May 13, 2013 – During last night's episode of Mad Men, a 90-second animated commercial aired touting the "wonderfilled" nature of Oreo cookies. The storyline of the commercial was straight out of  Laura Numeroff and Felicio Bond's classic 1985 children's book If You Give a Mouse a Cookie and the series it launched.

May 13, 2013 – Kings of Leon kicked off their 2013 tour over the weekend at the BottleRock festival in California's Napa Valley, and they performed a promisingly fiery new song. Though its title and how it might be released have yet to be confirmed, it's likely that "Always the Same" (as YouTube posters are calling the song) will appear on the Nashville band's first album since 2010's Come Around Sundown. Bassist Jared Followill recently said of KoL's upcoming sixth album, planned for a September release, "I thought we were going to make a really mature album, but I'm amazed how youthful it sounds." That's a fair description of "Always the Same," which has a bluesy, wailing guitar solo and the forward propulsion of recent Queens of the Stone Age.

May 13, 2013 – Kanye West knows the public relations value of gossip and controversy, and from the sound of it his new music will continue to generate plenty of both.The talented producer/DJ Hudson Mohawke, who's one-half of exemplary trap-rave duo TNGHT and who contributed to West's 2012 G.O.O.D. Music track "Mercy," unveiled a couple of West-led tracks in a set at Poland's Free Form Festival last night. The visuals aren't much, and the audio is a bit distorted, but it's still a whole lot clearer than the brief snippets from West's performance at New York City's Met Ball last week.The first video features West appearing to make light of Parkinson's disease ("We get this bitch shakin' like Parkinson's") and then taking what DDotOmen notes might be a shot at Kris Humphries, the husband of West's soon-to-be baby-mama Kim Kardashian ("Black dick in your spouse again").

May 13, 2013 – Major Tom has been heard from, and he has a nice singing voice. Canadian astronaut Chris Hadfield, who's set to return to earth today following a five-month stint on the International Space Station, has posted a remarkable music video of himself covering David Bowie's "Space Oddity" in, well, space. Mashable calls the clip "the first-ever music video from space," but it's also a refreshingly sincere addition to a song that has already left a wide cultural footprint — from a theatrically pompous William Shatner version to Flight of the Conchords' "Bowie's in Space." Hadfield actually was in space, though we're afraid he probably can't answer Bowie's question about "Life on Mars?."Bowie recently released The Next Day, his first album of new material in 10 years.

May 13, 2013 – Daft Punk finally have May 21 album Random Access Memories in their hot robot hands. In a new video, the French electronic duo opens up the packaging for the vinyl edition of the record. The clip is set in a spaceship, and we see that the physical design of the record lines up with the music's much-discussed back-to-the-future bent: There's none of the kids' fancy colored vinyl here, just a classic, old-school Columbia label emblazoned in red on black wax.At the end of the video, Daft Punk blast a few celebratory seconds of Random Access Memories opener "Give Life Back to Music." And then it's over.But there are still plenty more Random tidbits to sift through ahead of the album's release.

May 13, 2013 – Another new Queens of the Stone Age song has surfaced from the band's performance last week at Belgian venue Club 69. As QOTSAarchive points out (via Antiquiet), a stream of ...Like Clockwork opener "Keep Your Eyes Peeled" is online, and it's a furious, midtempo churner with a refrain that could serve as a riposte to the title of Beyoncé's recent HBO special, Life Is But a Dream: "If life is but a dream, then wake me up," Josh Homme roars. The recording joins the show's excellent debuts of the more subdued "If I Had a Tail" and charging, falsetto-teasing "I Sat by the Ocean." Also last week came the band's creepy "I Appear Missing" video.QOTSA's first album in five years is due out on June 4 via Matador Records. Elton John, Trent Reznor, Alex Turner, and Brody Dalle are all on board as collaborators, along with recent SPIN cover star Dave Grohl.

May 10, 2013 – America, Foxygen are coming for you. The laconic Los Angeles psych-poppers scrapped their entire European tour after a lackluster South by Southwest performance, but they're currently crisscrossing the United States, including a few dates in Brooklyn next week and a just-announced Pygmalion festival gig. Their new video for "No Destruction," the loping, Dylan-meets-Velvets highlight from this year's smartly '60s-rearranging We Are the 21st Century Ambassadors of Peace and Magic, appropriately nods toward that most American of visual styles: the Western. Rather than go the literal route and depict the song's most vivid image — pot-smoking in the subway — the band's longtime friend Bryan Felber shows them in cowboy hats, "not in Brooklyn anymore," interspersed with footage from video projects dating back to high school.

May 10, 2013 – Kanye West has recently been screaming about being a god at a New York City gala and jetsetting for an apparent Will Ferrell movie cameo, so it's worth remembering how we got here. Now, as Consequence of Sound points out, West fan James Workman has assembled a 45-minute refresher on the rapper, titled Where the Lonely Kids Go When the Bell Rings. Posting on forum Kanye to The, Workman writes: "My first intention was to make like a 10 minute video with Kanye quotes and such, but I had so much material so I decided to make it a tad longer. The closest I could get to a real documentary. (We really need one in all honesty)." With footage from every solo album, it looks like a fine way to get caught up ahead of West's May 18 Saturday Night Live gig.Bigger Than Jesus: 25 Rock Deities, Rap Messiahs, and Would-Be Golden Gods

May 10, 2013 – Now that's what we call a Breeders reunion. The Breeders' current tour with the lineup from 1993's indie-rock touchstone Last Splash was always different from most throwback gigs, because the original lineup, on 1990's likewise-classic Pod, also included singer-guitarist Tanya Donelly. Well, Throwing Muses' co-founder, who left after 1992's Safari EP to focus on her other band Belly, rejoined the Breeders last night for their Boston homecoming show, as Slicing Up Eyeballs points out. The Donelly-boosted Breeders performed Pod Beatles cover "Happiness Is a Warm Gun" (above) and Last Splash's "Do You Love Me Now?" (below, plus alternate looks at "Happiness"). Happiness is Last Splash's 20th-anniversary LSXX reissue coming out on May 14 — and Donelly reuniting with the Breeders last night.

May 10, 2013 – Chris Kelly's funeral in Atlanta yesterday brought out his former Kris Kross partner and about 300 other friends, family, and fellow performers, as the AP reports. Chris "Daddy Mac" Smith, who formed the early-'90s hip-hop duo with "Mac Daddy" Kelly, called the late rapper "a true friend."Jermaine Dupri, the producer who helped launch Kris Kross and Da Brat, another rapper who went platinum in the '90s, reportedly attended wearing backwards pants, Kris Kross' signature early style. Sisters LaTocha and Tamika Scott, of the '90s R&B group Xscape, performed at the service.Kelly was found dead in his Atlanta home on May 1 at the age of 34. Although toxicology results aren't in yet, the police suspect the cause of death was a drug overdose.