This dude's the latest signing to Australia's Modular label, landing with a tidy package of promotional offerings: a catchy, moistly breezy indie-pop debut single that couldn't be better titled for a meet-the-artist track; a subtly arresting/marginally tricked-out video; and a slightly more ambient take-away remix by long-time post-rocker the Album Leaf. Here's to good starts. We're told Boulet is 21 and a Sydney skate rat. Which means skate rat music in Sydney is a far cry from the shit-encrusted lo-fi tracks coming from skaters on our own west coast, or Boulet is an outlier wielding his board with a softer heel. Irrelevant -- the point is it's better produced and warmer edged, perfectly calibrated as a respite from the approaching cold here, or a reminder of how temperate things in the Aussie hemisphere most of the time. "A Community Service Announcement" practically drips with humidity, a honeyed guitar bit pushed along by tropical toms, a pop song's forward movement that's fit for cruise boat line-dancing. If that sounds fit for the OST to a Disney film set in some sunny climes well... it sort of is. But then there's the video, where someone get's offed and dumped into a lake, suggesting their might be some menace beneath the mellifluousness we'll need more than one track to fully suss. Until then, here's a community service announcement:

When we first heard onetime BTW Pablo Díaz-Reixa, aka El Guincho, we were drawn in by "Antillas," a song we described as "a five-minute bundle of clattering loops and sunny harmonies." It was from the self-released Alegranza!, before he'd signed to XL, who reissued the collection. Almost two years after being hooked we have an "Antillas" remix by XXXchange. It shows up on one of two double 12"s that feature remixes of the track by the likes of Architecture In Helsinki, Prins Thomas, Banana Clipz, etc. (Mad Decent's releasing one, Young Turks the other.) It's nice being reintroduced to the song, especially as we inch closer to winter. In this take, you'll here the original's loops buried beneath, and weaving through, a slew of new sounds.

The little-documentary-that-could The Story Of Anvil, about the band that was like a "real life Spinal Tap" right down to having a drummer named Robb Reiner, stole everyone's heart this past year. Except for people whose hearts are made of stone. Or metal. Well if your heart was made of \m/ metal then it probably stole your heart, too. But if your heart is made of Oscar-material precious metal, then it didn't steal your heart, it made your heart snub it from its rightful place on the 15-film Best Documentary Academy Award shortlist (via RS). Granted I've never seen most (i.e. any) of the docs that made the cut, but from what I can gather none boast quite the combination of pathos and punny album titles that Anvil does, and that's just heartbreaking. Also not winning favor with the Oscars' doc department: It Might Get Loud, the documentary which tackled the history of the electric guitar via the guitar-geek wet dream ménage à trois scenario of a Jimmy Page, The Edge, and Jack White jam session.

But while the Edge's documentary got shafted, his band is positioning themselves for a run at a Best Song Oscar by penning a track called "Winter" (sample lyric: "summer sings in me no more") for the Jim Sheridan film Brothers. (Apparently it's also slated for the next U2 studio album, apparently titled Songs Of Ascent). To paraphrase Bono, U2 are reapplying for the most award-hungry band in the world. You can hear that track below, along with some songs from the possibly-Oscar-worthy The Road OST by Warren Ellis and Nick Cave.

After Solange covered Dirty Projectors, a band on Domino, it's only fair the Londoners who sing "Dominos" have a go at a song by Knowles' sister. Fitting into A Brief History Of Love's romantic aesthetic, they put their mark on Beyoncé's "Sweet Dreams." It was recorded on Radio 1. As mentioned, Robbie Furze and Milo Cordell easily move between clattering post-Suicide, icy synth balladry, and radio-friendly electro-anthems (often with Jesus & Mary Chain and Happy Mondays echoes). So, which Big Pink do you get here? The moody, stripped-down result actually goes better with B's '80s-inflected cover art than the original.

When MTV's college-obsessed little sister station mtvU announced the nominations for this year's Woodie Awards, we had some fun trying to make sense of the logic underlying the way in which they had grouped together bands and pit them against one another. The logic being: their demographic is college, and college is the time when our tastes change! This is the time to experiment with our sexuality, or at least with the contents of our iPods. The apparent Viacom dictate, then, is to be all things to all people, and so the awards followed suit. Your winners:

We're already well aware that Crayola wants your kids to listen to hip music while they do their coloring. So far we've seen Animal Collective take us down a sweet road to vibrant color, pre-sciatica Dan Deacon brandish his Glow Station, and Unicorns offering up "I Was Born A Unicorn" for Color Explosion 3-D. This time? Micachu and her shape-shifting Shapes appropriately tell us that melting and molding your own crayons is fun. (Thanks for the tip, Michael.) It's sorta how she composes songs, really. It's also good for recycling: "worn crayons" become "new color-swirl mini crayons." As with the previous Crayola commercials, there's something psychedelic going on here.

Not that Dirty Projectors' set of four shows at Bowery Ballroom and Music Hall Of Williamsburg this week needed any help selling out -- that was handily accomplished simply by releasing one of this year's best (and most misunderstood) albums -- but after NY Mag's attempt to survey the Brooklyn scene by crowning David Longstreth its king, and Solange's making an honest R&B track out of "Stillness Is The Move," your prospects at some Craigslist action got slightly more dire. The run kicked off last night at Bowery with support from ascendant BTW tUnE-yArDs, whose shift-key shenanigans are no longer keeping people from tuning in. Which is a very good thing.

Tonight and Saturday the scene shifts to Williamsburg for the MHOW shows before closing out with a return to Bowery on Sunday night. Check these shots of the bands plus early opener Glass Ghost by photographer Jessica Amaya, and here's a list of what Dirty Projectors performed:

Two things you can count on every year: the year will end, and there will be lists that piss off everybody. Being 2009, there's bonus piss-off potential because we get to objectively rank subjective pieces of art not only for the year but also for the decade. Fun! So we're happy to announce that the time has come for you to participate in this historically meaningful electoral process: In partnership with our sister site Videogum.com, we're opening voting on this year's annual Gummy Awards. You've been making your Album Of The Year lists since before this year started, so that shouldn't be too hard. (Pass through our Heavy Rotation to refresh your recollection some more.) We also want to know about your favorite video, what artists you crush on, and your pick for Best New Act and Album Of The Decade.

Of course, life is about more than just demonstrating your superior taste in music. Life is also about your demonstrating your superior taste in TV, movies, and viral videos -- i.e., the stuff covered every day on Videogum. So you'll be voting in those non-music categories too.

Voting is fun. But it can also be very lucrative. One randomly selected entrant in this year's Gummy Awards poll is going to win this lot of cool swag:

Just when you thought musicians had left behind their wolves and crystals in favor of whales, this vintage psychedelic London quartet arrives with Tidings. Thing is, the collection gathers recordings made by main Wolf Jack Sharp in Bedford, England between 2005 and 2007, so technically they were right on time with the Wolf thing. Their sound, though, comes from a different time entirely. Or, as the well-written press release puts it:

Stitched together in a style reminiscent of Faust or early Mothers Of Invention, the songs lay nestled in snatches of field recordings, winding tapes, squealing feedback, studio outtakes and the voices of dead relatives.

The band's official debut will be out sometime in 2010. For now, here's one unstitched and upbeat outtake, "October Fires." A lot happens in its 4:20 (yes).

Following up on our post for "Cousins" The Song, here's "Cousins" the video: The single art's shot of the boys in a long alley doused in confetti fit the song's manically festive, church-belled punk racer, but is pretty much a direct still from the Garth Jennings-direct clip itself, which has the kids trade spaces on a moving platform and at the fringes, on ladders and wearing masks of each other. It's quick, quirky, and unpredictable but not without a sense of humor about itself, so pretty much perfect for a band of Ivy Leaguers who aren't above self-satirizing their prepped up ways. Also, love the colored-tape art by (or inspired by) Brooklyn's Aakash Nihalani. (UPDATE: Nope, not by Aakash. Interesting.)

Fan Death don't skimp on the video treatments: The clip for "Reuinited" featured a number of roadside cameos (Axl Rose, Marilyn Manson, Björk, others) via excellently unconvincing, often creepy lookalikes. This time, taking a turn into the white trash, we find an overweight dude in sweats and wife beater (and fairly hip hair) cuing up a Fan Death aerobics-style VHS video, seemingly in search of titillation, but he ultimately drops the remote and goes somewhere else entirely. He can only get there after grabbing a can of pop, giving the old guy in the basement a jar of pickles (?), and pulling out his paint samples.

Those 30 second samples of Animal Collective's forthcoming Fall Be Kind EP weren't all that satisfying. Even if you were already somewhat familiar with "What Would I Want Sky," "Bleed," and "On A Highway," the mystery of opener "Graze" and seemingly epic closer "I Think I Can" still remained. We don't want you to (ever) fall behind (see) in your AC completism, so here's the smooth, sorta classy, piano sprinkled "Graze." I was thinking of Morton Feldman, oddly, until the fairy dancers started their hoedown at the 3:13 mark. (Thanks for the tip, Mike.)

Hella active drummer Zach Hill's in (and has been in) more bands than you want to try to list, but we've most recently caught him helping out Boredoms and Marnie Stern and toughening up Wavves (more on that in a sec) when not releasing his own "solo" material. In Chll Pll Hill he does what the band's name suggests, joining forces, calming down (a bit), and harmonizing with Hexlove's Zachary Nelson, who layers lapping electronics (complete with dark/"funky"/sometimes gentle pop hooks) over submerged drum play. You get a taste in the self-directed strobed video for "Tales From The Crypt," an spacey bit from Aggressively Humble. It finds Hill stepping to the mic and carving out his eyes with monsters and negative hand gestures.

Harry Patch, the longest surviving UK veteran of World War I, lived an honorable life, his very existence serving as a reminder to countless others of how far we've come, and at what cost, in matters of international conflict and discourse. And thanks to an initially subpar rocker beef that's blossomed into something going on classic, Harry Patch has also served as a reminder of the life of composer Harry Partch, and how far we've come in matters of incorporating his 43 tone scale into countless blog posts. To recap: Radiohead wrote a song for Harry Patch the Tommy, which the Fiery Furnaces' Matthew Friedberger mistook to be about Harry Partch the musician. After castigating the band for "brazenly and arbitrarily associating [themselves] with things that [they] know people consider cool," which never happened, Friedberger tried to backpedal with a tongue-in-cheeky retort that again missed the mark, closing with: "Matt would have much preferred to insult Beck but he is too afraid of Scientologists."

There's a progression at play here. There was Sigur Rós filming hairless young things frolicking in the woods for "Gobbledigook," surpassed many months later by Girls' XXX "Lust For Life" video featuring Hunx's junk, which itself was trumped by the Flaming Lips' "Watching The Planets" which was a showcase for Wayne's coyne. The untapped avenue for flesh-tones? Interactivity, no doi. Enter Yeasayer.

The band released a great single with two great remixes so I think we can all agree it's time to take all your clothes off. Over at amblingalp.com there's a smeary sample of "Ambling Alp" that's a hypnotic soundtrack to an excuse for you to interact with bare bodies running and sitting and generally being naked in a trippy way. Pan the cam, rotate, etc. It's not the full song so not a proper video per se -- maybe it's the precursor to one. Or maybe it's just a way to raise awareness for their 12". (Rule: nudity is a good way to raise awareness for all sorts of 12"s). So, click.

Pro tip: You're not supposed to watch this at work.

I'm the only one currently with a full-time job. I work at Amoeba Records on Haight Street. I have for 8 years. Tim worked there as well until recently. Wymond is a dad and student. Kyle bar backs and moves furniture, hangs art and whatever else he can get.

I spoke with Sartin about his 9-5 at Ameoba. In the spirit of our record store discussion, after you're done, check out his Jewelled Antler-related work in Giant Skyflower Band, Skygreen Leopards, and truly great/sadly missed Flying Canyon.

Award winning antichrist Charlotte Gainsbourg has teamed up with Beck for her forthcoming IRM, telling Jessica in a Progress Report that Hansen "tried very different things" with her for the album. And while "IRM" and "Heaven Can Wait" could sound "very different" relative to Charlotte's past output, this Keith Schofield-directed video is very different relative to things you witness in reality: skateboards with wheels provided by Burger King, a dude with a half-beard, another barely outrunning an axe to the back, Sponge Bob getting arrested, trippy tennis, and a pool full of dead man's floaters. Which is about half the storyboard.

Earlier today we presented you with Real Estate's mellow update on "Green River." We called the guys busy then -- new album, forthcoming EP -- and I think it's appropriate to repeat it now: Here's "Sandglider" from Real Estater Matt Mondanile's ambient Ducktails project. It's a ambling outtake from his Landscape LP. If you want to position it somewhere, "Sandglider" has more immediate forward momentum than "Roses" and keeps up just fine with "Landrunner," albeit with a slightly somber gait.

It's been an eventful tour for Grizzly Bear, what with a tour bus accident that stranded half the band in Austria while the other half was la dolce vitaing it in Milan, ultimately forcing the cancellation of their support slot at a Wilco show. However their bills with fellow Twilight superfan Annie Clark are hitting as scheduled, as evidenced by this clip of Daniel Rossen joining St. Vincent at Basel, Switzerland's Volkshaus for a hypnotically looped pass at "The Party": Annie does the singing, Mr. Rossen supplies the inverted guitar chord atmospherics.

Busy Jersey-born favorites Real Estate slowed things down and classed them up on their excellent new self-titled Woodsist full-length. For instance, we first heard a speedier, electric "Green River" as the nugget-sized B-Side on the "Fake Blues" 7": Take a listen to the album's languid acoustic approach after you read frontman Martin Courtney's thoughts on the extended chill-out makeover.

This week we also offered the chance to win a DJ Hero bundle with game and turntable controller.

After topping the Amazon Editors' Best Albums Of 2009 list, Neko Case took a victory lap, performing a loose, pitch-perfect "Red Tide" for Jimmy Fallon last night. We've mentioned previously how good Case and her band sound live, so even though Middle Cyclone came out last March, she might as well prove she can sound great on every Late Night program. (And, in the process, make a case -- sorry -- that bad Late Night sound can't always be blamed on the techs.)

In early 2009 one-woman DIY BTW tUnE-YaRdS, aka Merrill Garbus, self-released her debut BiRd-BrAiNs. It showed up after that on vinyl via Marriage Records and it's out again today in Deluxe re-issue form via 4AD. It's been remastered at Abbey Road and includes two new tracks, "Want Me To" and "Real Live Flesh." To celebrate all of this activity, the label put out a "Hatari" 7" and the BiRd DrOpPiNgS EP. The vinyl includes "Hatari" plus a remix of the track by Small Is Beautiful (aka J'aime Tambeur from Islands/Unicorns) and a new tUnE-YaRdS tune, "Hap-B." The EP pairs the self-same Small Is Beautiful remix with the three aforementioned new tracks. What you won't find on any of these is this extended, spacious remix of "Hatari" by Drunken Monkey. Start your own solo drum circle. Dance on your caps lock.