When Nick Cave asks whether you love his baby anymore, I don't know whether the answer is supposed to be yes or no, but you'd sure better say whatever you can to keep him from getting that crazy faraway look in his eyes. Oh, too late? Cave and his Bad Seeds sit down and get serious in the video for the seven-minute extended version of Dig, Lazarus, Dig!!!'s creaking, tension-fueled "Night of the Lotus Eaters", sustained guitar notes crying out as if in a separate conversation over an unremitting three-note bass groove and flurries of percussion. The clip, directed by Iain Forsyth and Jane Pollard, puts shots of the band performing against a black backdrop with images of a city burning, emergency personnel rushing down the streets. "Get ready to shield yourself," Cave repeats, looking off into the distance on one side. Duck and cover, dudes; I'm typing this from under my desk.

[from Dig, Lazarus, Dig!!!; out now on Mute/Anti-]

For nearly four decades, the members of Senegal's Orchestra Baobab have been stirring rumbling Cubano percussion and angular "cha-cha-chas!" into their Sahelian stew of arabesque arpeggios and griot psalms-- thanks to them, the Official Map of Guitar Music now depicts Cuba as an island off the coast of Senegal, separated by a narrow body of water called the Atlantic Ocean. Lots of that has to do with the slave trade (boatloads of Senegalese Wolofs came to Cuba) and négritude, stuff Ned Sublette's definitive history Cuba and Its Music can explain in glimmering detail. But the enduring international popularity of the band and their Spanish-speaking cousins in the Buena Vista Social Club, in faraway places where Wolofs, Mandinkas, and Cubans are a distinct minority, suggests that, by any geographical standard, this Mambo/Son/Charanga/Big Band Cuban combo just works.

After Senegalese power and culture shifted to the less Europeanized hinterland, this upscale club fixture almost dropped off the radar, but with the help from benefactor Nick Gold, they managed to eek out a positively unlikely resurgence. To celebrate, Gold's label World Circuit is unloading Made in Dakar, containing new recordings of hard-to-find tracks-- many of them lost onto groddy cassettes that you just can't find anymore-- along with new songs. "Nijaay" was originally performed in the early 70s and is featured in a more uptempo version here: No matter what corner of the Afro-Cuban continent you hail from, there's something to dig, be it the swirling guitar runs spilling out of Togolese Barthelemy Attisso or the vocal contributions of Youssou Ndour. The conga flutters even tell an interesting story, about ocean crossings and musical adaptations. Ask Ned Sublette all about it.

MP3:> Orchestra Baobab: "Nijaay"
[from Made in Dakar; due 05/20/08 on World Circuit/Nonesuch]

The current "One Week Only" feature over at Pitchfork.tv is a visual companion to In the Vines, the most recent album from Ray Raposa's Castanets. Several of the songs are performed in intimate and unusual settings by a host of guests. So we see Dirty Projectors' Dave Longstreth putting his one-of-a-kind spin on "Rain Will Come" on the deck of a ferry and Phosphorescent doing "I Am Swimming" on a pier, along with some odd scenes that are bit harder to describe but well worth checking out.

Today also saw the appearance of the bright, shiny, and flickering new video for "Astronaut" from electro-pop outfit Shy Child.

Obligatory "Man, what is up with Baltimore?" comment here. Teeth Mountain call the Greatest City in America home and, like many musicians there, they take existing musical forms and bend them a bit to fit an idiosyncratic vision. The four tracks available for download on their MySpace are driven primarily by neo-tribal drums, which would seemingly put them in league with the rumbling sound of Bmore's Thank You. But "13 Plus Harsh Tanz" in particular is much more reflective. The guitar for me brings to mind the cracked post-1960s dream-psyche hangover of Pink Floyd, I'm thinking here of an instrumental interlude that might have been on Obscured by Clouds, or perhaps the contemporaneous Eastern-infused lines of Popul Vuh's Daniel Fichelscher. It's headspace music, to be sure, but in some places people dance to this sort of thing.

MP3:> Teeth Mountain: "13 Plus Harsh Tanz"
[from MySpace]

Tokyo Police Club enlist Tom Campesinos! (doubt I need to mention that he's in Los Campesinos!) to remix the band's Elephant Shell tune "Tessellate". The excitable boy powwow winds up being a bit of a surprise, as he shackles the peppy indie rock song with an unwieldy distorted beat, puts the brakes on the forward motion, and paints it a shade darker. It's not an improvement by any stretch but the remix does turn the tune into something a bit more dynamic, even if the drama it reaches for remains a bit beyond its grasp.

The second Bryan Scary album Flight of the Knife is criss-crossed by narrative threads and loaded with bird/sky/airplane/flying imagery. "Imitation of the Sky" is its theatrical early peak, like a punked-up "Paradise by the Dashboard Light" complete with turn-on-a-dime transitions, spoken interjections, and lots of 1970s glam touches. Scary's lead vocals are backed by a small chorus, and he hits some wailing notes worthy of Ian Gillan in the second half. The story of Susie High, "a walking imitation of the sky" who apparently invented some kind of flying contraption, is told economically, leaving plenty of time to revel in 70s rock abandon, with proggy instrumental passages, fret board fireworks in the coda, and flamboyant chorus vocals.

Art Brut is French for, roughly, outsider art. Everybody Was in the French Resistance...Now is English for Everybody Was in the French Resistance...Now. Hey, it's Art Brut's Eddie Argos, speak-singing over doo-wop ivory-tickling from the perspective of Martha & the Vandellas' "Jimmy Mack" on Everybody Was in the French Resistance...Now's "Hey It's Jimmy Mack". And frankly, he admonishes, "I've not been gone that long/ It definitely doesn't deserve a song." This is a fully fleshed-out studio recording, not a quick pisstake like Argos' previous non-Art Brut cover songs; Argos' blog claims it was recorded in Joshua Tree, Calif. Hey Eddie, go tell Bono to find what he's looking for and shut up about it already. MySpace has two other new songs, "The Scarborough Affaire" and "G.I.R.L.F.R.E.N. (You Know You've Got A)", which treat Paul Simon, Art Garfunkel, Avril Lavigne, and Jonathan Richman the way "Hey It's Jimmy Mack" handles Martha Reeves. 'Cause "Vive la Résistance" is French for "Vive la Resistance."

Stream:> Everybody Was in the French Resistance...Now: "Hey It's Jimmy Mack"
[from MySpace]

Druggy nature footage alert! The video for Caribou's "Irene", one of Andorra's understated pleasures, consists solely of shots of the natural world in all its chaotic yet beautifully-patterned splendor. We see clusters of insects crawling through some kind of web, the reaching tendrils of a gastropod, the rush of a stream, lingering images of a hexagon sun. All fitting visual accompaniment for the album's most woozily psychedelic track.

[from Andorra; out now on Merge]

By the sound of "Rabbit", the two people behind Cleveland's mr. Gnome are no laughing gnomes. This song from mr. Gnome's debut full-length, Deliver This Creature, pulls a heckuva lot of noise out of a small hat, pretty much just Sam Meister's tribal drums and the reverberating vocals and sludgily atmospheric guitar fills of Nicole Barille. "Rabbit", run: Barille raises her voice from a breathy whisper to a double-tracked, sustained holler, and her guitar playing ranges from high-pitched, psyched-out tremolo to bone-crunching distorted thrums. "Rabbit sleeping in my brain, wishing things would stay the same," Barille sings. mr. Gnome (yes, that's their lower-case) have been much blogged about on the strength of their catchier, keyboard-accented "Pirates", but their rabbit habit suggests a more patient side-- "Don't you rush in like that," Barille and Meister begin, in harmony. Trix are still for kids.

MP3:> mr. Gnome: "Rabbit"
[from Deliver This Creature; out now on El Marko]