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.

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]