When America's favorite English retro-soul singer (sorry, Joss Stone) made her first post-rehab appearance a few months ago, at the Mercury Music Awards, she sang "Love Is a Losing Game". Slow, vulnerable, and regretful where earlier Back to Black hits like "Rehab" and "You Know I'm No Good" still held a measure of brassy defiance, "Love Is a Losing Game" is Amy Winehouse as smoldering torch singer rather than trouble-causing heatseeker. It was the perfect track to regain public esteem-- and, as a bonus, potentially win over any soccer moms put off by her tabloid antics-- even if its biggest addition to classic soul tear-jerkers past is a heaping helping of good ol' British treacle. The video comes as the song drops in the UK today as Winehouse's latest single, and it has the feel of pure promotion: slow-motion shots of Winehouse performing live, kissing in a car, and singing to us close-up, with little visible trace of a plot or theme other than nostalgia. (via Stereogum)

[from Back in Black; out now on Universal]

White Williams' oh so exhaustively documented tour with energetic East Coast art-partiers Dan Deacon and Girl Talk is finally over, but not before he and his band stopped by Daytrotter's Illinois studio. Not surprisingly, the session is a cloud of glinting Smoke, as the noise-weaned Cleveland electro-popper lets more rough edges and feedback show through on three songs from his debut LP. "Headlines" puts ruminations about "itching and twitching" over lead guitar that does the same, plus chunky synth thrum. Softer synths sparkle over "Wham City" motorik on "New Violence", and "Route to Palm" sets a similar framework around bright Afro-pop guitar melodies, which kind of seemed to be everywhere in the second half of this year. Lightly distorted, meandering guitar lines are also the focus of a previously unreleased, untitled instrumental track by guitarist Hayes. Williams can only be in one place at a time (for now), but he's probably coming soon to a city near you.

MP3s/Streams:> White Williams: Daytrotter Session
[Smoke is out now on Tigerbeat 6]

"U.R.A. Fever" as "I.M.A. Fever" as "We R.A. Fever", and a video for the Kills' first single since 2005's No Wow is all together. The garage-rock duo airs each of those three variations on their mercury-rising declaration over this sweaty two-minute track's foreboding groove. Directed by Sophie Muller (Eurhythmics, the Jesus & Mary Chain, Weezer, Blur, Gwen Stefani, Beyoncé), the clip shows the Kills looking as if they, like the song's feverish subject, "ain't born typical." The lyrics are a series of cryptic, Beck-like non-sequiturs, and the video retains the track's darkness as well as its strangeness. The two Kills are occasionally split up in two different frames as they shout into telephones, peer out in front of film projections of themselves, play with dogs on a vintage sofa, and act goofy in front of bare, rough-edged walls. The best part is, they didn't even call in sick.

[from a forthcoming album; due March 2008 on Domino]

Last night came word Daniel Smith's Sounds Familyre label (Danielson, Sufjan Stevens, Woven Hand) would be posting a new Christmas song on its blog every day for 13 days-- beginning, well, today. We tried to stay up all night to see if we could catch Brother Danielson going down the chimney, when what to our wondering ears should appear this morning but a new Danielson tune, "Christmas Eve Nite". A slinky ? and the Mysterians organ accompanies an abstract little carol about the restless wait for Santa and the excitement of Christmas day morning. "We can't sleep, we can't sleep, it's Christmas Eve!" a choir of kids cheer, as Danielson describes a conversation between an eager child and well-meaning mom. "Hey, hooray," the kids repeat on a bridge that's more spaced-out than any Christmas I remember. I just hope somebody remembered to leave out cookies.

Stream:> Danielson: "Christmas Eve Nite"
[from A Familyre Christmas - Vol. 1; currently being posted a track a day to the Sounds Familyre blog]

Dan Snaith and Caribou appear on La Blogothèque's "Take Away Show". The version of "She's the One" is pretty typical fare, just following the band down the narrow streets as they play, the usual gang of curious kids streaming behind. But "Sundialling" is little more special, as the band spreads out and jams in an alley and we see Snaith dashing over to jump in on drums for the percussion break, just like he does on stage.

Caribou: "She's the One"

Caribou: "Sundialling"

Sally Shapiro came into being one day when the pseudonymous Swedish singer and her soon-to-be producer, Johan Agebjörn, were singing Christmas songs at a piano for fun. "Johan said that I have a very Italo disco voice," Shapiro recalled to Pitchfork's Matthew Solarski in a recent interview. He was right, and the result, Disco Romance, caught our imagination as soon as we heard first single "I'll Be By Your Side" last winter. Now, Agebjörn has kindly put together a Christmas mix for Pitchfork. Called "Crying on the Dancefloor", it includes one of the Italo disco singers he was probably thinking of that fateful day (Valerie Dore), a little-known Swedish synth-pop artist (Fake), a Shapiro bonus track, the source for her Nixon cover "Anorak Christmas", and, why not, "Take on Me". The full track list is below the link:

MP3:> Crying on the Dancefloor (Xmas Mix)

1. Fake: "Empty Garden" (Sound of Scandinavia) 1984
2. Valerie Dore: "Get Closer" (Merak Music) 1984
3. Sally Shapiro: "Skating In The Moonshine" (Paper Bag / Permanent Vacation) 2007
4. Squash Gang: "I Want An Illusion" (Indalo Music) 1986
5. Sandra: "Around My Heart" (Virgin) 1989
6. Angie Care: "Your Mind" (Merak Music) 1984
7. Nicolas Makelberge: "Dying In Africa" (Rico) 2006
8. Nixon: "Anorak Christmas" (Benno) 2001
9. A-ha: "Take On Me" (WEA) 1984

[Disco Romance is out now on Paper Bag/Diskokaine; Paper Bag's 5th Anniversery sampler is available for download here]

Beloved entertainer Jens Lekman tells some stories and plays some songs on AOL's The Interface. He's definitely learned something from acknowledged inspiration Jonathan Richman about how to spin a yarn while alternating between a couple of plucked chords and keep things interesting. Even if you've heard the details of how these tune came to be a couple of times, he still manages to hook you with his easygoing charm. And the songs themselves, yes, these are good ones.

Video:> Jens Lekman: "Live on the Interface"
[Night Falls Over Kortedala is out now on Secretly Canadian]

While San Francisco-based two-piece Seventeen Evergreen peddle robust, melody-infused indie as in debt to the dreamier moments of the 4AD roster or Mercury Rev, this track offers something else entirely. Although little information is available as to the identity or past work of the Bi-Polar Men, they have transformed the band's original into a haunted, buzzing, skipping, swung 2-step indebted workout. Currently being played out by Skream on his Rinse FM show and championed by Prancehall in grime circles, this little piece would not have been out of place on Kode9's sharply dexterous Dubstep Allstars Vol. 3 in which cut-up, quick mixing and diverse selection demonstrated that the barrier between grime and dubstep was not the chasm many imagined. This track is tucked away on the Music Is The Wine EP between a pair of Joakim remixes but shines far beyond its confines.

Photo by Jason Bergman

If "Yoni Wolf and his band Why? are outcasts from groups of outcasts," as Pitchfork's Jason Crock wrote, then the levels of outcasts-ness only multiply on this selection from the Anticon outfit's just-released The Hollows EP. "Broken Crow" was originally a dark, sludgy hip-hop track by Why? and Odd Nosdam offshoot Reaching Quiet, who released it on 2002's In the shadow of the livingroom. The new Why? EP includes covers by such artists as Xiu Xiu, Boards of Canada, Dntel, Yo La Tengo's James McNew, and Nick Thorburn from Islands and the now-defunct Unicorns. It's Thorburn who turns in a cover of Reaching Quiet's "Broken Crow".

Whew. If you've made it this far, the rest of this post should be a bit easier to follow. Thorburn slows down the original's rapidly yelped rhymes and refits "Broken Crow" for piano, stumbling cymbal crashes, and his own whispering vocals. Here and there he might repeat a lyric for emphasis ("You know it's hard/ You know it's hard"), but elsewhere he occasionally cuts several lines at a time (for example, the types of jobs "you" find downtown). This recording is somber where the original was manic, and if it doesn't have the funniest line from the Reaching Quiet rendition-- "Last night I practiced holding my breath/ My record is two minutes and 13 seconds"-- well, maybe he knows there's nothing funny about failing to make it in the big city and having to move back home with your parents.

MP3:> Nick Thonburn: "Broken Crow"
[from the Europe version of "The Hollows" 12" ep out now on Tomlab]

You may know Thao Nguyen from her self-released debut, Like the Linen, or more likely from her song on Kill Rock Stars' 2006 comp The Sound the Hare Heard. If you've heard anything about her new album with backing band the Get Down Stay Down, due next month, you know she braves bee stings and all. A stand-out track on We Brave Bee Stings and All, "Swimming Pools" is a rambunctious ode to precocious youth. "We don't dive, we cannonball," Nguyen sings with subtle petulance, as if defending her personal philosophy. Pushed along by her busy pop banjo, the song creates a pedaling momentum, as if building speed to jump off a homemade bike ramp.

[from We Brave Bee Stings and All; due 01/29/08 on Kill Rock Stars]