There's not much cold about UGK half Bun B's "Damn I'm Cold", from his forthcoming solo follow-up to 2005's Trill, other than the ice the Texas hip-hop legend says he's wearing, the "chill in your veins," and guest rapper Lil Wayne's relationship advice: "Never marry Robin Givens." Produced by ex-Mountain Brothers member CHOPS, the II Trill track comes on like Southern summer heat, all sweaty blues guitar and sweltering electric organ, with occasional Muscle Shoals-esque horns and the synth-bass of single "That's Gangsta". Weezy, who has faltered lately when guesting on tracks by high-profile MCs, is back to spitting fire here, whether boasting of his Bentleys and Ben Franklins, free-associating about Lambeau Field, or paying tribute to UGK's 1996 Ridin' Dirty. Plus he limits his singing-- you know, the stuff that helped make "Lollipop" an unlikely #1 hit-- to the chorus. As for Bun B, he's in his element, threatening to turn your neighborhood into the North Pole while Wayne makes, WTF, machine-gun noises. Bun B's late UGK partner Pimp C gets another of the well-deserved R.I.P. shout-outs that have sadly replaced the old "free Pimp C" as a rallying cry. As for Bun B and Wayne, this is why they're hot. (via 2dopeboyz)

MP3:> Bun B [ft. Lil Wayne]: "Damn I'm Cold"
[from II Trill; due 05/20/08 on Rap-A-Lot]

Shana Worden sings about stars colliding on "Inside a Boy", the theatrical opening track and first single from her forthcoming My Brightest Diamond sophomore LP A Thousand Shark's Teeth. We're not talking about Huey Lewis bumping into Whitney Houston here, though, but rather the Sufjan-interviewed chanteuse behind 2006's Bring Me the Workhorse getting remixed by the also-classically inclined recent Anticon signee Son Lux. On 2008 debut At War With Walls & Mazes, Son Lux's Ryan Lott brings a composer's craft to the techniques of underground hip-hop, and his chopped-up "Inside a Boy" charts a similar path. The string-draped original has drama and grandeur enough, but Lott dismembers the rhythm section, opening with little more than skittering strings, stabs of electronic percussion, piano, and Worden's pristine voice. Other rumbling beats, muscular guitars, and all manner of additional orchestration soon return, but the context is more abstract and disorienting than on the album version. "We crash like lightning into love," Worden sings, repeating the word until all is full of that stuff. Boy meets girl, song goes supernova.

MP3:> My Brightest Diamond: "Inside a Boy (Son Lux Remix)"
[from the "Inside a Boy" digital single; out now on Asthmatic Kitty and original track from A Thousand Shark's Teeth; due 06/17/08, also on Asthmatic Kitty]

"All the way from Switzerland," it's Robyn, singing her finally domestically available self-titled 2005 album's "Bum Like You" at the Cotton Club and Steakhouse in Granger, Texas, back when she was in the U.S. for SXSW. This video clip of the performance surfaced this morning on Robyn's YouTube channel, and it's an odd but charming one. The Cotton Club's partner-dancing patrons-- many of them wearing cowboy hats-- don't seem to mind a chorus that's directed at a bum rather than a lover (this is a country bar after all), and Robyn definitely doesn't look as if she thinks she's wasting her time on them.

[from Robyn; out now on Konichiwa/Cherrytree/Interscope]

In addition to premiering the tripped-out eye candy video for Stereolab's "Three Women", Pitchfork.tv also posted this live-in-studio session featuring Nic Offer's !!!. They play a few choice jams from their catalogue, including "Yadnus" and "Heart of Hearts", and then tour-mate Axel Willner aka the Field jumps in for a collaboration. While he plays a variation on "Fall From a Height (The Field Way)", his incredible remix of a track by Swedish popsters the Honeydrips, !!! fall in behind him, vamping along as they feel their way through the chord progression.

Today also saw the addition of the video for Heartsrevolution's teeth-grinding 8-bit electro track "C.Y.O.A.". 

PAS/CAL's full-length debut didn't ship in February as planned. No surprise. Leading dude Casimer Pascal has been pushing back the release date since early 2005, which would be a heckuva long time even if he were a New York rapper instead of a Michigan indie-pop perfectionist. Bigger surprise: The name of the album-- the successor to three worthy EPs-- stripped off its Citizens Army Uniform and became I Was Raised on Matthew, Mark, Luke & Laura. The first mp3, "You Were Too Old for Me", is just as schizophrenic, in a catalog that includes not just sun-kissed melodic pop, but also krautrock, Stereolab references, and a song that shoots from spaghetti Western to girl group less than a minute.

With the baroqueness of "Your Cover's Blown" or dare I say "Bohemian Rhapsody", the six-minute track stacks one catchy bit onto another, bouncing from urbane Jarvis Cocker strut to organ-wheezing double-time in the first 60 seconds alone. "Everybody needs someone they can pray to," Pascal croons, harmonizing with himself in falsetto over shaken percussion and a gritty guitar lick Weezer's "Say It Ain't So" would drink someone else's Heine for. Then melodies careen around corners like it's XTC. Somehow, there's an even brighter, wordless section from here: "Could've called you if I wanted/ Knew the number to your room," Pascal sings alone over piano. Still three minutes left: handclaps, swaying choruses, an old person and a young person not breaking up soon. The album might get here eventually, too.

Atlanta's own Deerhunter practiced Friday night out on the Marietta Square, right near Hazel Street in suburban Marietta, Ga., with new guitarist Whitney Petty fully present and accounted for. In between chatting with police officers and covering Tom Petty, the band recorded this acoustic version of a new song called "Winter Never Stops". And... man, it's a promising, bittersweet tune, closer to the wistful melodicism of Cryptograms tracks like "Strange Lights" and, yup, "Hazel St." than the cathartic din of that album's first half or the Fluorescent Grey EP's explosive "Wash Off". Of course, that could just be 'cause it's unplugged, with muted guitar arpeggios on the verses turning into big, heart-tugging strums by way of winding, vaguely psychedelic dissonance. "I had dreamed," singer Bradford Cox begins, which suggests the forthcoming Microcastle may be similar thematically to not just the recent Deerhunter records but also Cox's Atlas Sound debut LP (no word on whether this song will wind up on the album). The video has Cox and another guitarist, probably Lockett Pundt, hidden in shadow, but you can see Petty (Whitney, not Tom) clearly in center screen.

BONUS: Meanwhile, the ever-prolific Cox has also posted a new Atlas Sound EP, Things I'll Miss, to his bands' blog. The song titles-- "My Car", "My Room", "My Bed", "Marietta"-- relate to the things Cox must, contra U2, leave behind when he goes on tour. But you can take them with you after you download them here.

[previously unreleased; Microcastle is forthcoming on Kranky]

And now, Broken Social Scene bring you their latest feature presentation. Next up after Kevin Drew's wide-eyed Spirit If... comes fellow BSS founding member Brendan Canning-- aka Broken Social Scene Presents: Brendan Canning-- with Something for All of Us... "Hit the Wall", the first such something, makes it sound like the "all of us" in question happen to be indie-rock fans (hey, good guess!), grabbing 1990s indie touchstones by their lo-fi scruff as if the wall he's singing about had Blood on it. Followers of the Scene may have heard Canning's voice on You Forgot It in People's "Stars and Sons", Broken Social Scene's "Handjob for the Holidays", and "KC Accidental" B-side "Market Fresh", but that's about it; he sings in a high, whispery tone, cloaked here in loads of clanging distortion.

Lesser Gonzalez Alvarez's musical background includes electro-pop, droney country-folk, and a separate electronic side project, but he decides to do more with, um, lesser on "Mostly a Friend", the first mp3 from his Carpark debut, Why Is Bear Billowing?. The Baltimore resident (and member of the Wham City collective Dan Deacon sings about) relies almost entirely here on fluid acoustic-guitar arpeggios and lightly clicking percussion (castanets?) for the backing, for a nice example of the kind of daydreamer folk that Devendra Banhart inherited from Donovan. It's a short song-- roughly two minutes-- with simple, beatific lyrics: "There's a wreck up the way/ I hope it's not my foe/ My foe's mostly a friend," Alvarez sings in a high, naked voice. He'll be touring with Jana Hunter, which makes sense given her ties to B'more and Banhart; if the entire album is so frank and peace-loving, it'd be interesting to see Alvarez alongside somebody like Japan/Seattle naïve-pop singer/songwriter Pwrfl Power, too.

If we learned anything from Fujiya & Miyagi, it's that the toe bone is connected to, well, the rest of the leg bones. Hard to believe Chromeo hadn't already released an official video for the title track from the Montreal duo's Pitchfork-recommended Fancy Footwork, but now that they have, they're not letting the song's synth-fancying grooves do their work on just feet. Disembodied legs (what, don't they know the hip bone's connected to the back bone?) strut their stuff, finally lining up Big Lebowski-style, while Chromeo's dressed-up P-Thugg and Dave-1 kick it like wedding singers tiny enough to stick on the cake next to the plastic bride and groom. The track itself is still playful and unabashedly nerdy, maybe not owning all those electro-funk moves, but selling them with 1980s-weaned ease.

[from Fancy Footwork; out now on Vice]

When lava lamps and WinAmp visualizations have lost their luster, head on over to the newest Stereolab video, premiering over at Pitchfork.tv. Billed as "a nostalgic throwback to the cartoon psychedelia of the 1970s," the clip has a nice day-- or at least a trippy four minutes-- with the swoonsome brass, cheerful chords, and clear vocals of "Three Women", the first mp3 from the iconic London band's forthcoming Chemical Chords. Diamonds and other shapes float around in a variety of resplendent colors, and eventually you can make out some ghostly figures drifting through the geometric landscape, too. Black shapes filled with pinpricks of light look kind of like the night sky, and a mathematical equation also appears-- perhaps the reason for the madly chattering teeth that show up near the end of the clip. Groovier than Jimi Hendrix porn, that's for sure (erm, not that I would know).

[from Chemical Chords; due 08/18/08 worldwide (except for the U.S.) and 08/19/08 in the U.S. from Duophonic UHF Disks/4AD]

The first time I heard This Is Ivy League (back when they were known as just Ivy League), I assumed they were from Sweden, where this brand of sophisticated, historically-minded twee pop apparently bubbles up from underground springs. I was wrong, of course. The duo-- Ryland Blackinton and Alex Suarez-- actually hail from Brooklyn, and they recorded their self-titled fell-length debut in their own borough apartments. "The Richest Kids", the album's opening track, portrays them still cutting their teeth career-wise: "Oh we've been working, we've been paying our dues," they sing over dreamy backing vocals, crisp guitar licks, and a distant tambourine. "We've got dirt on our hands and holes in our shoes." Yet their tender Chad & Jeremy melodies and polished harmonies sound pretty professional, as if they've been at this for years. [Edit: Huh, apparently these guys are also in Cobra Starship of "Bring It (Snakes on a Plane)" notoriety, among other things. Not caring at all about arena-emo bands on Pete Wentz's label, we didn't snap to attention at the names Ryland Blackinton and Alex Suarez. And the Ivy League weren't in a rush to mention it anywhere either.]

MP3:> This is the Ivy League: "The Richest Kids"
[from This Is the Ivy League; out now on Twentyseven]