A few weeks ago I offered up some words in testament to Warp records, the ambitious, tasteful, and increasingly eclectic label that's also earned itself a "venerable" descriptor having just celebrated 20 years of nurturing the processes of everyone from Boards Of Canada to Battles. Their latest signing, LoneLady -- who is in fact a lone lady named Julie Campbell from Manchester -- offers another reminder of how far Warp's come from its nascent, radical electronic days. We have one track to go on so far, called "Immaterial" -- the A-side to an introductory 7" out this week in anticipation of next year's full-length debut. On it LoneLady eschews any easy singer-songwriter categorizations, just as she seems to discourage them with an insanely broad list of cited influences that covers everyone from Wire, Grace Jones, and Throbbing Gristle to Scott Walker, Kraftwerk, and Salt 'N' Pepa; too broad to be meaningful, beyond meaning to be beyond easy classification. Here's an MP3 of the aforementioned, airy and existentially tinged "Immaterial," which was recorded by Julie in her self-built studio with producer Guy Fixsen (My Bloody Valentine, the Breeders, Stereolab), featuring a steely guitar figure and open-tuned strums, chimes, keys, and a malleable voice, but unfortunately no allusions to autobahns or "Push It."

Ex-Titus Andronicus and Glen Rock, NJ resident Andrew Cedermark (he lives in Charlottesville, Virginia now) is releasing a split 7" with Family Portrait next week via Underwater Peoples. Cedermark represents on Side A with "Untruth" and "Hard Livin'," two things that can often go hand in hand. In his brief bio at Underwater Peoples he notes:

I have only ever played one show [now false]. With some friends on the night I graduated from college. We covered "Tugboat" by Galaxie 500 and "Amen" by Spacemen 3, and I was feeling a little ill, for I had a cold. Regardless, ribaldry and mirth were the orders of the evening and much fun was had by all.

You get some of that haze here mixed with a slightly muted take on Titus Andronicus' ramshackle anthemics. It doesn't open up right way either. All of which makes for satisfying repeat listens.

Passing through these photos of the Flaming Lips' naked-bicyclist video shoot confirmed that yes, Wayne wasn't playing coy -- he wanted to videotape young things who knew how to ride bikes and also were comfortable being framed in perpetuity as naked sylvan nymphs in a Flaming Lips video. But those pics didn't suggest the biggest revelation, that being the big reveal of Wayne's coyne. Yep he gets naked, just like the rest. "Killing the ego" indeed. (Or, inflating it. Depending on your angle. And his.) If you've seen the Lips during this summer or beyond, when they've been playing new stuff, you likely remember their stage entrance through those psychedelically undulating vaginal lips. Well those make an appearance too, in spirit, and Wayne takes a terrible old Truly Tasteless Joke -- you spend nine months of your life trying to get out, and the rest of your life trying to get back in -- to its illogical extreme.

Watch "Watching The Planets" at NME. Sorry Sigur Rós and Girls, you lose.

San Diego quartet the Soft Pack were called the Muslims when we suggested you keep your eyes on them. They shifted the name, but their Strokes-esque Stooges-inspired post-punk rock 'n' roll remains the same (even when they go acoustic). They reminded me of a preppy Richard Hell and the Voidoids when I first heard them... that's still there. Ditto a modern Modern Lovers. So what else shifted? The group's recently done shows with Phoenix (who they've remixed), Franz Ferdinand, the Last Shadow Puppets, and the Breeders and are about to release their self-titled full-length debut on Kemado. Take a look at the video for first single "Answer To Yourself," which finds the guys working hard for the money, etc., at Del Mar Pizza. Oscars will not be awarded for the fight sequence.

Patrick Wolf has an unusually strong appeal to two distinct demographics: highbrow actresses and fans of S&M bondage outfits. (Actually, those demographics really aren't that distinct. Highbrow actresses are fetishists of the highest order for all you know. Have you ever seen Showgirls? Case rested.) Regardless, Patrick doesn't cross the streams on this high concept video for "Damaris," the latest single from his Bachelor LP. Wolf gets a directing credit (along with Director of Photography Rory Broadfoot) and casts himself opposite the actress Gwendoline Christie, who YouTube tells us "can currently be seen playing Holly Go Lightly's glamorous neighbour in the hit West End production of Breakfast at Tiffanys, and also in the Terry Gilliam film The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus." There's some choreography, some kissing of the heterosexual variety, and some nice shots of the Blackdown, West Sussex wilderness. Who knew Patrick was so dramatic? (Everybody knew Patrick was so dramatic.) Watch:

As we've mentioned, 19-year-old Santa Rosa multi-instrumentalist Ryan Schmale approaches That Ghost's fuzzy, spacious pop in a way that reminds us more of vintage garage rockers and Robert Pollard than he does his lo-fi peers. See, for instance, "Shouldn't Leave The Estate," a song from the forthcoming Get It And Get Out EP (11/17, twosyllable) that premiered in this week's Drop. Schmale told us about the isolation and agoraphobia that inspired the track. You can read his thoughts on it while you take a listen, hopefully from the safety of your home.

In this week's Drop we also offered the chance to win a USB Turntable and the Led Zeppelin biography When Giants Walked The Earth.

Bradford Cox opens Virtual 7" no. 8 with a rousing cover of the vintage 'late 50s/early '60s pre-Now Sound Brooklyn doo-wop group the Five Discs' "Doctor." The B-Side's a somber harmonica-lined campfire-side track called "The Screens" that'd work well with what Cox has been doing lately in the more stripped down moments of his Atlas Sound live shows. Pretty, but there's a reason "Doctor" shows up where it does.

After a year that saw them cover Joy Division, get covered by Lissy Trullie, and pursue various side projects, UK dance crew Hot Chip are set to return with a new LP, the Made In The Dark followup titled One Life Stand. The set is due in February via Astralwerks and features, according to Alexis Taylor's recent interview with NME, the "anthemic" song "I Feel Better," a "big, massive Euro club sounding track." They're still deciding whether that song or this updated version of the previously released "Take It In" will serve as the first single, but either way this new gothy then uplifting "Take It In" is the first One Life Stand serving available for listens. Take it in:

Maybe we're not ready to call it a trend, but Cloud Nothing's ebullient, gently snotty lo-fi pop does pair nicely with Wild Nothing's "Confirmation," at least on a textural level. I don't know all that much about Cloud Nothings besides a vague Ohio address, a CD/cassette forthcoming on California's Bridgetown Records, a tendency to use the words "me" and "my" in MySpace updates, and a Cory Arcangel-style cloud is the official CN "photo." But really, you don't need to any more than that to know "Hey Cool Kid" has one hell of an immediate hook to go with its seeming sarcasm.

Sweden's the Mary Onettes are '80s radio playlists raiders of the highest order. On the best tracks from their second LP Islands, the band finds a wistful sweet spot between synthetic swell (everyone from New Order to a-ha) and new romantic swoon (the Cure, or even Echo & The Bunnymen). Last week, they came through NYC for their second time, to support this second album, playing three public shows -- at Union Hall (11/4), the Studio @ Webster Hall (11/6), and Mercury Lounge (11/8) -- and one private one at their label offices. Along the way they even did normal human things like riding subways, bar hopping in the East Village, selling CDs on street corners, returning lost wallets to NYC students, and ample etcs. Photographer Kyle Dean Reinford spent a few nights shadowing the band in their various guises and delivers this caption-filled photo essay for a peek at how much fun it is to visit the city when you're in a band that everybody is into. Click through for the gallery, and click below for a couple of MP3s and the video for the excellent Islands standout "Puzzles."

I like a lot of Isis -- especially Oceanic, Panopticon, and, yes, In The Absence Of Truth -- but the Boston-to-L.A. post-metal group's generally beloved fifth album Wavering Radiant has struck me, basically, as good background music since its release this past Spring. Sue me: The Isis elements are there, but somehow it's just too well-oiled. The polish provides a fitting soundtrack for the sleek, subtly detailed imagery in this gorgeously epic Matt Santoro-directed video for "20 Minutes/40 Years."

Few rooms offer what Bowery does in terms of acoustics; dial your levels right onstage and the Ballroom's soundsystem and resonant effects will do the rest. With Cass McCombs's fourth LP, the endlessly repeatable Catacombs, the traveling troubadour has never been quite so forthright with his lyrical content: he's singing about what's on his mind, and what's on his mind is mostly what's in his heart. So Bowery was the right room for this late-support show of his latest LP, where the bed of Korg keys and gently swelling pedal steel guitars could color, but never color over, those sweet Catacombs couplets. At times the locomotive rumble and dustier trappings of his writing can feel like paging through a book of faded photographs, which made the coat rack casually hanging out stage right a perfect prop; the checkered, flickering light rig in back was a curveball, but a good spin for a songwriter that's been tough to pin down over the years. (These weren't all new songs, after all, the setlist dating back all the way to his debut EP Not The Way's title track.)

Opening were Acrylics, who we've seen twice with a drummer (opening for Besnard Lakes at Mercury, again at the Terrible Records showcase during CMJ) -- and after last night, once without. Going without drums shouldn't be a permanent shift, and I don't imagine it was, but it offered a chance to hone in on what makes the band's best songs ("All Of The Fire" and "Vertigo" if you're tracking) tick: the uncluttered and unabashedly '70s radio-pop melodies, the occasional harmony, the voice of Molly Shea. The band's Chris Taylor-produced debut EP All Of The Fire is out now. Download the title track here, and have a pass at these photos by Jessica Amaya. (The early opener was Bad Girlfriends, a band helmed by Cass's touring bassist; she wore red for the early set, black leggings for the late.)

You wouldn't be faulted if OX, Coalesce's first album in almost a decade, shocked you with its overall raw, vital energy. "Reunions" don't often work this well. That said, as I mentioned shortly before it's release in June, the new collection ranks with their classic 0:12 Revolution In Just Listening and, yup ... I really do prefer it to its elder. Riding that wave, the new seven-song OXEP, which came out today, continues the expansive, texturally expanded post-hardcore exploration of the full-length. (It's all new material.) When speaking with vocalist Sean Ingram and guitarist Jes Steineger about OX I suggested:

Maybe because of the country western and just straight-up western feel ("Wild Ox Moan," "We Have Lost Our Will"), it comes off as a really American album. I don't mean this in a jingoist way. More Johnny Cash. A distinctively American sound.

Their responses go well with OXEP's "Absent In Death." So read while you listen.

Hey you lovers of vampires and/or mall culture, this one's for you. The Twilight Saga: New Moon OST is the #1 album in America, shortly before the Twilight Saga: New Moon feature film will be the #1 reason to avoid movie theaters in America. Death Cab is on it with "Meet Me On The Equinox," and either because they love Twilight or because they love Hot Topic or because they have to pay the piper for being the featured single from a pretty stacked soundtrack, the band is the only A-list outfit to have been roped into the album's Hot Topic Twilight Tour tie-in. Their engagement was limited to the Hollywood & Highland HT stop, which happened Friday. Now if only somebody brought a camera...

In the one-sheet for Warm Brother, Arizona-bred Digital Leather mastermind Shawn Foree talks about coming up with his current moniker after years of taking acid and making home recordings on his 4-track:

i think the combination of drugs and reading too much postmodern theory (baudrillard, lyotard, lacan) is what first inspired DL thematically. but i was still pretty much doing the same thing as always: recording in my bedroom. not caring what people thought. the concept of DL just kinda stuck with me and evolved. never had the desire to do anything else like start some side project, or work at a bank. although i did have to work at a porn shop for a year. that was fucking scary. i used to do graveyard shifts. sometimes i'd go in there drunk and pass out in my chair behind the register. i'd wake up an hour later to some creepy old man trying to by a sixteen inch dildo or something.

He lives in Omaha now and finds himself backed by a second guitarist, bassist, and drummer. He no longer works in the porn shop, but this video for Warm Brother's "Hurt So Bad" does involve a friendly gloryhole.

Good news for lovers of cantankerous, hyperacusis-afflicted songwriters (also, just plain old good news): Stephin Merritt and his Magnetic Fields will be back with their eighth LP Realism on January 26th. This comes after a year that offered a particularly momentous Merritt milestone in the classic 69 Love Songs' 10th anniversary (alongside endorsing Puma and plotting to pen 50 successful Hollywood musicals), but the world could always use new Mag Fields songs to hear, and indie rockers could always use new Mag Fields songs to cover. We've been given precious little info aside from the album art and a tracklist, but that LP cover is pretty suggestive: It expands on the design template introduced with Love Songs and furthered by i (Magnetic strip on the side, image to the right), sure, but its notable for how it pairs with the last one. Then it was a blurred boy for an album called Distortion; here it's a straight-lined girl for an album called Realism. At the very least, I think they're telling us to expect much less Jesus & Mary Chain haze this time around.

The tracklist:

When Dayve Hawk edited "Graphics" for UK radio he opted out of a simple abridgment, instead slicing and dicing it while also folding in new passages and a clipped futuristic (less backward looking) beat. Hence the title. On a structural level, the song's gone from 6 minutes to 3 and it's been remastered: Take a look at the prismatic artwork while you take a listen to the FM-ready face lift. (Mind the skulls.)

In the 11/22 episode ("My Morning Straitjacket"), Stan becomes a MMJ groupie so Yim Yames shows up in shaggy pre-MOF form, the other guys are angelic in the buff. Six songs by the band will be featured in the episode, and Zach Galifianakis cameos as a super-fan. Take a peek at these stills (via stewiesplayground via TwentyFourBit), and if you're curious how this collaboration happened, read a press release Q&A with American Dad co-creator Mike Barker reprinted below.

Welcome to your music meme of the week. Turns out there are bands in Williamsburg, and New York is all over it. It's far from the first time our neighborhood's been dressed up and packaged for a major print publication, but maybe it's the first time the scene's been distilled into a playlist everybody can argue about. The criteria for inclusion on this list isn't explicitly stated, beyond the "A highly subjective ranking of the songs that define the sound of right now" subheader. And subjective it is: Passing through its 40 tracks and 39 artists ("Knife" and "Two Weeks" are by the same band, after all), it seems there wasn't much criteria at all: an artist could call Brooklyn home, but also just have just visited (see: Neon Indian). A song could have been released in 2009, but also three years ago (see: the aforementioned "Knife"). But before we jump down NY Mag's throats about their fuzzy parameters, it sort of fits with what passes for the Brooklyn scene now, a neighborhood of transplants and myriad genres that share little in common aside from a 11211 postal code. Although that won't stop the mag from framing their top pick as its focal point. After all that we've been through, I know you'll guess it.

Art Fag, the label that brought us a great four-way split earlier this year, was the home of the first 7" from Best Coast aka Bethany Cosentino. For this next pair of tracks, produced by Fool's Gold's Lewis Pesacov, she's taken musical partner Bobb Bruno and flipped over to Lewis's Black Iris imprint. The 7" features "When I'm With You" b/w "This Is Real," both of which fit nicely in the rising tide of beachy noise-pop coming from the West Coast: playfully fuzzed and pleasantly reverbed, heartbeat drums, girl group harmonies, and a fixation on California pop you don't need to skim her press materials to finger. One MP3, one stream, both here:

London's Golden Silvers made their way to the States last month for CMJ, turning in one of the IAMSOUND showcase's many great sets and converting us, and seemingly all those around us, on the spot. In our BTW post the next day, we included this brassy re-do of "Arrows Of Eros," which appears on the Silvers' debut True Romance as a Clash-inflected bit of new wave pop that melded mildly funky bass to soul pianos, a single horn, synths from the '80s and harmonies from three decades earlier. For this take, the nine-piece Chicago jazz outfit -- eight of whom call Phil Cohran "dad" -- joined Golden Silvers at Damon Albarn's Studio 13 to re-record the track from the single-horn up, multiplying that bit of brass many times and substituting it for the rest. It's a successful experiment, and lucky them, there happened to be a video camera on hand that day. Here's the official vid for the officially horny retake:

The reunited Pixes kicked off their nine city US tour -- the one where they play Doolittle cover to cover -- in Los Angeles earlier this week. The band's celebrating a lot, from the 20th anniversary of that classic LP to the release of the physically massive Minotaur boxed set (not so much a coffee table decoration as a coffee table), in various ways this week. You can download a free live EP culled from the band's show in Paris last month, or you could watch this clip of "Here Comes Your Man" for the Tonight Show audience. Frank Black spoke to Minotaur's size, but you get some real perspective when it still looks tremendous sitting under Conan's ample cranium.

Much as Billy Corgan has made a sport of testing Smashing Pumpkins fans' limits this past year, last night's benefit for one-time Smashing Pumpkins Fan Club chief Laura Ann Marusa is a reminder that he really does appreciate those that appreciate him. Of course Laura isn't just your average Pumpkin lover; in addition to making delicious artisanal jams, Masura is a musician in her own right, a Chicago scene drummer and founding member of the bands Evil Beaver, the Prescriptions and Motorhome. A ghastly motorcycle accident forced the amputation of her foot, and her health care doesn't cover much of the fallout. True to his beneficial mode of 2009, Billy anchored last night's benefit show at the Echoplex, creating the band Backwards Clock Society for the event, featuring Mark Tulin of the Electric Prunes on bass along with longtime Pumpkin associate Kerry Brown, ex-Catherine drummer and ex-Mr. D'arcy Wretzky (who has recently been found, btw).

Gothy San Diego Outsiders Blessure Grave recently graced us with the appropriately dark, dramatic Adam Grabarnick-directed video for "Open Or Shut." We don't have moving images this time, but in "Stranger In The House" Reyna and Toby conjure more than enough darkness without turning on a video camera. The song's a demo from the band's next EP, which they haven't recorded just yet.

When I wrote up "Swollen And Halo" and talked up Baroness' Blue Record, I told you to keep watch for the Joshua Green-directed video for another standout, "A Horse Called Golgotha." It's here and it's suitably intense considering the Golgotha reference/Calvary pun. The clip features a bald, bloodied, and muscular savior/modern dancer involved in various tasks/tests that make him want to lift his arms in the air and/or scream: The sun rises and eclipses on the back of his head, he vomits black tarry bloody, he's reborn via a trip to a psychedelic interlude, etc.

Things were different from the last time we saw Girls live, when we hosted their first NYC show at Market Hotel: near unanimous praise for one of the year's best Albums, and a recently reconfigured lineup that saw the abrupt departure of their touring guitarist, replaced for this trek on a few days practice by Ryan Lynch aka BTW Dominant Legs. As a result the jangle-pop was jammed to a manageable tempo, the heartbeat drums dialed down to a low pressure BPM, but the songs remained the same: a batch of 13 finely tuned happy/sad gems (along with their show-closing and -stopping cover of Daniel Johnston's "True Love Will Find You In The End") shaped in a classic-pop mold that took the slower pace to be more dynamic and less California dreamy.

Opening were the New Jersey BTW Real Estate, who seem to be in an early slot on most every bill you'll see in NYC these days whether you want them or not (not complaining). But this one was different: this bill was a true pairing, a linking of stylistically related bands with a thread stronger than their respective buzz to tie them together. That's supported by Girls' Chris Owens shaking a tambourine during Real Estate's "Basement," sure (the symbolic lending a hand trick, maybe those people yelling for "Girls!" through the set will shut up now), yet it was made most clear by hearing how both put their own little twists on songs that live on simple progressions and boogie bass: One band anchored by a budding nerd rock laureate, the other by shambling Budweiser and sprite dazes, but both featuring pensive inebriates who built their tracks staring down sunsets over different oceans. A setlist follows, as does Kyle Dean Reinford's photos on the night.

Oh and also: Looks like Chris's story checks out. Girls really are two steps in to a killer Behind The Music one day.