New Quin Twin video off current release Sainthood! Although one is forced to ask…WTF are they wearing?

(hat tip Stereogum)

EDIT: Okay, in searching for the YouTube version of this, I also found a live performance with a long banter/story section in which Sara tells a mostly unrelated story about her first girlfriend (when they were five) and how it somehow connects very randomly to “Alligator” (which she wrote). It is hilarious. Now I want to see them live, if they have this kind of funny awkward banter a lot, and it sounds like they do. That live video is tucked after the jump. Long, but like I said – HILARIOUS.

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Well, “Heart of Stone” is not quite my favorite Raveonettes song, but I can easily say the just-released video for it is the best of their music videos so far, thanks to the terrific animation from Blind’s Chris Do and his team. The video tells the story of a dejected young man’s trek through a surreal steampunk world, and does so with great style and heart. Blind has some storyboards and concept art here. Great work all around.

This video has been going around the interwebs for the past couple of days, mostly eliciting variations on “WTF???!!” It’s Kirsten Dunst as “Akihabara Majokko Princess” in a short video directed by McG, and produced by Takashi Murakami. The song is a cover of “Turning Japanese,” by The Vapors. Images from the shooting began popping up a couple of months ago, and here’s the whole thing, with Dunst bouncing around the Akihabara district of Tokyo. There are some hentai images in various shots, so the video’s slightly NSFW.

WTF cries aside, I find myself strangely entranced by the video. And not even in a bad kind of way.

EDIT: The video’s been removed by the copyright holder. Bummer.

(via The Playlist and Boing Boing)

This isn’t a brand-new video (it’s been sitting in my feed reader for a couple of weeks), but it’s worth posting even late. I mean, late in internet terms. It has more of a framing story than most music videos, as comedy team Thunderant (Fred Armisen of SNL and Carrie Brownstein of Sleater-Kinney*) plays the owners of a feminist bookstore inviting Annie Clark to come play a show. They kind of steal the show from Clark even during the song, but the song itself is gorgeous.

*Thanks to a commenter on You Ain’t No Picasso for this info!

When we get a preview of new albums from both Broken Social Scene and The New Pornographers within the same week, I’d say that’s a good week. We’ve shared details on both these albums in these pages, and it looks like both are due to come out the same day – May 4th, 2010 (apparently the day Canadian supergroups have chosen to begin their world takeover). So we’ll let them share this post as well.

Broken Social Scene’s first record since 2005 is going to be called Forgiveness Rock Record, and as previously reported, will feature a core group of six (including Brendan Canning and Kevin Drew) as well as guest spots from their oft-collaborators Leslie Fiest, Amy Millan and Evan Cranley, Emily Haines and Jimmy Shaw, and others.

Pitchfork has the first track from the album streaming here – an almost-seven-minute-long track called “World Sick”. You can also get a link to download the song by clicking on the pink button on the banner to the left (which will sign you up for their email newsletter, but you can unsubscribe later should you so choose).

It hasn’t been quite so long since The New Pornographer’s last release (2007′s Challengers), but group members A.C. Newman and Neko Case at least have been busy working on solo projects in between – it’s good to see them all back together for the upcoming Together.

Thanks to Matador for the first track from the album, “Your Hands (Together)”, which I have to say is making me even more excited. It’s a bit fuller, a bit deeper than the majority of Challengers – the verse didn’t catch me completely, but as soon as the chorus started, HECK YEAH.

The New Pornographers – Your Hands (Together): The New Pornographers – Your Hands (Together)

So I guess I know what I’m doing on May 4th. And probably for a few days after that.

Just a few news items from the past few weeks, all courtesy of Pitchfork:

• The Strokes Back in the Studio – For the first time since 2006, The Strokes are working on a new album. They’re hitting two festivals this summer, Isle of Wight and RockNess, both in the UK – they say these are the only two tour dates for the year, though. A nearly ten-minute long clip of them in the studio can be found here.
• The Dead Weather Prepare Sophomore Album and Tour – Also back in the studio, though with much less long a break, is Jack White’s current project The Dead Weather. They’re also planning a major tour, including several of the big festivals. Fingers crossed for a Lollapalooza appearance!
• Info on New MGMT Album – MGMT’s follow-up to 2007′s massively acclaimed Oracular Spectacular is scheduled to drop April 13th. It’s going to be called Congratulations! and includes a track called “Lady Dada’s Nightmare”, a tribute to Lady Gaga. Should be interesting!
• The Bird and the Bee’s Hall & Oates Tribute Album Dated – The Bird and the Bee have been performing Hall & Oates covers at live shows forever, and we’ve known they’ve been planning a covers album for a while. Now it’s firmly titled and dated: Guiltless Pleasures Vol. 1: A Tribute to Daryl Hall and John Oates will come out March 23rd. Does “Vol 1″ indicate they plan more of these? Perhaps, and they do a wonderful job putting their own spin on covers, but I do hope to see some more original material from them sooner rather than later.
• Grandaddy + Earlimart = Admiral Radley – It’s not unusual for LA bands to share members back and forth, form new bands with different configurations, etc., and now Grandaddy members Jason Lytle and Aaron Burtch have teamed up with Earlimart duo Aaron Espinoza and Ariana Murray to form a new band they’re calling Admiral Radley. They already have dates lined up in Dallas and LA.

French music site La Blogothèque has several video series of intimate concerts with hot artists, and they got Vampire Weekend (fresh off huge opening sales for their latest album Contra) for “Soirée de Poche,” which looks like a series of live shows in a small cafe. They perform five or six songs from both Contra and their debut self-titled album. Looks like a good time was had by all! The original Blogothèque post is here, but it’s in French and I can’t read it. Good thing music is universal!

Canadian super-group Broken Social Scene has been touring and working on solo projects for leads Brendan Canning and Kevin Drew for the five years since their previous release You Forgot It In People, but they’ve just released some details on their not-yet-titled upcoming album, releasing May 4, 2010. Given the ever-changing size and line-up of Broken Social Scene, as members come and go and work with other bands, it’s always a question who exactly will be featured on an album – this time they’ve managed to supplement their core six-person group (Canning, Drew, Justin Peroff, Charles Spearin, Andrew Whiteman, and Sam Goldberg) with guest appearances from friends and often collaborators Emily Haines and Jimmy Shaw (of Metric), Amy Millan and Evan Cranley (of Stars), and Leslie Fiest (of…Feist), among many others.

In an interview with Pitchfork, Kevin Drew cautions that most of these performers are less involved that in previous records, mostly coming in to lay vocals over already-written songs rather than collaborating from the beginning. That likely also means none of them will be involved in Broken Social Scene’s upcoming US tour. I would’ve loved to have the chance to see them all together, but Broken Social Scene is awesome enough on their own to be worthy of attention, celebrity guest performers or not.

Here’s a couple of older songs:

The sequel to the massively popular and beautifully designed Bioshock comes out next Tuesday, February 9th, and the hype is continuing to grow. Check out this detailed unboxing of the Bioshock 2 Special Edition – and keep watching for the unveiling of a very special surprise edition.

Well, through the Super Nintendo, anyway. I wasn’t really playing games then, so I’m woefully unable to identify most of these outside of Mario Bros. and some of the arcade ones, but I still enjoyed every minute of this video. Maybe someone will make one for my generation of gaming (i.e., N64-Xbox360, heh), though I don’t think there’s as much nostalgia for current-gen consoles as for the 8- and 16-bit ones. At least not yet. Someday maybe we’ll be all “hey, remember when we played games on a screen? With a box with buttons? How quaint!”

(via Kotaku)

Hotter than hot New York-based indie rockers Yeah Yeah Yeahs have just released the third (I think?) video from It’s Blitz!, this time for “Skeletons,” one of the most mellow and ethereal songs in their repertoire. The video (directed by Barney Clay) is based on the dance style of turn of the century dancer Loie Fuller, known in film circles from the Lumiere film Serpentine Dance, as well as an art installation with image projected on smoke that Clay saw in London. It also has a bit of a Louis Feuillade Les Vampires feel to me. Quite evocative. The second video is a making-of.

(via Pitchfork)

My dad actually forwarded me this little story of musician Dave Carroll, whose custom-made Taylor guitar got broken by careless baggage handlers during a United Airlines flight. After many months of fruitless attempts to get United to at least reimburse him for the $3500 instrument, he finally stated that he would write a series of songs detailing the poor service he’d received at United’s hands and put them on YouTube. The video below is one of the results.

It’s not the type of music I generally listen to, but it’s definitely entertaining, and a great example of the kind of widespread negative publicity companies can get in the age of user-generated social media. It helps that Carroll is actually talented, too. This video has gotten over 7 million views. United has since tried to settle with him in exchange for pulling the videos, but he’s given them the same response he got when trying to deal with their customer service: “Good luck with that, pal”. In the meantime, Taylor Guitars have sent him two new guitars in appreciation for the publicity boost the videos have given them.

Since Phoenix’s infectious Wolfgang Amadeus Phoenix ended up on several of our top ten lists this year, I finally succumbed to the hype and listened to the album, and I’m really glad I did. If I’d done that earlier, it would likely have been on my top ten. Ah well. In any case, the last artist you might expect the bright and poppy Phoenix to cover would be Bob Dylan, but they did just that recently for German magazine Musikexpress. Here is Phoenix’s shortened version of Dylan’s “Sad-Eyed Lady of the Lowlands” (from his 1966 album Blonde on Blonde).

Phoenix – Sad Eyed Lady of the Lowlands

(via Pitchfork)

It’s been rumored for a while that The New Pornographers would have a new album in 2010, but now we have confirmation and details. It will be called Together and will drop May 4. All the major players are back together (see what I did there?), with Neko Case and Danny Bejar, as well as John Collins, Kurt Dahle, Kathryn Calder, Todd Fancey and Blaine Thurier, joining New Pornos leader A.C. Newman. Plus some guest spots from Annie Clark (St. Vincent), Zach Condon (Beirut), Will Sheff (Okkervil River), the Dap-Kings Horns, and others. I can’t wait! Hopefully we’ll have some mp3 samples to check out soon. In the meantime, check out the band’s updated site with a heap load of photos from the recording sessions.

(via Stereogum)

One of the most hotly anticipated gaming titles of the year is Mass Effect 2, the second of a planned trilogy of games in Bioware’s real-time RPG world. I played Mass Effect three or four times through (using different skillsets and squad members, which gives quite different experiences), and I cannot wait to get my hands on this one. From the interviews I’ve seen, they’ve worked hard to fix most of the problems I had with the first game – notably the repetition of the side missions – while still keeping the epic scope and quality character development and voice acting that set the first game apart from its peers. (My capsule review is here.) Mass Effect 2 releases next Tuesday, January 26th, for Xbox360. The final launch trailer is below, but there have been many others highlighting different aspects of the game. Note that if you played the first game, you’ll be able to import your existing character, and the choices you made in the first game will affect the storyline in the second.

If you haven’t played before, the game will give you all the background you need to catch up with the story. Basically, you play Commander Shepherd, a human spaceship captain who, in the first game, ends up leading humanity through military and diplomatic relations with non-human species while also combatting an unknown threat from the far reaches of the universe. The thing that makes it really interesting is that humanity has only come in contact with non-human species within the last 50 years, while the other races have lived for a long while with an intergalactic senate and interrelations. It makes humanity the new kid on the block that has to prove its worth to the rest of the universe. Shepherd is the first human to become a Spectre, an elite member of an intergalactic task force. The threat that looms over the first game is revealed at the end, and the second game takes the fight into their space.