These guys are one of my favorite metal bands that's currently touring. They'll be here on December 11th and you can bet there will be goat horns in the air.

(Press release after the cut.)

How drunk is Mark E. Smith in this video?

Never you mind.

But we finally understand what makes "Leave!" by Northampton's VV Brown work.

Besides the '50s rock & roll doo-wopness of it, and a video that demolishes an old Tori Amos idea, it's the way the song's dynamics run up against the walls of each other and does funny things to your stomach.

The end of each verse, interestingly, goes up, uP, UP.

While the end of the chorus goes down.

Simple. Unusual.

Success!

VV Brown : "Leave! [Little Boots Mix]"

Slow-mo! Drag queens! Self-awareness! Role reversals! Pet Shop Boys!

The pitch-perfect, straight-faced absurdism.

"You're a good guy, Robbie."

Every acclaimed music-video of the last three years can only be embarrassed for trying.

Was it the missing $100,000 that some say is the reason the Satellite closed? Is it a mountain of pure Columbian cocaine? Is it the brain of Courtney Love?

Here's what was inside:

As soon as Camille Paglia weighs in with an essay, Lady Gaga's transformation into "the next Madonna" will be complete....

Head Like a Kite's next gig happens at the Crocodile with Foscil and Animals at Night Sat. Nov. 21.

(Parts 2-6 are all lined up and waiting for you on Pitchfork.)

Anyway, they just released a video for the song "Silverfish." It's cute. It's like an old pop-punk video you'd find on one of the Cinema Beer compilations circa 1998 or something. Well done, boys.

So sometimes when you set out to find one thing, you find another. In this case, I stumbled upon The Puppini Sisters, an immensely talented and annoyingly-named Verve recording act. Uh, is it weird that I kind of love this? Especially the way they go "mmm-hmm-op" barely moving their lips?

If the singles from Tongue 'N' Cheek have so far mined late '90s big beat ("Bonkers") and Ibiza-styled trance ("Holiday"), "Dirtee Cash" is full-on late '80s crossover acid house, which continues the album's deliberately low-brow through-line of mainstream British dance history and works as a sort of follow-up to the "Pussyole (Old Skool)" Wiley-bait that Dizzee put out a couple of years ago before his hit-or-miss abandonment of grime credibility.

Wiz hears the song, in any case, and conjures up a black-faced, beauty-contestanted, rugby shirted, mandolin enhanced, Margaret Thatchered, 'The Wicker Man' book-bonfire dance of death.

As you do.

It's a nice change of pace, both visually and musically. Not as sure-fire a trick as earlier ones. Until you realize it's only a vague update to the 1989 number-one "Dirty Cash" by The Adventures Of Stevie V.

"Road Rage," from the album, should've been the single anyway.

But it is! Or will be.

It's now the next song scheduled for release.

Pop telepathy! Bam!

Which reminds us. Remember when we wanted an extended all-aboard-the-trance-train version of "Holiday"? (We do.)

Bam!

And how, for the last year, we obsessed, again and again, about Little Boots properly unleashing "Earthquake"?

Bam!

We love it when E.S.P. demands come together.

If you're unfamiliar with the local band, here's what I said about them many a couple moons ago, when they played Bumbershoot.

The Black Whales play the Sunset on November 7th.

Here's the video for the album's first single, "Hell":

I don't care how ridiculous the band has become over the years (more so than we could've ever imagined, surprisingly)—The Art of Drowning is still a great punk rock record and it always sounds best in late October.

We can no longer make R&B that has this kind detachment, control, elegance. Black elegance can never be retrieved; it can only recede. "The pain of too much pleasure..."