Photo by Paige Parsons

Over the weekend Erykah Badu tweeted "Window Seat", the first piece of new music from the upcoming New Amerykah Part II: Return of the Ankh ("Jump In the Air and Stay There", though good, is a web-only bonus track.) (Via 2DopeBoyz / Prefix)

MP3:> Erykah Badu: "Window Seat"

It's a good day to be Flying Lotus. To ease the wait between now and the May 4 release of his upcoming album Cosmogramma, Warp released three non-album tracks from the producer. One was the earlier Forkcast of Gonjasufi's "Ancestors", another his Gucci Mane remix from the "Adult Swim" compilation ATL RMX. Lastly is "Quakes", from the same 2010 comp as "Ancestors", which bumps along on scattered percussion and a fluttering futuristic synth pulse.

MP3:> Flying Lotus: "Quakes"

Owen Pallett, formerly of the moniker Final Fantasy, just released a terrific new album called Heartland. Recently, he stopped in at CBC Radio One's Studio Q and played some songs live in-studio. Here's a video of his performance of "Lewis Takes Off His Shirt", featuring Pallett on keyboards, loops, violin, and voice.

The Golden Filter are a NYC-based dance outfit that's been around for awhile, and Pitchfork.tv has posted videos of the tracks "Thunderbird" and "Solid Gold". The pulsing "Hide Me" is a track that has been drifting around in an earlier form, but here we've got the completed version of the single, due April 19, just in advance of the album Voluspa, which drops on April 26. Both releases are coming via Brille.

MP3:> The Golden Filter: "Hide Me"

Last year we brought you "All Yr Songs", a light and airy slice of bedroom pop from Toronto's Diamond Rings. John O'Regan, the man behind Diamond Rings, now has a 7" coming out via Tomlab with this song, "Wait & See" as its A-side and a cover of Sebadoh's "On Fire" on the flip. "Wait" is immediately heavier than its predecessor, with big distorted guitars and disaffected vocals carrying the busy but memorable chorus.

Ever since Hot Chip started as indie kids seemingly dabbling in classic soul and modern R&B, they've been underestimated. Delivering lines about "20-inch rims" and "Yo La Tengo" in a proper English accent, as they did on their 2005 debut, can have that effect. Yet on their two subsequent records-- 2006's The Warning and 2008's Made in the Dark-- Hot Chip steadily rebuilt their reputation by toughening up their sophistipop side. Their melodies began to betray hints of neurosis, and they earned dancefloor credibility through an association with DFA. Their fourth album, One Life Stand, changes things a bit. Dialing back some of their eccentricities and embracing personal songwriting, Hot Chip have crafted their most consistent album yet.

The Big Apple continues to inspire vastly divergent songs. In the rap world alone, the metropolis has been the subject of triumphant rallying cries, grim street assessments, and rowdy vignettes. Leave it to the ever-prescient Gil Scott-Heron to brush yet another line of color to the city's canvas. The Chicago-born, NYC-based artist is primarily known for his acclaimed series of proto-rap and spoken-word records during the 1970s. But Scott-Heron's recent life outside of music has seen him living with HIV and doing time in prison for drug-related offenses, and those experiences inform "New York is Killing Me".

The track comes from his first new album in 16 years, I'm New Here, and it depicts a stark and cold New York far removed from post-9/11 renewal. Scott-Heron echoes these personal calamities with an impressionistic and tuneful ear. His grizzled, torn-down-by-time baritone immediately demands attention, and XL Records founder Richard Russell's sparse production magnifies the song's junkyard beat with vocal detritus, handclaps, and electronic fuzz. It feels bluesy and caked in earth, but also surprisingly modern. Many artists make comebacks, but here Gil Scott-Heron makes it sound more like a rebirth.

[From I'm New Here; out now on XL]

After a 2006 album created in collaboration with Air and Jarvis Cocker, Charlotte Gainsbourg returns with a surprisingly great LP written and produced by Beck. The nods to psych rock, junkyard blues, half-rap cadences, and ghostly ballads won't shock anyone generally familiar with Beck's oeuvre, but Gainsbourg's versatile and vulnerable vocals add a depth missing from many of her songwriter's post-Sea Change work. Throughout, she makes the most of her limited vocal abilities by switching deliveries to match her surroundings. IRM marks Gainsbourg's transition from pop scion to pop artiste.

If Dan Snaith has mastered one aspect of his music career, it's change. Not the remodeling or renovation sort, more the alterations and adaptations with purpose (not even including the weird story of the Dictators' Dick Manitoba forcing Snaith to give up his pseudonym in 2004). The steady upward progression in replayability between 2001's glitchy Start Breaking My Heart and 2005's towering Milk of Human Kindness feels like a problem of some sort was solved. Which makes room for the comparative left-turn of Andorra, which both felt like a huge surprise (songs!) and a logical extension (songs with insane drumming!) of what he'd always been doing.

I'll admit that when I first saw the title "Odessa", I feared the worst-- stasis. The song's title, and Snaith's evident propensity for British chamber pop, immediately made me prepare for an album inspired by the Bee Gees' 1969 conceptual lark. My trepidation was quickly alleviated when I played the track and, soothingly enough, couldn't figure out what the hell I was listening to. As usual, Snaith filters his influences through his own chilly-and-warm aesthetic, which one of my friends once said was a perfect soundtrack for sun melting snow.

Appropriately, "Odessa"s main reference point is the icy geek disco of Hot Chip, Junior Boys, and Erlend Øye (I seriously did a double-take when the vocals came in). Snaith tricks out the sound with ESG-style sound bombs, a little chicken-scratch guitar, clanging polyrhythms playing off a globular bassline, and eventually, a piano cribbed from an early-90s house track that feels right at home. Snaith works with restraint, riding the beat for all its worth and keeping his affect more or less in check. Given "Odessa"s awesomeness, and its clear break from its predecessors, here's hoping that Snaith is good enough to us to retain at least one trend from Andorra on the forthcoming Swim: a variety of repetitions on this well-chosen theme.

MP3:> Caribou: "Odessa"

[from Swim; out 04/20/10 on Merge (North America) and City Slang (UK/Europe)]

Teen Dream is both the most diverse and most listenable of the Baltimore band's three full-lengths, and yet it never seems like a compromise. Instead, their Sub Pop debut feels like the product of careful, thoughtful growth, bringing in new influences-- bits of mid-1970s Fleetwood Mac, sparkling indie pop, even a few soul and gospel touches--- while maintaining the group's core sound.  Front to back, the arrangements and sequencing are superb, and the LP is a stirring reminder that good things can happen when you move out of your comfort zone.

Driven by dance-inspired beats and ghostly sampled voices, the new Four Tet album is the most focused in Kieran Hebden's catalog, and also among his best. Hebden refined this music over the course of a long stint as a resident DJ at the London club Plastic People, and while the result isn't dance music proper, There Is Love in You definitely functions on that plane. This isn't fist-pumping music that toys with the pleasure of pop music and it's not an album that bowls you over with the density and intricacy of its textures. Instead, it's both heady and physical, subtle but powerful music for thinking and moving or ideally doing both at the same time.

2009 saw a few fresh-faced youngsters (USF, Blind Man's Colour) attempting their best Animal Collective impression-- and if the continued appeal of Merriweather Post Pavilion is any indication, their sound is sure to become more prevalent. There's a hint of A.C.'s wooly weirdness in "Yellow Wings", from relatively unknown Brooklyn trio Keepaway's just-released debut EP, Baby Style. The clipped vocal samples and woozy synths that open the song have some parallels with MPP's blasted-beat utopia, while rubbery guitar lines add Feels-era reference points to the mix.

But on the evidence here, Keepaway also have an inclination toward indie-rock accessibility, allowing them to sidestep the formlessness that can suffocate more strict A.C.-devotees. "Yellow Wings" shares elements with Northwestern indie-rock heroes such as Modest Mouse, and not just in singer Nick Nauman's passing vocal similarity to Isaac Brock: The tune's lyrical sentiments ("I think I finally know what I want/ I want to be two places at once"; "All I've found is nothing is true/ And nothing has happened at all") echo bong-session musings perfected on early Built to Spill records. So yeah, while the trippy lean is undeniable on "Yellow Wings", it takes clear eyes and a crafty set of musical minds to create a song that's both this deliciously heady and instantly engaging.

MP3:> Keepaway: "Yellow Wings"

[from Baby Style EP; self-released]

The debut LP from this young Florida band is first and foremost a great guitar album packed with sing-along hooks, but there's more going on beneath the surface. It's unfair to think of Astro Coast as reactionary in some way to the more overtly ambitious indie stars of last year-- there are no chamber sections, no pocket harmonies, no integration of West African rhythms (ok, there's some of that). But ambition can just as easily manifest itself as a desire to create a relentlessly catchy, "classic indie" album in your own dorm room, and if that's what Surfer Blood set out to do, Astro Coast succeeds wildly.

Honest-to-goodness, hard-line indie rock is alive and well in the great white North. "Facelove"-- a ferociously catchy single from Kingston, Ontario, duo PS I Love You-- was the hiding on the B-side of a shared 7" with "All Yr Songs", last fall's Best New Music-approved track from Toronto's Diamond Rings. Sorry we didn't catch the flipside sooner. "Facelove" is a towering tribute to art of the build, helmed by juicy, punched-up guitar work that demands to be felt (if not just plain gawked at). Part of me thinks that PS I Love You could have gotten away with dubbing their half "All Yr Bands", as they shred like Ratatat on a ZZ Top kick through a Wolf Parade stomper, or Broken Social Scene crashing a high school battle-of-the-bands, just to revel in beating living hell out of any pimpled Zep cover band who dared show their face. Except here, they do all that with only two guys, a stiff backbeat, and a ton of a great licks. Impressive stuff.

MP3:> PS I Love You: "Facelove"

[from the "All Yr Songs"/"Facelove" split 7"; (sold) out now on Hype Lighter]

Usher is single again, and from the sound of things, he's very, very into being single. But "Little Freak" isn't some R. Kellyesque devotional hymn to sexual addiction. Rather, it's Usher introducing a new wrinkle to that old "More Than Words" if-you-love-me-you'll-fuck-me routine: If you love Usher, you'll fuck her. "If you fuckin' with me, really fuckin' with me, you'll let her put her hands in your pants, be my little freak," he wails, sounding suavely desperate, or desperately suave. And as far as revenge-breakup fuck-songs go, it pushes into "Cry Me a River" territory for the same reason that "Cry Me a River" transcended: the gigantic, operatic backing track.

As on "Love in This Club", Ush's chiffon moan makes an ideal ornament to producer Polow Da Don's widescreen thump. Here, Polow turns a Stevie Wonder sample into a monstrous swirl of orchestral exoticism, on some real "Kashmir" shit. Guest freak Nicki Minaj adds extra cackling libido: "I'm plotting on how I can take Cassie away from Diddy." The whole towering mess makes a drunken 3 a.m. threesome sound like the most epic endeavor anyone could hope for-- which, unless your life is way more interesting than mine, it probably is.

[from Raymond vs. Raymond; out 02/16/10 on LaFace]

— The theatrical UK art rockers levitate above dewy fields in this haunted clip. Director: Institute for Eyes.

An 11-minute featurette featuring the UK electro-pop group talking about and recording their imminent new LP, .

— The Montreal hard rockers raid a taxidermy factory and terrorize old ladies in this winningly absurd clip. PETA would not approve.

— Fred Armisen and Car­rie Brown­stein play bookstore owners who host a special in-store gig in this clip.

— The Sigur Rós frontman hangs out with some feathered friends in this picturesque clip from his forthcoming solo album, .