In the context of the Sigur Rós sonic continuum, this B-side lies closer to the "fall into deadly cold waters and then watch helplessly as the ice above you refreezes" silent-depression end than the "cure cancer, safely disarm all nuclear weapons, and invent an eco-friendly oil alternative in one day while still having time to make your sweetheart dinner" ceaseless-triumph end. It's everything you'd expect from a Sigur Rós flip: humble, ethereal, quaint, string-laden. It's pretty in a fairly pedestrian way, like Julia Stiles.

This scares me, especially after viewing a "photostream"-- basically a glorified internet slideshow-- the band set up so fans can post and view their own pictures alongside other fans' pictures while a Sigur Rós song plays in the background. To me, this highly democratic gesture is sweet in theory yet ultimately destructive.

Lacking in specificity and excelling in vague mood, Sigur Rós' music is a particularly great vessel for listeners to project their own life experiences upon, transforming them into magnificent events. Yet, put simply, the music loses all impact when attached to strangers' photos of a ketchup heart on a hamburger bun or a bunch of douchebags giving the peace sign. And "Ófriður", meanwhile, isn't that great of a life soundtrack for anybody because it just kind of sits there.

This 10-minute track seems designed to taunt anyone suspicious that the whole Banhart deal is a case of the emperor's few clothes. After a metal blast-Ñ "operatic" as in Phantom of theÑ- listeners are treated to an interval of wannabe seductive scaffolding in the intriguing/exotic soundtrack vein. As with most product that approximates generic mysticality, role-playing seems to be encouraged: Are you at Pier 1 Imports looking for the perfect catshit-negating candle set, or are you Indiana Jones searching the caves where the early Christians got their tiptoe on?

By the five-and-a-half minute mark though, Banhart gets to trill-shrieking and the Tarantulans get to thundering, and the classic sixties psych flashbacks get to strobing, and damn if a white rabbit hasnÕt painted itself black. A.D. are groping grandeur pretty coyly, but if your inner cynic Talibanned similar hefty nonsense (Sigur Ros, say), you will spurn this effort, preferring to let it be at the local Mediterranean restaurant, used to get rid of the supine hookah-jocks pretending they're in an opium den that takes Discover cards.

There are no actual gongs on "Gong", which leads me to conclude "gong" in Hopelandic must mean something entirely different-- "let down," perhaps? OK, that's a bit harsh, and a return to the old knock: Should Radiohead ever be cut in half Solomon-style, Coldplay would get the pop side while Sigur Rós would inherit the atmospherics. But "Gong", at a reasonably brief 5:30, is the closest thing the Icelanders have ever gotten to a radio single, and if its words were in a British accent about ennui rather than in Jonsi's falsetto yodel and about who knows what, you could almost picture the song facilitating a crossover from indie-movie soundtrack requirement to alt-rock radio stations.

Outlined by their trademark breezy strings at the open and close, the bulk of the song is driven by a busier rhythm and brisker tempo than the band usually employs, as if they're trying their best to eliminate the word "glacial" from reviewers' vocabularies. And with the song's circular guitar and electric-piano melodies reaching their climax in about half the time of your usual Sigur Rós epic, "Gong" may be the song for those of you (us) who tend to fall asleep three minutes into Agaetis Byrjun like it's laced with Ambien.

The Psychic Paramount are a power trio partially consisting of survivors from the excellent and under-loved Laddio Bolocko; check out their tune "Laddio's Money (the Death of a Pop Song)" if you don't already know that they were the unacknowledged legislators of an alternate universe in which post-rock was a dense, muscular, gloriously loud affair. It would be merely nostalgic to point that out if this meaty offering were not such a pleasing logical progression from that early milestone.

What you get here is a proggy minimalist vamp, a repeating figure on guitar, bass, and drums that chimes and shimmies and wavers like, well, like Phaer and Twyne, the 16th century translators of Virgil, might have had in mind when they rendered the poet's description of bees in the Elysian Fields as making a "huzzing fervent noyse, that every feeld of murmour ringes" (sorry if that is pretentious but it really sounds like that). It builds and builds until the bees become a bit like Focus and then a bit like Blue Cheer and then a bit like High Rise, dirty crushing psyche-noise-rock-sludge and the whole thing rings and builds and you are banging your head in sympathy and abandon and then OOF! They cut to near total silence with just a tiny, intensely quiet trace of the drums, at near inaudibility. This cunning jolt of almost sadomasochistic control over things-- just as they were orgasmically cresting-- seals the deal. These guys know what they're doing.

Though Dead Cities, Red Seas & Lost Ghosts has its haters who demean its simplicity and melodrama-- I know a curmudgeon who considers it "Andrew Lloyd Webber's Brian Eno Superstar"-- few albums can so powerfully transform ordinary afternoon vantage points into cinematography, leaving the listener/viewer feeling, rightly, like a tool of the powerfully suggestive media that we choose to let shape our nostalgia for that gay old time when Michael Landon taught us right from wrong and mullet from man-perm.

By the way, M83 songs sometimes have vocals now, and they sound as breathy and reluctant and after-hours-in-France as you might imagine. Let's throw a reference-point party: A) This song's an outtake from a more propulsive The Soft Bulletin, only it contains an (offtime?) Interpol-esque staccato bridge. B) This song is the utopian endpoint to a teleology begun by those nineties groups such as Polara and Certain Distant Suns who struggled to be utopian endpoints to a teleology begun by My Bloody Valentine. C) This song is Ride channeling the Beach Boys, but with lyrics adapted from a junior-high horror novella: "A ghost is screaming your name/ Bleeding all around." While M83's last album may have always been a mite mournful, or ambiguously about resurrected technology or decomposing pop, the new disc threatens to contain unadulterated exuberance.

Everybody dies, you know. Bands do, too. Thankfully, Justin K. Broadrick's proclivity for reinvention suggested that the demise of Godflesh would herald a new beginning. And so it is: UK tour posters are proclaiming the arrival of his latest incarnation with stately resurrection imagery, carrying with it all of the expectations of a grindcore second coming.

It should be noted, though, that the God of the New Testament shows far more pathos than the Old. And so it is: Jesu is the compassion to Godflesh's vengeance. Reprising the grindcore/slowcore dichotomy of 1994's Selfless, "Heartache"'s epic shift from a crushing first act to a regretful, Codeine-style midsection might not seem like a significant creative departure. But it's the majestic coda, the acoustic guitars, cascading melodies, and infinite layers of delayed vocals that remove the song from its genre trappings. In fact, it's about as close as Broadrick has come to hybridizing his inimitable guitar sound with the wonderful ambient explorations of his Final side project. Subverting all expectations while entirely aware of them, "Heartache" has touched on a sound that honors its dark past and while looking forward to a glorious future. Amen.

Opening with lumbering drums and a windmilling guitar strum similar to their previous single "Assessment", The Beta Band's "Out-Side" is the narrative of a man hunting down his maiden, punctuated with birdcalls, barking dogs, train engines, and bleeping synths ripped from Guerilla-era Super Furry Animals. Not only do these small accoutrements recall the experimentation of early Beta Band material, they give a simple four-chord rock song the feel of a children's story. Every verse ends in a brief interlude of crawling space-rock before the track downshifts completely into compressed guitar plucking and the phrase "I love you to pieces" sung ad infinitum.

While all this may seem trite, it comes across as genuine, unencumbered sentimentality, not unlike the folksy ruminations of Hot Shots II's "Eclipse". Whether "Out-Side" evokes this simple picture adequately or not, the song is merely endearing without being truly captivating. Earlier Beta Band songs unfolded in movements as this one does, but here the deliberate structure feels more assembled than it does extemporized by a live band. What may be their last single only reminds fans of the joy of discovery that the heralded Three EPs elicited, instead of reaffirming that level of potential. Perhaps the remaining Beta Band members already saw themselves in the same past tense as this listener did.

Say what you will about The Secret Machines' arena-rock grandiosity and tendency towards stylistically stir-craziness; the NYC trio writes melodies that outshine their songs' aesthetic ostentation. "First Wave Intact" is a highly ambitious track that manages the precarious task of exploring a semi-ironic extreme without the self-indulgence that generally comes with that territory. The song rests upon a strapping, Bonham-esque drumbeat that chugs along for two minutes before dishing out its first fill, and then, gradually, the song's central riff emerges from behind a veil of bass and unrepentantly cosmic synths. Throughout the opening six minutes, the guitar and vocals only occasionally touch down on the airy rhythmic pad beneath, intent to wander vaster spaces, before finally coagulating in a denouement fit for a nine-minute space-rock epic. It's the kind of anthemic, onward-marching song that would find a suitable home on year-end mixtapes, perhaps in the closing slot, for the way it emphatically dominates its time and place. It's only a shame space-rock, immersive and spiritual, so seldom works this well.

Everybody already knows M83 are the gods of post-millennial neogaze or whatever it's going to be called when enough bands start copying them that a new genre needs to be coined to define it. Their ridiculously Geiss-compatible sophomore album, Dead Cities, Red Seas & Lost Ghosts, gushed gorgeous synthstreams of consecrated treble that evoked both the purity of pastoral rurality and the firing encephalon synapses of futuristic murderdroids. It also instantly made a name for the French label Gooom, who is now offering a single for the album's most accessible track, "Run into Flowers", featuring remixes from other Gooom artists. Like these fuckin' weirdos, Abstrackt Keal Agram, who infuse the song with a gritty hip-hop edge: ominous horn blasts, organ loops, and Prefuse-esque vocal glitchouts. It's so crazy it just might work. And it does, but in the most noncompatible manner: it eventually breaks down to a minimal vocal loop and screeching guitar from the original song, somehow simulatenously violent and sublime.

Sounding a lot more like Acid Mothers Temple than Kinski, this collborative track from the two psych-rock bands' split on Sub Pop will likely hit the spot for anyone in need of an Indian trance injection, stat. As it happens, it's a beautiful exercise in the kind of heady drone that does wonders in the halls of a mountaintop sacred temple, and is currently in vogue everywhere under the sun, under the ground. Sitar, psychedelic swirling and falling star effects work together to form just as much spacey ambience as you'd expect from this crowd, though at this point, I suppose some credit should be given at how spot-on their approximation of the Sun guru sound is. Truthfully, this music comes out flat and forgettable more often than not (at least on record), and that these guys are able to hypnotize seemingly at the drop of a tab speaks volumes.