Andrew Bird – “Fitz and the Dizzyspells” (Live on Letterman, 1/27/09)

Casiotone for the Painfully Alone – “Old Panda Days”From CFTPA‘s upcoming Advance Base Battery Life, out 3/10 on Tomlab.

Final Fantasy – “Horsetail Feathers”

Amazon is selling an mp3 download of the 17-track Radiohead: The Best of for only $5.

Bishop Allen frontman Justin Rice talks to Exclaim! about the band's forthcoming album, Grrr... (out March 10th).

The Asheville Citizen-Times interviews Patterson Hood of the Drive-By Truckers.

Q: What different approach — if any — will you bring to your upcoming solo release?

A: It's very different from my first solo album. It's kind of a power pop album (to me). Half of the songs were written before DBT came to be and the other half were written from a very different perspective in the months prior to my daughter's birth. I'm very proud of it and hope it can finally see the light of day.

The Guardian previews Bob Dylan's Super Bowl ad for Pepsi.

Boxwish lists the best fictional bands in movies.

The A.V. Club reviews the DVD, How to Work Out Like an Indie Rocker.

NME's In the Office blog lists the best online music services.

The Guardian gives the new Andrew Bird album, Noble Beast, five stars out of a possible five.

Bird and his 10 collaborators use sound the way the impressionists daubed paint, layering elegiac violin melodies with pattering plucked notes, fuzzy or jangly guitar, clip-clop percussion, clicks and drones to create music that might be straightforwardly folky, brightly poppy or more experimental, but is always vivid and engaging.

Coachella has announced its 2009 lineup, daily headliners are Paul McCartney, the Killers, and the Cure.

The New York Times profiles Bruce Springsteen.

While his latest seven-album contract with Columbia Records is worth a reported $110 million, he still comes across as a working-class guy from New Jersey, invoking a compassionate populism as he sings about jobs, families and everyday life and savors the company of his longtime buddies in the E Street Band. He has the gravitas to lead off an inaugural concert and the gusto to rock the Super Bowl. In between he released a new studio album, “Working on a Dream.”

Modest Mouse
The Decoder Ring Design Concern, 2005

One of the running themes in Franz Ferdinand’s music is an awareness that music and the social culture around it can provide an valuable escape from the more dreary aspects of life, and that framework gives us the raw materials to reinvent ourselves and reshape the narrative of our lives. In other words, the band have been making a case that hedonism and imagination are essential coping mechanisms for dealing with life, and ought to be embraced lest we give in to boredom and horror.

“Lucid Dreams” takes the band’s themes — both conceptual and musical — to the furthest extreme of their career to date. The lyrics express a desire not only to fully escape reality, but to reshape it within the mind to something more like a utopia. Of course, there is a catch: The escape is fleeting, and the alternate reality is constructed by a flawed mind, and so the limits of one’s own awareness and the depths of one’s neuroses are imposed on the supposedly perfect world.

In terms of the musical arrangement, the structure of the song is like a flowchart of the band’s development, starting with a charming power pop introduction before leaning into a more intense variation on their standard dance-rock template, and then concluding with an electronic acid climax and resolution that pushes them into an uncharted territory of their aesthetic. In context, the transition into the electronic section — which, I should mention is rather similar to the trick LCD Soundsystem pulled in “Yeah” — has a way of signaling a slip into another state of mind, as if casting off the vestiges of rock music has taken the music to a more “pure” place that mirrors the utopia in the singer’s mind.

Buy it from Amazon.

Yuula Benivolski When you’ve become gotten to know a band exclusively through their live performances, it can be difficult to accept them as a recorded entity. Especially so when the band in a live setting possess a sort of elemental energy that you can’t imagine being done justice in a studio environment. This was the case with Toronto’s Bruce Peninsula, who made a serious impression with a series of shows back in 2007 which established the band, ten members deep when at full strength, as a potent new force on the local music scene.

A listen to their first recorded output last Summer - a 7″ of traditional folk recordings - verified that they’d somehow managed to capture their sonic potency, but it took some time with their debut album A Mountain Is A Mouth - out on Tuesday - to confirm that they’d really made a record that fulfilled all the expectations that had accumulated since August of 2007. And they have.

MySpace: Bruce Peninsula

Stereogum is offering up an MP3 from the new Great Lake Swimmers record Lost Channels, due out March 31.

The Globe & Mail profiles Laura Barrett, complete with awful, awful headline.

Rolling Stone reports that Metric will release their new album Fantasies on April 14.

The Seattle Post-Intelligencier talks to Brendan Canning of Broken Social Scene.

Neko Case sounds off on animal rights to Spinner and verifies that you shouldn’t expect to see her in any PETA ads anytime soon.

The Daily Texan speaks briefly to Jonathan Meiburg of Shearwater, who aim to have a new album out this year.

Drowned In Sound offers up a three-part interview with M Ward. Hold Time is out February 17.