You Can’t Form A Single Thought

Von Südenfed “The Rhinohead” – Mark E Smith has a tendency to dominate the flavor of any song he sings, but “The Rhinohead” is a rare exception, a track with a bounce so aggressive and gleeful that it keeps pushing Smith out of its way. Smith’s voice can be heard throughout, but his words seem shattered and scattered by Mouse On Mars’ stomping beats, as though he’s too distracted and overwhelmed to form a coherent thought, much less utter a comprehensible sentence aside from the distant and tentative exclamation “I was feeling…fascinated.” (Click here to buy it from Amazon.)

Boys Noize “Oh!” – All of the songs on Boys Noize’s first full-length sound more or less the same, and though that can be a bit numbing if heard from start to finish, the quality of the non-stop onslaught of riffs is terrifying consistent. I really need to emphasize the word “riffs” — every song is based on a motif that sounds like a badass guitar hook transposed into computer error signals, electronic screeches, and synthetic noise. This isn’t far off from what Justice and the rest of the Ed Banger crew have been up to recently, but it’s more obsessively focused on achieving an overwhelming heaviness. (Click here to buy it from Juno.)

Elsewhere: Sharon Jones reads passages from Douglas Wolk’s Live At The Apollo book from the 33 1/3 series.

Also: Mark Pytlik interviewed Daft Punk for Pitchfork.

And: Drive XV, Stereogum’s tribute to Automatic For The People, launched today, and you really ought to check it out. In addition to free mp3s of covers of every track on the record by a range of indie rock acts, the mini-site includes an essay about the album written by myself, along with comments from Mike Mills on each of the songs. I conducted the interview with Mike last week, and a longer Q&A about the new live dvd/cd set and the forthcoming album will appear on Stereogum in a couple weeks. A big thank you is due to the guys at Stereogum for making this happen, and to David Bell, Bertis Downs, and Mike Mills for being so great about getting that interview together.