Hard to believe, but it's just about time for a trip to Austin, Texas. (03/18 - 03/22, to be more exact.) In the midst of these tough economic times, it's unclear if things will be as hedonistic as in years past (free Sparks? No free Sparks? Sparks without the active ingredient?) or if we'll be forced to bring down our own discount BBQ and bulk beer from New York. What is clear, though, is that there will be actual bands playing. We have the proof: A partial list's been revealed. Buckcherry's not on it. But Black Cherry is, along with two Crystal bands and the oldest Gallagher. You can also catch Dead Prez, Primal Scream, and Peter Bjorn & John, among others. Process:

Okkervil River's performance of "Pop Lie" on David Letterman last night wasn't sweetly sung or especially succinctly stated. The The Stand Ins track sounded pretty shaggy dog (like hirsute Will Sheff, trying out for Mastodon in the accompanying screengrab), especially in comparison to that more staid singing interview from a couple months back. For his part, Dave claps and gives a shout out to Austin, but doesn't seem half as excited to be there.

Yesterday we posted the New Year's seasonal effective "MMV." Today, more firmly entrenches in the post-Holiday work week, Bubba and Matt Kadane take us on a lonesome trek through an airport in the self-directed video for an updated, chillier version of The New Year's "Seven Days And Seven Nights." The album's guitars are traded for a piano, which gives the song a more spectral, lonesome feel. The video comes complete with subtitles, the lyrics a 9-5ers muted post-vacation resignation.

The holidays are over, but that doesn't mean Trent can't pass along 400+ free gigabytes of unedited HD footage from three December Lights In The Sky shows. He offers the background info and supplies the linkage along with caveats ("...don't expect any instant gratification -- the download may take days, even weeks...") at the official NIN forum. Needless to say, if you have dial-up, pretend this post never happened.

We heard the title track to Justin Vernon's four-track, victory-lapping extended player some weeks ago, now the whole set's up for streaming at MySpace. Featuring piano, falsetto, and a healthy dose of autotune. It's out 1/20 via Jagjaguwar.

Scooping phish.com and phish.net, Billboard has announced a string of confirmed reunion tour dates for the second generation jam-scene stalwarts and the trustafarians who love them. The trek commences a couple of months after the previously reported Hampton run in March, with a pair of shows at the Jones Beach Amphitheater in New York and rolling through the month of June. More shows will surely pop up, but for now there's a conspicuous hole in the itinerary where a stop in Manchester, TN would fit (6/12-13), giving some more credence to those Phish-and-Bruce headlining Bonnarumors. Here's how it's looking:

While the Is Merriweather Post Pavilion The Best Album Of 2009? war rages on, an a cappella group called Momo & the Coop have returned to Sung Tongs, offering an energetic "Leaf House." You may cringe a bit, but that often goes hand in hand with end-of-the-semester indie-rock a cappella arrangements. It's at YouTube (via Fluxtumblr).

The Hold Steady are a band you loved commenting about in 2008, even though Stay Positive didn't place as high in those year-end lists as past HS offerings. Regardless, Craig Finn & Co. donned tuxedos and helped Jools Holland ring in 2009 as part of his New Years Eve Hootenanny with a couple Positive anthems. This version of the title track's more interesting than the stylized video treatment (not hard). Finn sounds a bit hoarse, which adds some urgency.

Yesterday we got a rare glimpse of Phil Selway singer-songwritering at one of the 7 Worlds Collide shows in Auckland this week. As mentioned, the series yielded something just as rare and even more bloggable in Jeff Tweedy's take on "Fake Plastic Trees." And here it is. The world-collision quota is nearly fulfilled by this performance alone: Jeff on vocals, RadioEd and Phil on their respective instruments, Johnny Marr on his. (The footage is sorta crappy, but you can also make out BTW Liam Finn playing the role of Jonny, which would make sense 'cause this whole party series is papa Neil's baby.) As you'd expect from a makeshift band comprising 40% of Radiohead and 100% of awesome, it's a very faithful and dynamic cover, all big guitars and perfect sound swell for "She looks like the real thing..." Also not surprising but great to hear -- Jeff gives good Thom.

The last official Paul McCartney video we posted came via Michel Gondry and starred Macca along with Natalie Portman and a bunch of raving ghosts. This Marco Sandeman-directed clip for Memory Almost Full bonus track "222" takes a darker, more minimalist and psychedelic route. It looks a bit like a high school science experiment. As far as the song? Something very Vince Guaraldi-on-Spoon going on here.

Morrissey's ninth solo album is one of those collections that leaked in fits and starts via live performances and singles and the like that by the time we took it in from "Something Is Squeezing My Skull" through "I'm OK By Myself" it already felt fairly familiar. For instance, a few months ago, we got that aforementioned skull-squeezing opening track along with "Mama Lay Softly On The Riverbed" live at La Laiterie in Strasbourg, France. There were also various versions of "That's How People Grow Up," All You Need Is Me," and just before the New Year, "I'm Throwing My Arms Around Paris." The bigger trick was figuring out the proper sequence and over analyzing the album art. All that said, we've now listened to Moz's Ringleader Of The Tormentors followup enough times to weigh in on it as a whole.

Read that any way you wish and you will be bingo. Fab Moretti's side project made their network debut on the NBC-funded public service to insomniacs that is Carson Daly last night. "No One's Better Sake" is a great song, a summery Strokes-on-the-beach jam, and the Fab crew made great work of it here. Moretti is little more than a figurehead standing at the mic with his acoustic (I can't really hear his voice), but still he gets screengrab honors because the only way you're allowed to sound so Strokesy is if you have a Stroke in your band. Lesson learned, Stroke wannabes.

This past Saturday (1/3) Brian Eno gave a fairly impassioned speech regarding his thoughts on the current Israel/Palestine situation during the Stop Gaza Massacre protest in London. He titled his speech "An Experiment in Provocation: Stealing Gaza," and his thoughts are clearly also a provocation. Maybe the most divisive thing he's done since producing Coldplay. He begins:

It's a tragedy that the Israelis - a people who must understand better than almost anybody the horrors of oppression - are now acting as oppressors. As the great Jewish writer Primo Levi once remarked "Everybody has their Jews, and for the Israelis it's the Palestinians". By creating a middle Eastern version of the Warsaw ghetto they are recapitulating their own history as though they've forgotten it. And by trying to paint an equivalence between the Palestinians - with their homemade rockets and stone-throwing teenagers - and themselves - with one of the most sophisticated military machines in the world - they sacrifice all credibility.

The Israelis are a gifted and resourceful people who fully deserve the right to live in peace, but who seem intent on squandering every chance to allow that to happen. It's difficult to avoid the conclusion that this conflict serves the political and economic purposes of Israel so well that they have every interest in maintaining it. While there is fighting they can continue to build illegal settlements. While there is fighting they continue to receive huge quantities of military aid from the United States. And while there is fighting they can avoid looking candidly at themselves and the ruthlessness into which they are descending.

He continues along these lines, which you can hear for yourself in this video footage.

Courtesy of ateaseweb.com, we have some acceptable footage of Mr. Selway fingerpicking his way through a droning little acoustic number from a live performance in New Zealand last night. The YouTube label has 7 Worlds Collide affixed, which is the title of a 2001 album culled from various performances spearheaded by Crowded House's Neil Finn and including Johnny Marr, Eddie Vedder, Ed O'Brien, and others. As previously reported, the global all-star troupe are reprising the project, with notable addition Jeff Tweedy, via a new LP and a series of shows that took place in Auckland this week. We'll assume this is Phil's contribution:

SXStereogum alum Blitzen Trapper put out the very fine Furr album last year, releasing the title track as a freebie. In posting Brandon said "The track's mellow and straight-up folky until they let a harmonica in with a few electronics, making it a little coyote spacey but still pastoral." I was really taken by their performance on Conan, which cut the digital squiggles and embraced the back porch stomp of it all, with a new round of earthy Trapper harmonies in tow. Director Jade Harris does the track proud here, sticking to the lyrics with a sepia photo flipbook of Blitzens and lupines and mice on magical beanstalks. Solid.

We thought it would be wise (and witty) to start the New Year with the New Year, so this week's Drop found the post-Bedhead Kadane brothers-fronted Touch & Go quintet offering up "MMV," a suitably thematic track from their excellent self-titled third collection. Professor Matt Kadane ably answered our questions about the track and the year ahead. You can read and hear his words here.

This week also offered you a chance to take home a Kodak Zi6 HD Pocket Video Camera, with which you can document your own New Year.

Before the holidays, a Swedish website surprised us with the world premiere of "Lay It Down," a new Peter Bjorn & John song ostensibly from their upcoming album. We can't be sure because we don't understand Swedish. Tonight comes the leak of a second song via Kanye West's blog. It's cool though, they gave him PERMISSION.

When we posted about L.A. prog-gospel crew Bodies Of Water's "Under The Pines," we mentioned that at least in name, the song reminded some of us (me) of old-time Siltbreezers the Strapping Fieldhands' In The Pineys EP. The video, written and created by Bodies David & Meredith Metcalf and directed by Andy Bruntel, finds David looking like a fieldhand, albeit not so strapping. Story wise, it's good to see Meredith putting her past acting skills to use. But dog (and sweetmeat) lovers might want to avert their eyes.

Apple always knows how to grab headlines for its sense of theater and savvy in rolling out new products, and the company's last ever MacWorld presentation was no exception. Except in the sense that it was totally an exception, because the big news coming from San Fran is a variable track-pricing model in the iTunes store? (Now in three flavors: run-periodic-tasks.69, run-periodic-tasks.99, and .29.) That, and all its 10 million songs will be available in DRM-free format by March, which is great news if it was 1999 and also if you still pay for music (and if you do, we salute you because check out these deals). No fun gadgets, nothing that will significantly impact your music lifestyle unless it's your dream for Garageband 09 to offer music lessons from Sting, John Fogerty, and Norah Jones for .99. That dream has finally come true, so nice work. There is a new 17" MacBook Pro with environmentally friendly batteries, but I won't mention it because this is a music blog. HOWEVER, there was one great thing to come out of this last MacWorld:

Last January we saw Sam Beam perform "Flightless Bird, American Mouth" by his lonesome. A year later, he's reprising The Shepherd's Dog closer on Leno with band in tow. If you haven't seen Twilight it might seem strange that he's making the Late Night rounds for an album that came out in the Fall of 2007, but beyond teenage vampire movies, the song's take on the loss of innocence/an idealized America, materialism and fat cats devouring flightless birds is all the more chilling amid the dust of our fucked economy and feels like the better reason to be singing this particular song. You can watch it at Hulu.