March 2, 2012 – "Our next guest is one of the most popular rappers in the world," Jimmy Kimmell announced last night on his ABC show. And then he welcomed to the stage a purple-shirted audience member wearing another audience member's baseball cap and, of course, a dreadlock wig. Lil Wayne, Kimmell informed audience members a few moments earlier, hadn't shown up for his interview. Good thing the fake Lil Wayne was game for a lively conversation of his own. Turns out Weezy was actually in prison for speeding, hails originally from New York, and is a huge, huge fan of hockey. "How often do you wash your hair?" Kimmel asks. "Did Justin [Bieber] visit you in prison?" Watch the non-interview below, while hoping real Weezy is safe out there, and that false Weezy gets some kind of acting bit part out of this.

March 1, 2012 – Now might be the best time in years to get familiar with Mark Kozelek. The former Red House Painters frontman has a prolific and potentially intimidating discography of desolate and often moving records. With each passing release of sleepy folk-rock rambles and radical cover versions from Kozelek's current Sun Kil Moon project, however, it's been getting easier to take this lonesome-voiced talent for granted — fairly or not. Ask Damien Jurado, or Richard Buckner: Confessional-seeming high-plains gorgeousness is hard work. Which actually happens to be the subject of "Track Number 8," the latest song to emerge from Sun Kil Moon's May 29 album Among the Leaves (you can hear it at Paste, where it is streaming).

March 1, 2012 – Mark Berry doesn't really play an instrument. OK, a little maraca. But, in some ways, he could be considered as vital to Happy Mondays as frontman Shaun Ryder. Known simply as Bez, he was the Manchester rave-rock band's mascot, its hype man, its dancing Bosstone. "I go around in a daze half the time," he told this magazine in 1989. A spirit which, not coincidentally, was inextricable from Happy Mondays' zonked-out party music — their first Factory Records single was called "Freaky Dancin'," after all. Bez isn't freaky dancin' anymore. He confirmed last night to the NME that he will no longer be shaking his thing, maraca or otherwise, on an upcoming tour that otherwise features Happy Mondays' original lineup. He will, though, be traveling with the band and doing some DJing. "I won't be on the stage because my performing days are over," he's quoted as saying.

March 1, 2012 – "Don't look ahead, there's stormy weather," Santigold begins on "Disparate Youth," the spacious, guitar-pierced second single from her May 1 sophomore album Master of My Make Believe. Directed by Santi herself and Sam Fleischner (Panda Bear, MGMT, Suckers), the song's video has only puffy white clouds in sight. White decamps to a thickly vegetated Caribbean locale, riding a motor bike and walking with face-painted children off to some kind of voodoo-tinged tree house. Unlike in the animation-based clip for fellow Master track "Big Mouth," Santigold's typical sentry-like dancers aren't by her side, but she does encounter two twinned dudes with blank eyeballs.

March 1, 2012 – The long-defunct Swedish hardcore punk rockers who once sang "Refused Are Fucking Dead" are … very much alive. Refused, which broke up in late 1998 after a disastrous tour and a touchstone third album (The Shape of Punk to Come), played their first show in 14 years last night at a small venue in the band's hometown of Umeå. Via Blabbermouth, watch fan footage of two songs from the unannounced set below — maybe consider it a preview of the newly reunited group's upcoming Coachella appearance? Shouts of "hardcoooore!!!" punctuate the Swedish-language banter before Refused answers a fans request by performing "Everlasting," the title track from a 1994 EP. Tattooed kids who look far too young to have seen the band in its first go-round crowd-surf triumphantly.

February 29, 2012 – In early 2009, Tanlines unveiled a warmly loping remix of euphoric, perennially underrated Swedish pop duo the Tough Alliance's "A New Chance." At that time, Brooklyn-based singer-guitarist Eric Emm and percussionist-keyboardist Jesse Cohen had only one official release under Tanlines' name, a 12" single on XL imprint Young Turks, and its A-side had few if any decipherable lyrics. Although it might not have become clear until later, that TTA remix set the template for the best songs on Tanlines' own Settings EP, released that same year: shuffling dance-pop beats, African-tinged instrumentation, synths to melt frowns away, and soaring, earnest vocals. "All of Me," the second song on Tanlines' upcoming full-length debut, takes those elements to giddy new heights.

February 29, 2012 – The long and winding road to a debut album from the Baltimore rap's scene's most likely legitimate crossover hope has taken a day-glo late-'90s turn. It's been more than four years since Rye Rye started turning heads outside Charm City with the raw, youthful charm of Blaqstarr-assisted "Shake It to the Ground", more than one year since her eerily humming "Sunshower" collaboration with label chief M.I.A., and eight long months since her Robyn-sampling rap ballad "Never Will Be Mine," and SPIN can now tell you Go! Pop! Bang! has a firm release date: May 15. Coming quickly on the heels of a guest verse on a booty-shaking track by "Like a G6" hitmakers Far East Movement, her latest attempt at a much-deserved breakout single, "Boom Boom," borrows a hook from '90s party-popsters Vengaboys. Who, if you don't remember, were sort of like the non-rapping, Eurodance forefathers of LMFAO.

February 29, 2012 – This past October, Damon Albarn told a reporter he and Noel Gallagher had buried the hatchet, and this month's Brit Awards gave us the instant-awkward-classic photo to prove it. In another bizarre turn of events, it appears the Blur-Gorillaz maestro and the former Oasis songwriter-guitarist are so simpatico they're making oddly similar music. Let's review the evidence below. Gallagher has said his follow-up to debut solo album Noel Gallagher's High Flying Birds will be a collaboration with Amorphous Androgynous, an offshoot of long-running post-rave boundary-pushers Future Sound of London. As Consequence of Sound points out, the first taste of Gallagher's sessions with Amorphous Androgynous has emerged, as the B-side of a new solo single.

February 29, 2012 – No cage can hold Ceremony, despite the name of the forward-thinking California punk thrashers' thrilling new album. Like Fucked Up, No Age, Iceage, Pissed Jeans, and other impressively vital bands in recent years, the men behind 2010 evolutionary leap Rohnert Park masterfully combine mosh-friendly fury with headphones-blasted finesse. Zoo, Ceremony's debut LP for indie stalwart Matador, takes another leap beyond the pit while still maintaining the visceral energy of the group's years on the hardcore touring circuit. We've already heard blistering opener "Hysteria," frenzied call-and-response

February 28, 2012 – Estelle's third album, All of Me, which came out today, spans a range of styles, from the heartbroken balladry of Akon-penned "Thank You" to the West Indies-accented hip-hop stance of "International (Serious)." If the British native who had a 2008 hit with Kanye West-assisted single "American Boy" is giving us her "all," the message appears to be that she's an artist with a whole lot of different facets. Some are better than others, though, and All of Me's most immediately winning track is the lighthearted, lithely catchy pop of "Do My Thing" (via Antiquiet), an independence-asserting collaboration with gifted Atlanta eccentric Janelle Monáe. "My flow, it ain't your flow / But trust me, I know just how I'm flowing," they harmonize amid handclaps, Booker T and the MGs-style organ, peppery horns, and wildly careening hey-hey-heys.