Proggy warriors Yeasayer spent much of the past year recording the follow up to All Hour Cymbals. The first tune to hit the Inter-streets is “Ambling Alp,” which, if you try to say it five times fast, will have your tongue wrapped around your hangy ball. Not to be confused with a nut, your hangy ball will, in turn, be triggering samples on the MPC in your tonsils. Ok, enough dental imagery.  As is usually the case with Yeasayer, “Ambling Alp” is a worldly, tripped out affair unafraid of twisting itself up in all sorts of sound found hieroglyphics and Aboriginal beats. Oh, now you wanna hear it? Well, in order to do that you gotta sign up for the Yeasayer Clinic’s Free Dental Service, aka their list serv, through which an exclusive MPEG-1 Audio Layer 3 will be delivered to your inbox. Brilliant! Peep Yeasayer’s new alliteration of a web site for more info on the limited edition 12″ single, super heady tri-color T-shirt and some other new Yeasayer swag.

What happens when you take the offspring of famous cultural icons and have them produce an album together? IRM. That’s MRI backwards. Coincidentally, that’s exactly what came out of Beck, grandson of artist Al Hansen and son of Bibbe Hansen, a regular fixture at Warhol’s Factory, and Charlotte Gainsbourg, whose parents, Jane Birkin and Serge Gainsbourg, may have been the coolest people to ever roam Earth. No surprise then that IRM, which despite being billed as Charlotte’s second record, is really a collaboration on all fronts, a cultural assault of cool synths, minimalist rhythms and all sorts of post-modern swirls and glitches. Not to mention, Charlotte’s monotone chic, “looking through a glass onion.” While Charlotte has made the title track available for download, the album’s first single, “Heaven Can Wait,” co-written, produced, and mixed by Beck, as was the rest of the album, is set to hit your RSS reader and maybe even physical stores October 12th. Head over to Charlotte’s web site for a your first taste of the collaboration.

The 10″. An odd format. It doesn’t have the shoe-box currency and the hallowed history of the 7″, nor the expansiveness of the 12″, but damned if it’ll go away. Animal Collective know a thing or two about neglected formats. The band recorded their soon-to-be-reissued album Campfire Songs and many of the tracks on the immediatly unavailable Crack Box to the once touted MiniDisc format. (Thx, Sony!) And now comes another 10″. This time a single for MPP’s “Brothersport,” backed with “Bleeding,” which was called “Bleed” when it first surfaced back in May. Rumor has it that Animal Collective have added a whole bunch of “-ing” to “Bleed” to concoct “Bleeding.” There are a few versions of “Bleeding” floating around the web, and while the three minute DC version has its moments, any space traveler worth his weight in cosmic glitter knows you go with the 11+ minute ambient trip. Behold below!

Animal Collective, Bleeding (Live @ Henry Miller Library)

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Stripping down and baring it all has never seemed to have been a problem for Woods, who, prior to the Woods Family Creeps record, were basically a low-key folk project sans intergalactic jams, music concrete forays and other far out shit. Don’t get me wrong, I love mix of the sylvan and the cosmic, in fact, it’s absolutely wondrous, and the band’s recent Daytrotter session proves it. Stripped down, but certainly not out, G. Lucas Crane conjures spirit worlds with his Sony TCM-929 tape deck, illuminating Earl’s friendly ghost songs with visions of a Utopian yurt community that sustains on its own produce, nuts and wildberries. Of course, Utopian communities are never perfect, and that’s where Woods magic lies, projecting light on the untouched and contrasting it with warbling fits of exploration and decay. Anyone familiar with the band’s Acoustic Family Creeps (Live in the Woods) bootleg knows what’s good, only this time the band lays the bare bones treatment on 3(!) new tracks, along with Songs of Shame standout “Where and What You Are?” Dig it here.

Usually a twentieth anniversary means you and your spouse head to Bermuda or your company honors you with a gold watch. If it’s a birthday, and you live in the States, you get jack shit but another year of waiting before you can legally purchase 40 oz. malt liquor at your favorite corner store. If you’re a certain band from a certain coffee-loving city in the Pacific Northwest, it means you get a deluxe, remastered, reissue of your first album, ya know, the one before that dude from Foo Fighters joined. (That dude rules!)

The folks at Sub Pop understand milestones, and so the label is set to flesh out Nirvana’s classic debut Bleach with a boat load of extra features and cool shit that Courtney Love may or may not have a problem with, depending on what day it is. More importantly, the kingpin label has made “Scoff,” an unreleased song recorded live at Portland’s Pine Street Theatre on February 9th, 1990, available for free download. The show also features Nirvana fan favorite “Love Buzz” and a cover of the Vaseline’s “Molly’s Lips.” Check “Scoff” below, then check out this absurd three part interview Canadian music journalist, and interviewer extraordinaire, Nardwuar did with Kurt, Kris and Courtney in 1991. Nothing says grunge like pizza and cigarettes.

Nirvana, Scoff (Live @ Pine Street Theater, Portland, OR)

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