Stream New Screaming Females Album, "Ugly"; Watch New Garbage Video & Chat

The Screaming Females are back and screaming with their new album "Ugly," and you can stream it in its entirety at Spin.com. The album drops today, and the New Brunswick, New Jersey band is heading out on tour to support "Ugly."


Video for "It All Means Nothing," the first song on "Ugly."

It all starts with a record release show this Thursday at Maxwell's in Hoboken, a venue the band is quite familiar with. Tickets for the show are still available and are only $10 in advance/$12 day of show. Marvin Berry and The New Sound and Lost Weekend open the show. They play Bell House in Brooklyn the next night.

Garbage Releases "Blood for Poppies;" Chats with Fans: Shirley Manson and company put out the video for their first U.S. single today, and had a web chat with fans on Ustream. You can find both below.

"Not Your Kind of People," the first Garbage album in five years, will be released on May 15th.





Video streaming by Ustream

New Tunes: Dum Dum Girls "Coming Down" Video; Songs from Garbage, Japandroids, & More

Some great new tunes have come out this week, from bands including Dum Dum Girls, Garbage, Japandroids, and Silversun Pickups. First off is the video of "Coming Down" by the Dum Dum Girls, directed by the band's own bass player, Malia James (who is also a photographer/videographer/writer/who knows what else).

The video uses a shortened, four-minute version of the song, which ran six-and-a-half minutes on DDG's "Only in Dreams" album from late last year. (Related: see photos from the February Dum Dum Girls show at Maxwell's.)

Here's all the new stuff:

* Dum Dum Girls, "Coming Down" video:



* Garbage's "Battle in Me" video (U.K. single). (Via Consequence of Sound, which also features the track listing.):



* Japandroids have a new single, "The House That Heaven Built." You can listen to it at their website. Also: the band is playing Bowery Ballroom on June 27th; get tickets here this Friday at 12 Noon.

* Stereogum as posted a new song download by Screaming Females, "Expire." At the link you can also find their live dates; they're kicking off their tour with an album release show at Maxwell's on April 5th.

* Silversun Pickups are out with a new song, "Bloody Mary (Nerve Endings)," which you can listen to at the link or listen to below (for some reason, SoundCloud embeds aren't working for me).



* Crocodiles, the band fronted by Brandon Welchez (husband of Dum Dum Girls frontwoman Dee Dee), is preparing a new album and has a new video of its own: an album teaser that sends up those old Time-Life Records collections of the past. (Via NME.)

Sat. Afternoon Videos: Springsteen Plays the Apollo, Watch The Shins Webcast Replay, & More

Since many of us were frantically clicking around on the web this morning trying to get Radiohead tickets, let's wind down by watching videos of some musical performances that made the news this week. One of the most notable (and the most recent) of these was last night's show at the famed Apollo Theater by Bruce Springsteen and the E Street Band. (See a video excerpt of "We Take Care of Our Own" and "Wrecking Ball" below.)



The concert was to mark the 10th anniversary of SiriusXM radio; see the writeup by Spinner's Dan Reilly for a review, setlist, and another video in addition to the one above. Sounds like it was a fantastic show, based on the comments by Reilly and others who either attended or listened to the concert.

The Shins returned from a five-year absence with a free concert webcast on NPR Music last Thursday night that was streamed only through the organization's iPad app. The show, at New York's Le Poisson Rouge, is now available for viewing online; you can also listen to the audio only. You can watch or listen to the Shins' concert here. Incidentally, The Shins will be the musical guests on "Saturday Night Live" tonight, and Nashville-based singer-songwriter Jessie Baylin will be part of the band.

Bradford Cox, leader of Atlas Sound (and Deerhunter), got very literal last week with a heckler who demanded to hear "My Sharona": he played a jam based on the song for a full hour (see two excerpts below).





The incident, at an Atlas Sound show in Minneapolis last Friday, was only one odd aspect of the concert, which saw Cox asked the heckler to come onstage and take his clothes off, ans instructing audience members to hold their venue's chair above their heads. Some attendees, including the person who shot the video, called the "My Sharona" cover "awesome" and "fantastic."

Finally, Sarah McLachlan performed a set before a few hundred people at CBC Vancouver as part of the network's "Toque Sessions." She then left the stage to a choir of musicians from the Sarah McLachlan School of Music, which reportedly moved into a new home in Vancouver recently. Watch the video for "Possession" below, and see more videos from the concert at CBC Music.

Modest Mouse's New "King Rat" Video, Directed by Heath Ledger, is Released

Besides being an actor, the late Heath Ledger also directed several music videos, and his last one was released today. Ledger's six-minute video for Modest Mouse's song "King Rat" made its debut today exclusively on MySpace Video. (Embedding the video was disabled, but I've put a screen cap above and you can view the video at the link.)

Although the animated video features fish and other sea creatures piloting a fishing boat, which seems like standard cartoon fare, the video takes a dark turn as we see the "fishermen" hunting for (and killing) humans. (Which may explain why the video has a positive rating of only 25%.) It's said that the video reflects Ledger's interest in the issue of illegal commercial whaling, which is a controversial issue in the late actor's native Australia.

A press release says that Ledger had proposed the idea for the video in 2007, according to a blog post at SeattlePI.com. The video was unfinished at the time of his death, but was completed by a company that Ledger had worked with, in honor of the actor.

The release also said that, in keeping with Ledger's interests in protecting ocean life, proceeds from sales of the first month of the video's iTunes sales will go to an international marine wildlife organization.

MTVmusic.com Brings Back Music Videos Old and New

Once upon a time, MTV actually used to show music videos (not surprising, since MTV stands for "music television.") Of course, the network has over the years gotten away from music to put all kinds of lame reality shows on the air, and it became hard to find music television on MTV.

That's where MTVmusic.com comes in: it's a Web site that has plenty of your favorite (and not so favorite) classic and current music videos where you can view them on demand, whenever you want.

The "most viewed" columns has both old and new offerings" "Money For Nothing" by Dire Straits shows up first, followed by Britney Spears's new "Womanizer." There's also "Once in a Lifetime" by the Talking Heads and the classic Guns N' Roses tune "Welcome to the Jungle."

And if after all the rickrolling on the Internet you still yearn for more Rick Astley, you can view the original video for "Never Gonna Give You Up."

Free Indie Rock Concert Videos

As a fan of indie music, I was pleasantly surprised to come across a podcast called Schedule Two. It's a series of free concert videos, one song each, from a range of indie rock artists, filmed in concert in a variety of venues, many in Minneapolis.

Lately this podcast has featured videos of some of my favorite bands of recent vintage, performing songs I wasn't yet familiar with. (If you subscribe to the podcast you'll get once song by an artist, but you can view and download other videos by the artists at the Schedule Two Web site.)

These are straightforward concert videos shot in a conventional manner; you won't find any stage pyrotechnics, dazzling camerawork, or special effects in the podcast. But that's fine with me; I'm perfectly happy just hearing the songs straight up with no frills.

Some of the recent podcasts have included "Pillar of Salt" by The Thermals, Midlake performing "Young Bride," Asobi Seksu (formerly of Cibo Matta) doing a tune called "Strawberries," and the Hold Steady rocking out on "Stevie Nix," as well as performances by Tapes 'n' Tapes, Mates of State, and Jason Colett of Broken Social Scene (featuring a guest appearance by Feist).

If you like indie music, Schedule Two is a great little podcast of cool tunes performed live.

Record Companies Turn the Tables on Downloaders

Facing slumping sales and increased online piracy, record companies have decided to turn lemons into lemonade. Companies have started planting advertiser-sponsored video clips of their artists on video sharing sites–the exact same kind of sites they've been battling for years.

The Wall Street Journal noted in October, for example, that rapper Jay-Z authorized a video clip from one of his summer concerts in New York to be placed on a variety of illegal music-sharing cites. The action occurred at the request of Coca-Cola, the Journal said, and the clip included promotions for Coke.

While record companies have usually battled file-sharing sites by planting fake "decoy" files to thwart and frustrate downloaders, this new tack by Jay-Z recognizes that the people who download files are also some of the biggest music fans and buyers, and that it may be more in their interest to market to them rather than sue them. So the decoy files being planted on leading file-sharing sites contain promotional materials, which are then seen by eager fans. So when fans turn to the file networks for purposes of piracy, they're getting a marketing message instead.

The article notes that other artists including Audioslave and Ice Cube have also benefited from decoy files, putting bits of a song into the files and promising that the user and this companions will be able to stream the entire song once the file is forwarded to a certain number of people.