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Pitchfork contributor Nitsuh Abebe engages Alison Goldfrapp and Will Gregory of Goldfrapp in a fireside chat at the Bowery Hotel. They touch on songwriting process, the difficulties of talking about music, and the curious influence of the animal kingdom.

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First, the song, "Weekend", off of the upcoming album Car Alarm by the Sea and Cake: It's so good. I can understand why some people stop following this band closely, since on a cursory listen their records can sort of bleed into each other. But when they're playing with this kind of energy, integrating electronics into that ringing guitar strum, and Sam Prekop has the "Doo-dee-doos" working, they still do this sort of thing better than any band going. Then there's the video, by director Tim Sutton, which follows the exploits of a group of kids as they bike, skateboard, swim, jump, and generally have a ball. Not on a school day, presumably.

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[from Car Alarm; due 10/21/08 on Thrill Jockey]

Throw Me the Statue toss us some more literate, low-key guitar-pop with "Ship", from the Seattle band's tour-only Purple Face EP. As the Scott Reitherman-led group sets sail with the likes of Bodies of Water and David Vandervelde (dates are here), this song has more of the understated yet inventive instrumentation that former Pedro the Lion member Casey Foubert helped bring to debut album Moonbeams. Programmed beats set a martial rhythm, and drawn-out keyboard chords evoke melancholy overhead. "We too can hear, it gives us cause to wonder of loss," Reitherman murmurs, before adding, "It's all right," amid some nimble guitars and horns on the chorus. Strangely, no statues were thrown overboard during the making of this track.

MP3:> Throw Me the Statue: "Ship"
[from the Purple Face EP; available only on tour on Secretly Canadian]

Salem's debut four-song 7" is called Yes I Smoke Crack. On the cover, swathed in black, is the face of a terror-stricken woman. Side A begins with "Redlights", a lurching, bass-heavy synth haunting that sounds sort of like the Cocteau Twins backed by chopped 'n' screwed club-rap. Side B ends with "Dirt", which, true to its title, cakes even more murk over its industrial-chugging synths, trunk-rattling thuds, and still-beating heart. The tweaked vocals have an alienating effect, as in the Knife's music, while the absorbing buzzes and crunches envelop like an underworld My Bloody Valentine, a mope-out (or a creep-out) instead of a bliss-out. It gives me the shivers, but I'm never quite sure if they're the good kind.

MP3:> Salem: "Dirt"

BONUS: Then there's the video. Made by the band themselves in Traverse City, Mich., it's definitely NSFW. An opening moment of silence leads into scenes of suicide and a nude body grinding. Salem aren't the only ones smoking crack: Although the Yes I Smoke Crack EP was the debut release on Patrik North's Acephale label, the band has another EP on the way via Merok in October. As if any of us will still be alive by then.

[from the Yes I Smoke Crack EP; out now on Acephale]

Some confess they're left frigid or baffled by Max Tundra's obsessive and virtuosic laptronica, and, for those who have heard it, by his recent six-year quest to cram hundreds of beats and blips and orphaned samples into forthcoming LP Parallax Error Beheads You. Then you've got us others, who are so overstimulated by every sound that we want to rush the stage and jump on his shoulders and scream "YES YES YES" like Molly Bloom in earbuds. While the fantastically crowded textures of Ben Jacobs (Max Tundra's solo mastermind) first grab the ear, the warmth that legitimizes it lies in his Englishness: on "Which Song", his computer-aided falsetto apes Scritti Politti's Green Gartside while his humble, facts-of-his-life lyrics recall Robert Wyatt.

Like he promised on Mastered By Guy at the Exchange, he only writes about what happens to him, and this time he's confessing his tendency to overwhelm his dates and seek a "potential wife" when he should know to play it cool. Learning about football and spending more than 20p on a jumper could also help him pull-- but that's not to say he lacks confidence. His concert-honed vocals have grown stronger, and power chords and a hook surface from the swarm of so many emotionally-closeted synths and modest micro-melodies. And almost lost in the extended instrumental is a keyboard solo that's as witty as it is utterly, fussily mechanical.

MP3:> Max Tundra: "Which Song"
[from Parallax Error Beheads You; due 10/13/08 in the UK and 11/18/08 in the U.S. on Domino]

The world of the video for El Perro del Mar's "Glory to the World" is a pretty drab place: an assembly line of white-clad workers glumly putting objects into little brown boxes. The actual glory is in the daydreams the characters come up with to pass the time, as one of the workers discovers by pointing an X-ray telescope at her colleagues' heads. While sad Swede Sarah Assbring's fragile voice weeps through chirping woodwinds and funereal organs on this track from From the Valley to the Stars, a man imagines riding a motor scooter through some European city with a glamorous lover. A woman pictures herself on a romantic nighttime gondola ride. Another guy is photographing a pair of frisky female models. But one man is imagining himself on a sailing ship, peering through a telescope of his own, and that's where our life is not a movie or maybe.

Video:> El Perro Del Mar: "Glory to the World"
[from From the Valley to the Stars; out now on Licking Fingers/The Control Group]

A pleasant nostalgia fills Q-Tip single "Gettin' Up", easy like a Thursday morning. That was probably inevitable for a track from the A Tribe Called Quest rapper/producer's first proper solo album since 1999's J Dilla-produced Amplified. In the video, Q-Tip looks to be tweaking our collective nostalgia slightly, wearing a Davy Crockett hat and a red military jacket Michael Jackson might've sported in the early 1980s. "Walking through the corridors of my mind/ The hideaways, the nooks there, filled with good times," Q-Tip rhymes amid buoyant bass and splashes of piano, as good times go on around him and on an old, sepia-toned TV screen. "Now look at our lives, so colorful," he observes.

[from The Renaissance; due this fall on Universal Motown]

I don't know whether this video is official, or what. I do know that when I think of the ethereal synths, honking siren blares, and shuffling lo-fi electronic beats of Crystal Castles's "Knights", well, I think of hipsters on bicycles, eerie blonde twin boys, old cars, dank clubs, and a pimpin' dude with a smooth metal face getting wailed on by the aforementioned bicycling hipster until his metal face looks like a disco ball, and the eerie blonde twins shaking their rocker hair, and it all sort of happening somehow in two places at once. So yeah, official or not, its a nice follow-up to the recent "Crimewave (Crystal Castles vs. HEALTH)" video, also from the from the Toronto duo's self-titled debut LP.

[from Crystal Castles; out now on Last Gang]

Sure, Frightened Rabbit's April-released sophomore effort, The Midnight Organ Fight, was a triumph of bass-free, acousti-electric folk-rock, but-- no offense to the album-- even it didn't capture the pop power that the Scottish trio is capable of reaching onstage. Live, drummer Grant Hutchison strikes his skins with a single-minded, bloody-knuckled abandon, breaking drum sticks while holding down the low end with precise, tribal thuds. And in front of a crowd, his brother, singer/guitarist Scott, matches the rawness of his guttural, glottal delivery with the antithetical sweetness of his strum. The result is masculine yet openhearted, basic yet vital. But the finite restrictions of recording and the distance that studio polish can create makes it hard for a band like Frightened Rabbit to capture their rhythmic heaviness or the vulnerability of Scott's quavering burr on tape. Such a disconnect between their unbridled concert sound and their more restrained recorded one makes Frightened Rabbit a prime candidate for that oft-overused trope: the live album. This band, however, have earned theirs, and Liver! Lung! FR! is luckily due out next month.

This stripped-down version of "Old Old Fashioned" (originally off of Fight) puts the emphasis squarely on its percussive pulse and Scott's unadorned vocals, which serves to illustrate precisely the lyrics that he's singing. Yearning for the proverbial "simpler time," Scott longs to turn off the TV and waltz with his lady as the radio plays. "We won't need no electricity...Let's get old fashioned, back to how things used to be," he croons. And with just a bluegrass-inspired acoustic guitar line and Grant's insistent kick drum behind him, this version seems to take that advice to heart. 

MP3:> Frightened Rabbit: "Old Old Fashioned" (live)
[from Liver! Lung! FR!; due 10/21/08 on FatCat]

Following up on our post yesterday, here's Part 2 of Crystal Antlers' appearance on "Don't Look Down". Some bands, when they perform these sets on top of buildings, it's great to see them underneath the blue sky and sunlight, but the noisy grind of C.A. sounds much better in the darkness. These three songs all come from their self-titled EP; "A Thousand Eyes" is below, and the other two are over at Pitchfork.tv.

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