Twin Sister: "Kimmi in a Rice Field"

Twin Sister, a Long Island band that oh-so-predictably relocated to Brooklyn once their career began to take off, is a relatively new arrival on the scene.  First forming in 2008, they put out two EPs spanning the same number of years before releasing their debut full length, In Heaven, last week.  Despite the album title, Twin Sister is not a power pop band in the Cheap Trick vein, but rather a combination of indie rock and dream pop that loosely circles the chillwave drain.  Ignore my snark.  They're actually quite good, and this insane horror themed video will skullfuck the ghosts of your distant relatives.  It's like a cross between Hausu and Jean Rollin.  Not really but I have to say something.

Jacuzzi Boys: "Automatic Jail"

Jacuzzi Boys sounds like the worst kind of handbag club garbage.  Hell, they're even from Miami, home of some of the worst bass music of all time. And yet somehow Jacuzzi Boys turns out to be a sunny indie rock band who list amongst their interests "old Florida ghosts".  Weird shit abounds in the video for "Automatic Jail", the entirety of which is shot from a dog's point of view... except for the part when it laps up some radioactive detergent and morphs into a human!  You take it from there.



 Jacuzzi Boys - Automatic Jail from Hardly Art on Vimeo.

Captain Ahab: "The Kingdom of Light"

Jesus Christ.  This is not safe for work, this is not safe for any goddamn thing.  If you can get past the ingestion and expulsion of bodily fluids and flash-cut nudity, there are some interesting inoffensive visuals, but Captain Ahab and mad genius video director Lawrence Klein are not afraid to galvanize their audience.  You're either down for whatever or you should stick with Fleet Foxes camera phone clips.

Klein appears to have done most if not all of Captain Ahab's videos thus far.  They're all pretty madcap and NSFW, but unless I've overlooked something I'd say "The Kingdom of Light" is their collaborative magnum opus of gross out sleaze.  Judge for yourself, but you've been warned.
 The Kingdom of Light from Captain Ahab on Vimeo.

Ladytron: "White Elephant"

Blame it on Daft Punk's Tron: Legacy soundtrack if you want, but 80's minimalist electro is all the rage these days.  Ladytron have been doing it longer than just about anybody, so with any luck "White Elephant" will put them over the hump.  No idea what this video is about, but it's got a definite Last Year at Marienbad feel to it, which would be apt considering Marienbad centered around the unreliable nature of memory - or did it? - and everyone knows elephants never forget.

Dentata: "Earwig"

Much gratitude to Collapse Board for turning me on - literally - to this band, an obscuro-dirtpunk outfit from Ontario, but I'm not getting the Runaways vibe they do, aside from maybe the general 70s glam/sleaze look. If anything, these gals (and out-of-place dude) seem to be taking musical cues from early 90s girlpunk - think Babes in Toyland, L7, etc - except with the Black Flag/Sabbath influences stripped from the grunge template and recycled through a modern stoner rock filter.  It's hard to place, but readily identifiable once you hear it.

"Earwig" was directed by Richard Kern, a legendary filmmaker and photographer who is best known for photographing and directing videos for the likes of Sonic Youth, Lydia Lunch and Marilyn Manson as well being part of the Cinema of Transgression in 1980's NYC.




 Dentata "Earwig" (2011) from Richard Kern on Vimeo.

Tom Waits: "Back in the Crowd"

I feel like I've been posting a lot of Tom Waits lately, but the recent Throwback was done before I even realized he had a new record on the horizon.  I wasn't entirely sold on the first new single, "Bad As Me", but "Back in the Crowd" eschews the labored quirkiness of that song for a more straight forward, Spanish-inflected ballad sound.  It's a little brief at 2:50 but the two singles combine to reassure that Bad as Me, the album, will be the diverse collection we're used to expecting out of Waits.  If one song isn't your bag, the next one probably will be... and as a whole the man tends to bat well over .500.

Throwback 1997 || Oasis: "Magic Pie"

...and with this fine LP Oasis were publicly cast upon the ash heap, forevermore to be seen and not heard.  I kept stumbling across video links to the new Noel Gallagher solo song in my RSS feed today, and since it's no more post-worthy than brother Liam's Beady Eye phone in I instead alighted to my youth, a time when I worked in the music department at Hastings and Be Here Now was one of the few legit rock albums in our playbin (couldn't offend the blue hairs shopping for books a couple of aisles over with thumping techno or JSBX, after all... though one day a particularly iconoclastic night manager allowed - nay, insisted - that I play the album of death metal Metallica covers that I'd just gotten via special order.  Watching all those customers walk around trying to pretend like absolutely nothing was wrong or out of the ordinary was a pretty amazing experience, and one which I still refer to in job interviews to this day).

Lou Reed & Metallica: "The View"

Wow.  I come back from a literal death-in-the-family weekend to this?  It's almost like a cosmic set up, a profound joke only the doomed could understand.  Although I have to confess that when I first heard that Metallica and Lou Reed were collaborating I never expected it to be much better than this half assed poetry slam backed with a monotonous, first draft guitar riff.  For those of you that haven't been following the news, this project came together rather quickly... and it shows.  Oh, does it show.  This whole thing means about as much as the mannequin artwork above.  Exactly nothing.
   The View by Lou Reed & Metallica

Primus: "Lee Van Cleef"

I've been sitting on this for awhile, waiting for the band to film a video for a single - any single - but that doesn't seem to be happening anytime soon, so here's one of my own faves from Primus' brand spanker Green Naugahyde.  Kind of an underwhelming album title (and cover) but this record is in every way an antidote for the cruel twelve-year hangover that was Antipop.  More of a (probably deliberate) back-to-their-roots effort, Naugahyde jettisons the jazzy jam band aesthetic of Brown Album in favor of a stripped down, more song-oriented collection more akin to Frizzle Fry or Sailing the Seas of Cheese.  Sgt. Baker would be proud, boys.  YES SIR! YES SIR!

Avey Tare: "Oliver Twist"

Animated vids seem to be all the rage in 2011.  Actually, the album containing this song - the first solo effort by Animal Collective's Avey Tare - has been out since October 2010, but for some reason this is just now being released as a single.