Metric’s new album Fantasies drops in a few weeks (April 14th on disc, March 31st digitally, which you can sign up for on their website), and the first few songs are starting to show up. Here’s the video for “Gimme Sympathy,” which is not only a cool song, but the video is done in ONE TAKE. With a lot of switching around/wardrobe changes in the middle. “Help I’m Alive” has been playing for a while on the radio, and you can download an acoustic version of that on their site as well.

I only really got into Metric with their previous release Live It Out, but now I’ve gone back to some of their earlier albums (Grow Up and Blow Away and Old World Underground, Where Are You Now?), and I can pretty easily say that Fantasies is one of my most-anticipated releases currently on the horizon. Hope they announce some tour dates near me soon.

EDIT:

Here’s a video that shows the filming in splitscreen.

Links:
Official Site
MySpace
Amazon MP3

We had been everywhere. We had really seen nothing. And I catch myself thinking today that our long journey had only defiled with a sinuous trail of slime the lovely, trustful, dreamy, enormous country that by then, in retrospect, was no more to us than a collection of dog-eared maps, ruined tour books, old tires, and her sobs in the night — every night, every night — the moment I feigned sleep.

from Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov

Here is author Neil Gaiman appearing on The Colbert Report the other night. Keep in mind, this is just a few days after his father passed away. What a guy.

I’ve read a few of his books and enjoyed his imaginative and creative mind. I also read his blog often, one of the more interesting blogs by a published author. He’s just a cool dude and one who knows how to interact with his huge fanbase.

Anybody else out there ever read his stuff?

Twitter has hit the mainstream. The “social media” tool recently celebrated its third birthday (congratulations if you remember last years Macworld event which killed Twitter and introduced the “Fail Whale” to the masses. If you remember that, you’re officially a Twitter grandfather/mother) but it seems as if recently the micro-blogging application has picked up steam and folks you’d never expect are now talking about Twitter like it’s the next best thing. Soon your cool grandmother who knows all about YouTube is going to want in on the action.

So how do you explain the inner workings of Twitter? Why, you show them a video of course! This one is pretty funny and features a hysterical interpretation of the previously mentioned Fail Whale. This is classic people. Classic I tell you!

When it comes to watching good TV on its initial run, I’m not the best consumer. A look at my track record reveals show after show that is now cancelled and that I fell in love with on DVD. Sometimes I do try to make the effort but it simply doesn’t work out; I either lose interest of life gets a hold of my schedule and I’m never home to see the show. That said, the internet now makes it quite easy to catch up with shows if you miss them at their regular air date and I have a recommendation that has me working overtime to watch on a weekly basis.

“Castle” premiered on ABC a few weeks ago and two episodes in and it’s safe to say that I’m a fangirl in the making. The show stars the great Nathan Fillion (in a non FOX show which means the odds of it staying on the air for longer than ½ a season are pretty good) as Richard Castle, a best selling mystery author. When hard nosed detective Kate Beckett notices that the murders match the deaths in three of Castle’s books, the author is brought in for questioning and in a round about way, ends up assisting the police in their investigation (after all, no one knows the crime scenes better than the guy that wrote them).

It’s obvious from the get-go that the success of the show will rely on the relationship and chemistry between Castle and Beckett but how do you keep the two working together on subsequent episodes? The show actually does a fairly good job of setting up the relationship though I have a hard time believing that something like that would happen in real life, the show focuses on a lifestyle most of us are unfamiliar with so the details are easily glossed over. The appeal of the show so far is the combination of the writing and Fillion.

Anyone that’s seen him in action (particularly in “Firefly”) knows that the man does the mix of comedy and drama well. He has the “likable asshole” act down packed and the writers are making great use of it. The show has a great combination of drama and comedy and Fillion fits the bill of cocky writer to a tee. Add in the physical humour the show has displayed so far (particularly in episode two which features Castle trying to break out of handcuffs) and this has winner written all over it.

Mysteries are not my thing and neither are dramedies but two episodes in and I’m a fan. Here’s hoping that the show has enough viewers and love to keep it alive past the first season.

Have you watched “Castle”? What do you think?

But then, what have you in common with the child of five whose photograph your mother keeps on the mantelpiece? Nothing, except that you happen to be the same person.

-from Why I Write by George Orwell

-Edward Hopper, Nighthawks, 1942

It was announced a few weeks that Amy Winehouse would not be performing at Coachella due to issues getting her visa, but now we’ve got a replacement. M.I.A. will be joining Coachella’s lineup, making it one of her first shows after having her son a few months ago. Entertainment Weekly reports that she’ll be taking Winehouse’s Saturday night spot.

I haven’t heard a lot of M.I.A.’s music, aside from the song on the Slumdog Millionaire soundtrack, but I know a lot of people who like her very much. Apparently, she announced her retirement at last year’s Coachella – I guess “retirement” was a code word for “maternity leave,” eh?

Coachella runs April 17-20, 2009, in Indio, California. Both three-day and individual-day passes are still available.

You know that feeling you get right after you push send on an email bitching out your boyfriend for not putting the toilet seat down and you call him a ninny-muggins and tell him it’s over? You realize as you’re pressing send you shouldn’t have sent that? Well gmail has just introduced “undo send” as part of their ever expanding lab tools. After you send a message that wasn’t ready or you shouldn’t have sent in the first place, just click “undo” and gmail will grab the message and put it right back in the “compose” window.

How is this possible? Once something is sent, it is sent right? Well, yes. This trick doesn’t really grab an already sent email and magically bring it back. It just holds all sent messages in a queue for five full seconds before sending them. Which should be more than enough time for you to feel the pang of regret and hit the panic button to tell gmail not to send the message after all.

Leave it to Google to constantly come up with good, innovative ideas. More details on the undo feature can be found on the gmail blog

If you’re flying in Canada, everyone knows that WestJet does things a little differently but even they haven’t come to this (that I know of at least – it’s been a while since I’ve flown). In the US, someone else is doing things a little differently.

From the looks of things Southwest Airlines is trying to mix things up a little too. I’m assuming that the OK comes from management but some airline attendants are making your flight a little more interesting. Who actually listens to the pre-flight announcements? Everyone knows about the exits and we’ve all joked about the hand signals that have been around as long as people have been flying commercially but at Southwest, they’re shaking things up just a little.

There are a number of videos kicking around of David, an attendant for SWA that delivers his pre-flight information in a rap and it’s pretty entertaining. Who knew on board entertainment could be this good? Check it:

SxSW is like pop culture overload skydiving in a blender at 78rpm. There is so much to take in that aside from a few choice acts, you’re probably better off not planning anything and just stumbling from to bar to catch some random act. Chances are you’ll be surprised with something new. And if not, the next stage is 100 feet away. Not that I’ve ever been there.

There’s so much that I’m not even going to pretend that RowThree is able to even come close to covering it. Probably the best site to do so however has been NPR.org/sxsw. They have all the usual blogggy type stuff (interviews, reviews, news, op/eds, etc…), plus up to the minute Twittering and a huge list of live streaming sites from the festival. But probably best of all: loads of full live concerts from SxSW on .mp3 for free download.

While I claim to know very little about 99% of the 1800 bands from around the country/world performing at SxSW, I did discover a couple of choice cuts while lurking around the site. So here are a few key locations that should definitely be checked out by your casual (good) music fanatic:

Up to the minute Twitter
10 Free-song download of various SxSW performers (iTunes)
Live Webcasts of about 30 different bands
List of online radio stations streaming live from SxSW

Enjoy!

Does it get much better than Chevy Chase in his prime? Well yeah, there is Bill Murray in his, but still, the Chase-man in his early years has been much of the inspiration for my sense of humor as it exists today. From his short stint on SNL, to the blissful Vacation franchise, to Caddyshack, Fletch, and ¡Three Amigos!, he was a part of my childhood, making movies that my young self could watch over and over. I’ll be the first to admit that his filmography is also loaded with a lot of muck, but those classics far outweigh even his crappiest of movies. I’m also convinced that his Clark Griswold is a partial inspiration to Larry David’s character in Curb Your Enthusiasm, which makes Chase all the more important to my entertainment world.

Since 1997′s underwhelming Vegas Vacation, Chevy has been fairly under the radar. Yeah, he’s popped up randomly here and there – mostly in the form of cameos – but he hasn’t done anything of note since. Naturally, by the title of this post, you can guess what the news it though. Chevy is making a return – although this time to the small screen, for the first time starring in a full-time primetime gig, according to THR.

Titled Community and stripes as Stripes at community college (any Stripes comparison makes me instantly tingly), the NBC comedy pilot will co-star The Soup‘s Joel McHale as back-to-school lawyer who finds out his college degree is invalid and is forced back to a community college. Chase will play a fellow student at the college, a man who has been married five problems and seemingly has major commitment issues.

If the pilot is accepted, it will be on NBC, which certainly means quality comedy is likely. I’m hoping so. I’d love to see Chevy go on and do something funny again.

What you you folks think? I don’t watch The Soup, so I’ve have no opinion on this McHale cat – but a promising premise and cast or not so much?

There’s no shortage of WWII video games, between the Call of Duty series and the Brothers in Arms series and the Medal of Honor series and the Wolfenstein series and…you get the idea. But Velvet Assassin looks to bring a little something new to the time period by having a female protagonist (based on real-life WWII spy Violette Summer) and focusing on stealth rather than either shooting skills or squad-based strategy.

Violette tells the story of her time during the war from a military hospital, so all the gameplay is a flashback – I imagine that means they’ll have to do something creative for when you, like, die. I’m more into RPGs lately than FPSes, but everything I’ve heard about Velvet Assassin sounds like a cross between standard WWII games (which remain my favorite FPSes) and Splinter Cell, which was an awesome game as long as I remembered not to go all Navy Seals and run into places with guns blazing.

Anyway, publisher Gamecock and developer Replay Studios have released a new trailer today, with Violette cribbing Winston Churchill’s speech (and for some reason running around in what appears to be a negligee of some sort for a good bit of the time). I hope the voice acting ends up a bit better than this, but I’m not optimistic. If they can get the gameplay right, I’ll be happy enough. Also, it’s called VELVET ASSASSIN, which is perhaps the best title of anything ever. The game will be released for Xbox360 and PC on April 16th.

I can resist everything except temptation.

-from Lady Windermere’s Fan by Oscar Wilde

Bishop Allen released their new album Grrr… on Tuesday, and while I haven’t picked it up yet (I will next week when I see their show), I did run across the video they did for the first single “Dimmer”, and it continues to uphold my thesis that indie rock videos are full of win at being awesomely wacked out, especially when the band goes for a DIY kind of aesthetic. That said, I’m not loving this song as much as most of the ones on their previous album The Broken String or their 2007 monthly EP project. But I tend to like Bishop Allen songs the more I listen to them, so we’ll see.

For movie tie-ins, Bishop Allen was featured in Nick and Norah’s Infinite Playlist, performing their song “Middle Management” in the film for about four seconds (the whole song is on the soundtrack), and frontman Justin Rice played the lead in Andrew Bujalski’s Mutual Appreciation as, perhaps predictably, a musician trying to get off the ground. Incidentally, I have fangirl dibs on the bassist in the band, at least unless someone can prove dibs before November, which probably wouldn’t be hard, since November’s pretty recent. Never mind.

Links:

Grrr… at Amazon.com MP3
Official Site
MySpace
Hat tip You Ain’t No Picasso and I Guess I’m Floating.