TV PARTY! Handsome Furs, Flaming Lips/Lightning Bolt, Kurt Vile, Pictureplane, The Wooden Birds, My Goodness, Death Gripes, and much more!

Plenty of cool stuff to check out in our monthly round-up of favorite videos! New media this month from Handsome Furs, Kurt Vile, Thurston Moore, Pictureplane, My Goodness, Death Grips, John Maus and more! Stream the videos below, and come inside for links and info about the bands and labels. If you’d like, you can join our podcasts here…iTunes, Podcast.com, and Podcast Alley.
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STREAMING MEDIA LINKS:
VIDEO: Hansome Furs “What About Us” Sub Pop [30.4mb]
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VIDEO: The Flaming Lips/Lightning Bolt “I Wanna Get High, but I Don’t Want Brain Damage” Sub Pop [YOUTUBE]

VIDEO: Kurt Vile “Baby’s Arms” Matador [40.7mb]
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VIDEO: Pictureplane “Post Physical” Lovepump United [YOUTUBE]
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VIDEO: The Wooden Birds “Two Matchsticks” Barsuk [32.3mb]
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VIDEO: My Goodness “I’ve Got A Notion” Sarathan Records [YOUTUBE]
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VIDEO: The Horrors “Still Life” XL Records [56.1mb]
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VIDEO: Thurston Moore “Circulation” Matador [43.2mb]
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VIDEO: The Deer Tracks “Fra Ro Raa / Ro Ra Fraa” The Control Group [VIMEO]
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VIDEO: Death Grips “Beware” [YOUTUBE]

With Wolf Parade on “indefinite hiatus”, it looks we will have to turn increasingly more to Dan Boekner’s other project, Handsome Furs, for our New Wave dose of Canadian-flavored existential inquiry. On their newest, Sound Kapital, Boekner and wife Alexei Perry continue to flesh out their 80’s inspired, noire-palette of dance-tronics, while offering a music whose throb and beat is given as response to our increasingly fractured and invalidating cultural condition. A lot for pop music to take on? Nah! Inspired by a trip to Burma and playing with underground bands like Side Effect, who have to perform with little access to electricity and out sight of an oppressive and dangerous government, much of the album is alive with the heroics of people finding a way to express themselves in spite of limited circumstances. Much of Boekner’s music seems to stand on this central theme, the struggle of the individual to find it’s own identity in the face of a society which seeks it’s control, and with Handsome Furs, Boekner and Perry continue to find danceable ways to express this struggle. Those familiar with the album and it’s cover art will immediately recognize the Scott Coffey directed video for “What About Me”, as he has directed previous videos for the Handsome Furs and Wolf Parade, as well as being an actor who has appeared in David Lynch’s Inland Empire and Mullhulland Drive. The album’s striking cover shot of a girl dancing naked, vacantly atop an old car was photographed during the making of this video, so be ready for a Lynchian dream tour through mysterious hotel rooms, menacing car rides, and all kinds of erotic couplings. Sexual politics on the cusp of the apocalypse.

Oh shit, this is sick! Flaming Lips frontman Wayne Coyne has revealed via Twitter that the band has been collaborating with noise-monster-duo Lightning Bolt, and the resulting EP is sure to cause drain bramage! Get a lode of these song titles…1. “I’m Working At NASA on Acid” 2. “I Want to Get High but I Don’t Want Brain Damage” 3. “NASA’s Final Acid Bath” and 4. “I Want to Get Damaged but I Won’t Say Hi”, and you know you’re in for a real kick in the medulla oblongata. Here’s the mega-warped video for “I Want To Get High…” featuring a most frightening Wayne Coyne souped-up on some crazy kinda Captain Beefheart!

We’ve been wearing a groove into our copy of Kurt Vile‘s Smoke Ring for My Halo, so we were excited to add some visuals into the mix this month with the Todd Cole directed video for “Baby’s Arms”. For the video Cole, a fashion photographer and film-maker, utilizes an intimate, cinema-verite style, following a young East-LA couple for a day while they hang out with each other and friends. As a glimpse into a life, the result feels fairly pure, and plays well against Vile’s sweetly obsessive lyrics. The video was shot on a Windows phone, for the Windows’ Phone Me film series, but we won’t hold that against it.

Pictureplane‘s Thee Physical came out this month on Lovepump United, and on it Travis Egedy continues to perfect his take on 90’s house and rave music, while preparing us to meet our cyber-sexual future. Egedy has been one of the major players at Rhinoceropolis in Denver, a communal party-house where he has hosted the club night, “Real Is A Feeling”, while putting out a steady stream of mixtapes and remixes that have helped to spawn a DIY scene in that city. If that’s not audacious enough, dude rocks a Michael Jordan jersey with feather earrings in the new video for “Post Physical”. Now that’s some kinda nerve.

The Wooden Birds frontman Andrew Kenny started his career fronting Austin’s lo-fi, indie-pop band, The American Analogue Set, before leaving that town for NYC. There Kenny worked with The Broken Social Scene, and on his own solo material before deciding he’d had enough of the big city and was back to Austin. Since then, he has started the band The Wooden Birds, and has currently released his second album, Two Matchsticks, out on Barsuk Records. The video for the song “Two Matchsticks” features cool animation created by Justin Goldwater of Slowmobile.

Seattle power-duo My Goodness move some heavy-ass Rock on the tune “I’ve Got A Notion”. Guitarist Joel Schneider and drummer Ethan Jacobsen strip the blues down to just two instruments while muscling powerful riffs and pummeling drums on this cut, with Schneider’s warm whiskey vocals adding a nice after shock! The band put out a self-titled debut this April, and has since signed with Seattle label, Sarathan Records. The video for “I’ve Got a Notion” was directed by Jon Meyer, and shot on 21 cameras. What, does everyone own a 5D?

On The Horrors newest, Skying, the band continues to mine a wide array of European musical history circa the late 70’s and 80’s, blending new wave, shoe-gaze, and Krautrock into studied pop portraits of the past. Useful? Well, we will leave you to wrestle with the philosophical implications of nostalgia. What we can tell you is, the new video for the song “Still Life” is directed by Oliver Murray, and the video features all kinds of retinal burning with its intense coloration, psychedelic compositing and color tearing.

At the end of the video for “Circulation”, we see a long shot of Thurston Moore wandering across a green meadow with an acoustic guitar in his hand like a magic wand. On his newest, Demolished Thoughts, Moore has gone unplugged, and his work with Samara Lubelski and Mary Lattimore have brought a cello and harp into the mix, which might sound odd considering Moore’s sonic origins. That’s not the case, though, as the guitarist/vocalist is able to expertly distill the elements that have distinguished Sonic Youth, while reinvigorating them with this more nuanced audio palette. Check out how “Circulation” breaks itself down at just over the song’s half-way point, only to reassemble into a storm and swarm of strings and drums to close. Adult Rock!

The Deer Tracks are Swedish duo David Lehnberg and Elin Lindfors, and the pair have just released Part 2 of their Archer Trilogy for the label The Control Group. The Deer Tracks build very intriguing pop songs using tattered bits of glimmering melody and hiss covered glitch-hop beats, while moving deftly through varying electronic styles. This month we have the video for the song “Fra Ro Raa / Ro Ra Fraa” directed by Johan Stolpe, and featuring Lehnberg and Lindfors in a sort of neo-pagan drama. How very Scandanavian.

Sacremento’s avant-rap outfit Death Gripes have released some strong sonic medicine on their new mixtape Ex Military. The band was started by the producer Flatlander and includes Zach Hill’s beat dissections, as well as vocals from MC Ride, Mexican Girl, and Info Warrior. The track “Beware” begins with a Charles Manson quote set to a slow building grunge riff, before hurtling into outer space on swells of guitar drone and regurgitated sample squawk, all the while set to MC Ride’s seemingly endless spiral of stream of consciousness venom spitting. The video for “Beware” is directed by Flatlander, and features MC Ride haunting Death Valley.