Pitchfork

We're taking the holiday off (be safe with the fireworks, kids), but we'll leave you with another feature film on Pitchfork.tv. If you've been paying any attention lately, you may have noticed that Chicago singer-songwriter Liz Phair just reissued her classic 1993 album, Exile in Guyville. To coincide with the release, Phair has created the documentary Guyville Redux, in which she revisits some of the people and places that brought her record to life. The film features interviews with Matador Records' Gerard Cosloy and Chris Lombardi, Steve Albini, NPR's Ira Glass, and even Chicago's favorite son John Cusack-- with an introduction by ATO Records' founder Dave Matthews. Catch it while you can, over the holiday weekend and through next week, on Pitchfork.tv's "One Week Only."

Pitchfork.tv:> Guyville Redux (One Week Only)

In one fortnight, we here at Pitchfork (and hopefully you, too, dear reader) will congregate in Chicago's Union Park for the annual Pitchfork Music Festival. To get your appetite whetted for what promises to be the most mind-blowingly awesome festival of the summer, we're taking a peek back at last year's event, when Pavement mastermind Stephen Malkmus wowed the crowd with the opening track from their classic album, Wowee Zowee.



We've also added a few more videos to our ever-expanding archive, and today Pitchfork.tv premiered the newest video from Portland art-rockers Xiu Xiu. This black and white clip for "Master of the Bump (Kurt Stumbaugh, I Can Feel the Soil Falling Over My Head)" features some gender-skewing roles, a little S&M, and a couple of uncomfortable scenes of violent lovemaking. A perfect way to start your holiday weekend.



Next up is the colorful video for Asobi Seksu's "Goodbye", which melds the irresistable strains of the Brooklyn trio's shoegaze with kaleidoscopic images of origami papers, and sends singer Yuki Chikudate on a bizarre voyage through a world built of paper flowers.



Finally we have the melodramatic clip for "Royal Family" from ex-!!! member John Pugh's Free Blood project. Some apocalyptic percussion-- heavy drums, clanging metal, sparse piano, and handclaps-- form the basis of this track, while the video marries surrealist images of a woman in a Victorian armory-cum-recording studio with shots of Pugh in the middle of a desert. But keep watching and you realize that maybe these two locations aren't so far apart after all.

Well here's a creepy new video from Xiu Xiu's Women as Lovers, a high-contrast black and white clip, directed by documentarian Courtney Fathom Sell. The cut follows two young dudes-- one a Cobain lookalike who has arranged a gay tryst in a dank cellar, and then a rather mod fellow who meets another boy on his own strange trip to an empty field near the woods. The film soon becomes a haunting series of clips involving bondage, male kissing, and even a little water sport. So, like, it's probably not safe for work.


[from Women as Lovers, out now on Kill Rock Stars]

Hey, it's a track from Mogwai's new album-- you remember, that one called The Hawk is Howling that features this lovely picture of an animal that is neither a hawk nor howling? Well this track, which bears an equally puzzling name, begins typically enough for a Mogwai tune-- some slightly distorted guitars chiming, a nice simple post-rock drum beat. But soon enough, like clouds parting to reveal a sunny sky, chiming synths and pulsing electronic tones open up a heavier side to the song, the drums eventually getting outright tribal and all the elements building up to a wash of noise before devolving into a few blinking synth patterns and delicately strummed guitars.

MP3:> Mogwai: "The Sun Smells Too Loud"
[from The Hawk is Howling; due 09/22/08 on Matador]

It must be pretty time consuming to be Lil Wayne. Between creating hundreds of mixtape tracks, selling a million copies of his long-awaited Tha Carter III in its first week, penning this song about why he's great enough to sell a million copies of the record, and running around making videos for the album's multiple singles, Dwayne Carter must have about...a million things on his mind. This video for Carter III single "A Milli" finds Lil Wayne seeing to his various duties: sitting in his makeup chair, posing for a shot with a young fan, selecting his wardrobe-- all in preparation for...the next video from Tha Carter III. A steadycam follows Wayne as he walks a couple blocks from his trailer into what appears to be a big bank housing another film crew. Hmm, looks like a nice set up for a "Got Money" clip.


[from Tha Carter III, out now on Cash Money/Universal/Young Money]

On his last LP, Nas killed hip-hop to clear ground for a glorious resurrection, starring himself as mortician-turned-messiah. "Hip-hop was aborted," he raps on this new track from his forthcoming album, "so Nas breathes life back into the embryo." Fittingly, "Queens Get the Money" is elementary, omitting the drums and bass that have been hip-hop's lifeblood. Up-and-comer Jay Electronica's track is just skating piano phrases, of a piece with Child Rebel Soldiers' glassy, Thom Yorke-sampling mixtape cut "Us Placers".

Lyrically, Nas offers up a digest of his own tics: We get a couple brain-melting similes ("I'm over they heads like a bulimic on a seesaw"), some sociopolitical laments ("Pregnant teens give birth to intelligent gangsters, they daddies faceless"), hood-status touchiness ("Talking that Nas done fell off with rhyming/ He'd rather floss with diamonds"), and megalomaniacal fantasy (uh, remember when Nas "punched down devils that brought down the towers"?).

He really does have something deep and trenchant to say about the state of hip-hop, if you can ferret it out from the free-associative boilerplate: Consider the conflation of "Huey P. and Louis V.," alongside Nas' new moniker, "Nasty NASDAQ." Revolution blurs into fashion, outlaw rappers become legitimate businessmen, and a music born of the revolutionary spirit reckons with its assimilation into what it rails against.



[from Untitled; due 07/15/08 on Jones Experience/Def Jam]

An appropriately lo-fi WFMU in-studio video for this lo-fi monster jam off one of 2008's first Best New Music inductees, Times New Viking's Rip It Off. Bonus: you can actually see their faces! Ten whole imaginary dollars go to whomever can make out what the heck drummer Adam Elliott blathers at the end of this clip [via Matablog].

Double bonus: WFMU's Beware of the Blog has MP3s of TNV's entire nine-song in-studio set.

[original from Rip It Off; out now on Matador]

With the 2008 Pitchfork Music Festival just over two weeks away, Pitchfork.tv today served up another one of last year's highlights: Clipse and their Re-Up Gang associates Ab-Liva and Sandman steamrolling through Hell Hath No Fury standout "Ride Around Shining" before 17,000+ fist-pumping festivalgoers. Look closely and you'll see Thurston Moore soaking it all in upstage.



We also added a trio of high-energy videos, beginning with this Forkcast-featured clip for CSS' new single "Rat Is Dead (Rage)", a delirious glam-up marked by relentless camera movement and attitude in spades.



Next up, a classic from a couple years back from the Go! Team, matching their gleeful cut-ups with some of the snazziest arts and crafts concoctions this side of kindergarten.



And finally, the Besnard Lakes' Dark Horse comes to life in this apocalyptic animated offering from director Kara Blake.

When it comes to CSS, the live setting is where it's at. Wisely, this staged performance clip for Donkey's previously Forkcasted first offering "Rat Is Dead (Rage)" gives the rambunctious combo and their instruments plenty of room to roam. In lieu of a stoked-to-bits crowd we get frenetic lighting effects and a relentless camera that swoops in and out, assaulting the band from every angle. True to form, the members of CSS never shrink from meeting the aggressive thing eye-to-lens.



[from Donkey; due 07/21/08 in the UK on Warner and 07/22/08 in the U.S. on Sub Pop]

Photo by Daniel Cantó

Some fan reports suggest sound problems soured Radiohead's headline appearance at the inaugural Daydream Festival in Barcelona on June 12, and those problems are certainly visible and audible here. Ed O'Brien can be seen motioning to have his guitar turned up, Thom Yorke appears preoccupied and at one point drops his pick, and things generally sound out of sync and muddled. A static camera placed way back and left to zoom in and out hesitantly doesn't help matters any. But hey, all nitpicking aside, Radiohead on a bum day still top most bands at their best.


[original from In Rainbows; ATO/TBD / XL]