings altogether drop."

Stream:> Mark Kozelek: "Drop" (Live at Union Chapel)
[from Nights of Passed Over; due 04/01/08 from Caldo Verde]

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.