Gregor Samsa awoke after a night of unsettling dreams to discover "Jeroen Van Aken", from latest album Rest, had been turned into something nearly half the length of the eight-minute-plus LP version, and its glacially paced arrangement set to this watery video. With even a leading presidential candidate from the party of Al Gore proposing tax cuts likely to encourage global warming, guess everybody knew where those glaciers were headed, right? "It seems the devil's got a grip on me," frontman Champ Bennett intones, accompanied by Nikki King's vocal that wobbles as if coming up from underwater (or "Anthems for a Seventeen Year Old Girl"). The song's central, stately piano is shown in loving detail in the video, along with other pieces of the orchestration. But we also see a cardboard box floating in shimmering water, a bit of crumpled paper-- plastic?-- billowing in the wind, and the pipes of a radiator in some empty apartment. The devil damns the narrator of "Jeroen Van Aken" no matter what he or she does, but this video offers a concise introduction to the song's slow-building tranquility, the hellfire better left to Jerry Lee Lewis or his cousin Jimmy Swaggart. I mean, if we're talking about preachers now.

The latest episode of Pitchfork.tv's "Daytripping" series features Fleet Foxes, who took time to chat with our cameras between their multiple gigs at this year's SXSW. Pitchfork also tagged along in the Seattle psych-folk group's van, scoping out Austin, Texas' lovely scenery and thumbing noses at the Lone Star State Troopers.



The archive of videos continues to expand, and today we have the latest offering from Brooklyn's pop sensation Santogold. The rather disturbing video for "L.E.S. Artistes" finds Santo singing astride a horse, while some city dwellers spill their guts (literally) on the street. It's a little gross, but boy, what a catchy tune propped up by Switch's trademark blippy beats.



And while we're on the subject of weird, here's one from Super Furry Animals' Gruff Rhys and Boom Bip, aka Neon Neon, "I Lust You", which revolves, curiously, around a Jellyfish competiton.



Finally, we have "Shelter From the Ash", from Ben Chasny's Six Organs of Admittance, a no-frills but strikingly pretty video comprised mostly of panoramas of the desert at dusk.

Every ounce of violence spread across Bear in Heaven's debut album last year goes under the magnifying glass in this dark, disturbing clip. And when I say dark, I mean it-- there are passages that are so inky you can hardly make out anything apart from an occasional metal beam on the ceiling. Shades of Guantanamo Bay are clearly evident in the orange-jumpsuited man who is strapped to a chair by hooded captors, who then allow him to be beaten by a white-haired vamp with severe dental problems. The lyrics about a world full of enemies (and the song's patently ironic title) seem to be the jumping off point for the video's overarching paranoia.

Former Beulah singer Miles Kurosky is back with a new song almost four years after the Elephant Six indie pop heroes called it quits. Fortunately for the now-defunct San Francisco band's faithful, "An Apple for an Apple" doesn't fall too far from the tree. What begins as childlike psych-folk, just sparkling acoustic-guitar arpeggios and Kurosky's internal rhymes, grows into a horns-boosted, strings-sweetened, fuzztone-chugging group singalong on a When Your Heartstrings Break scale, with crescendo after crescendo and martial drum rolls. The lyrics start with Monty Python before touching on religion, fond farewells, doubt, and falling in love with the invisible-- including disease, which makes the narrator feel alive. "Maybe I was just an easy mark," Kurosky sings. Tell that to all the Shins and New Pornographers fans who aren't yet familiar with Beulah, fans who might use this as an opportunity to explore another rewarding discography full of pretty melodies and arrangements that burst at the seams. (via Stereogum)

Stream:> Miles Kurosky: "An Apple for an Apple"
[from MySpace]

When anyone around here other than Mr. Burns mentions aeroplanes, they're probably talking about In the Aeroplane Over the Sea. Or The Aeroplane Flies High, all right? Belgium's Aeroplane slip the surly bonds with spacey, romantic disco on "Whispers", a sultry vocal by UK disco diva Kathy Diamond putting what would've been a blissful instrumental over the stratosphere as a regret-choked pop single. "I'm lifeless," Diamond sings at one point, but the ecstatic handclaps, strobe-like synths, funky bass, and sighing backing vocals make it sound as if the narrator has found a freedom to cut loose since you been gone. That doesn't mean she's happy-- "I couldn't care less" isn't quite "carefree"-- but it does mean she's going to dance the night away, to music that would sound just as good on some Balearic morning-after. "We were dancing in the moonlight," Diamond repeats, already in the past tense. It shouldn't come as a surprise that Norwegian disco cosmonauts Prins Thomas and Lindstrom included Aeroplane on their BBC Essential Mix last year; equally unsurprising, though incredibly exciting, is news that Hercules and Love Affair give the track a pared-down remix on the flipside of this 12".

Stream:> Aeroplane [ft. Kathy Diamond]: "Whispers"
[from the "Whispers" 12"; due 05/12/08 on Eskimo]

Lykke Li gets a little bit cosmic on this remix of "Everybody But Me", from her debut Little Bit EP, which arrives in the U.S. today. Although the EP also has the 22-year-old Swede singing "Dance, Dance, Dance", "Everybody But Me" slows down the pace, Li's lonely whisper peeking out between horns, harmonica, and eclectic percussion like so many drawn curtains. "Everybody's dancing/ I don't want to," she repeats, contemplating (shudder!) whether she should "go home sober". Oslo-based diskJokke, aka Joachim Dyrdahl, specializes like his townsfolk Prins Thomas and Lindstrøm in music that's both sun-kissed and spaced-out-- fine for everybody who wants a beat-laden evening, and neatly suited to Li's more contemplative mood here, too. Dyrdahl's remix of "Everybody But Me" adds reverb-kissed synths, handclaps, and additional percussion to Li's original, beaming the song up for the kind of escape the narrator claims she wants.

MP3/Stream:> Lykke Li: "Everybody But Me (diskJokke Remix)"
[from the Little Bit EP; out now on LL Recordings]

There's not much cold about UGK half Bun B's "Damn I'm Cold", from his forthcoming solo follow-up to 2005's Trill, other than the ice the Texas hip-hop legend says he's wearing, the "chill in your veins," and guest rapper Lil Wayne's relationship advice: "Never marry Robin Givens." Produced by ex-Mountain Brothers member CHOPS, the II Trill track comes on like Southern summer heat, all sweaty blues guitar and sweltering electric organ, with occasional Muscle Shoals-esque horns and the synth-bass of single "That's Gangsta". Weezy, who has faltered lately when guesting on tracks by high-profile MCs, is back to spitting fire here, whether boasting of his Bentleys and Ben Franklins, free-associating about Lambeau Field, or paying tribute to UGK's 1996 Ridin' Dirty. Plus he limits his singing-- you know, the stuff that helped make "Lollipop" an unlikely #1 hit-- to the chorus. As for Bun B, he's in his element, threatening to turn your neighborhood into the North Pole while Wayne makes, WTF, machine-gun noises. Bun B's late UGK partner Pimp C gets another of the well-deserved R.I.P. shout-outs that have sadly replaced the old "free Pimp C" as a rallying cry. As for Bun B and Wayne, this is why they're hot. (via 2dopeboyz)

MP3:> Bun B [ft. Lil Wayne]: "Damn I'm Cold"
[from II Trill; due 05/20/08 on Rap-A-Lot]

Shara Worden sings about stars colliding on "Inside a Boy", the theatrical opening track and first single from her forthcoming My Brightest Diamond sophomore LP A Thousand Shark's Teeth. We're not talking about Huey Lewis bumping into Whitney Houston here, though, but rather the Sufjan-interviewed chanteuse behind 2006's Bring Me the Workhorse getting remixed by the also-classically inclined recent Anticon signee Son Lux. On 2008 debut At War With Walls & Mazes, Son Lux's Ryan Lott brings a composer's craft to the techniques of underground hip-hop, and his chopped-up "Inside a Boy" charts a similar path. The string-draped original has drama and grandeur enough, but Lott dismembers the rhythm section, opening with little more than skittering strings, stabs of electronic percussion, piano, and Worden's pristine voice. Other rumbling beats, muscular guitars, and all manner of additional orchestration soon return, but the context is more abstract and disorienting than on the album version. "We crash like lightning into love," Worden sings, repeating the word until all is full of that stuff. Boy meets girl, song goes supernova.

MP3:> My Brightest Diamond: "Inside a Boy (Son Lux Remix)"
[from the "Inside a Boy" digital single; out now on Asthmatic Kitty and original track from A Thousand Shark's Teeth; due 06/17/08, also on Asthmatic Kitty]

"All the way from Switzerland," it's Robyn, singing her finally domestically available self-titled 2005 album's "Bum Like You" at the Cotton Club and Steakhouse in Granger, Texas, back when she was in the U.S. for SXSW. This video clip of the performance surfaced this morning on Robyn's YouTube channel, and it's an odd but charming one. The Cotton Club's partner-dancing patrons-- many of them wearing cowboy hats-- don't seem to mind a chorus that's directed at a bum rather than a lover (this is a country bar after all), and Robyn definitely doesn't look as if she thinks she's wasting her time on them.

[from Robyn; out now on Konichiwa/Cherrytree/Interscope]

In addition to premiering the tripped-out eye candy video for Stereolab's "Three Women", Pitchfork.tv also posted this live-in-studio session featuring Nic Offer's !!!. They play a few choice jams from their catalogue, including "Yadnus" and "Heart of Hearts", and then tour-mate Axel Willner aka the Field jumps in for a collaboration. While he plays a variation on "Fall From a Height (The Field Way)", his incredible remix of a track by Swedish popsters the Honeydrips, !!! fall in behind him, vamping along as they feel their way through the chord progression.

Today also saw the addition of the video for Heartsrevolution's teeth-grinding 8-bit electro track "C.Y.O.A.". 

PAS/CAL's full-length debut didn't ship in February as planned. No surprise. Leading dude Casimer Pascal has been pushing back the release date since early 2005, which would be a heckuva long time even if he were a New York rapper instead of a Michigan indie-pop perfectionist. Bigger surprise: The name of the album-- the successor to three worthy EPs-- stripped off its Citizens Army Uniform and became I Was Raised on Matthew, Mark, Luke & Laura. The first mp3, "You Were Too Old for Me", is just as schizophrenic, in a catalog that includes not just sun-kissed melodic pop, but also krautrock, Stereolab references, and a song that shoots from spaghetti Western to girl group less than a minute.

With the baroqueness of "Your Cover's Blown" or dare I say "Bohemian Rhapsody", the six-minute track stacks one catchy bit onto another, bouncing from urbane Jarvis Cocker strut to organ-wheezing double-time in the first 60 seconds alone. "Everybody needs someone they can pray to," Pascal croons, harmonizing with himself in falsetto over shaken percussion and a gritty guitar lick Weezer's "Say It Ain't So" would drink someone else's Heine for. Then melodies careen around corners like it's XTC. Somehow, there's an even brighter, wordless section from here: "Could've called you if I wanted/ Knew the number to your room," Pascal sings alone over piano. Still three minutes left: handclaps, swaying choruses, an old person and a young person not breaking up soon. The album might get here eventually, too.

Atlanta's own Deerhunter practiced Friday night out on the Marietta Square, right near Hazel Street in suburban Marietta, Ga., with new guitarist Whitney Petty fully present and accounted for. In between chatting with police officers and covering Tom Petty, the band recorded this acoustic version of a new song called "Winter Never Stops". And... man, it's a promising, bittersweet tune, closer to the wistful melodicism of Cryptograms tracks like "Strange Lights" and, yup, "Hazel St." than the cathartic din of that album's first half or the Fluorescent Grey EP's explosive "Wash Off". Of course, that could just be 'cause it's unplugged, with muted guitar arpeggios on the verses turning into big, heart-tugging strums by way of winding, vaguely psychedelic dissonance. "I had dreamed," singer Bradford Cox begins, which suggests the forthcoming Microcastle may be similar thematically to not just the recent Deerhunter records but also Cox's Atlas Sound debut LP (no word on whether this song will wind up on the album). The video has Cox and another guitarist, probably Lockett Pundt, hidden in shadow, but you can see Petty (Whitney, not Tom) clearly in center screen.

BONUS: Meanwhile, the ever-prolific Cox has also posted a new Atlas Sound EP, Things I'll Miss, to his bands' blog. The song titles-- "My Car", "My Room", "My Bed", "Marietta"-- relate to the things Cox must, contra U2, leave behind when he goes on tour. But you can take them with you after you download them here.

[previously unreleased; Microcastle is forthcoming on Kranky]