The Cool Kids have dropped a few tracks from their Tacklebox mixtape, out later tonight. But you shouldn’t wait to hear this one. You hear that beat? That’s why they’re called The Cool Kids. Even listening to this makes me feel cool. Then it ends and I go back to feeling hungry. I’m gonna go get some Mr Steer. Look out for the mixtape later.
Flying Kites – The Cool Kids

Hoodie Allen is back with their latest single titled “You Are Not A Robot”, which samples “I Am Not A Robot” by Marina & The Diamonds. This joint is off of Hoodie’s upcoming mini-mixtape titled *The Diamond Cuts* in which they will be exclusively sampling from Marina’s *The Family Jewels* album.
You Are Not A Robot – Hoodie Allen

Here’s the visual for “The Ghost Inside” by the Broken Bells, featuring Christina Hendricks. This joint is off of their self-titled album and is available for purchase now.

Their self-titled album was released on Lettuce Flavored Music (BMI) in 2010. This album sounds good, with Mercer’s raspy indy voice over Danger Mouse’s electronic bleeps and bloops, and some songs (The High Road, The Ghost Inside, October) are brilliant, but the problem is that there are no surprises here, nothing you wouldn’t expect from this billionth Danger Mouse collaboration.

Miike effing Snow. This is the video for Stuart Price’s radio edit (can someone explain to me the difference between a radio edit and a remix?) of ”The Rabbit”, and it’s a trip. Stuart Price has also has worked for Madonna, The Killers, and Missy Elliott and he gives this one a boost of clarity and bounce. High points of the video include: A kid with a beard, a 3-legged pitbull, a chubby boy in a purple tanktop with wild eyes, and a beautiful reenactment of the 2LiveCrew album cover.

As cool as the video is, I’m not sure if the changes to the song are an improvement or a dive into a crowded ball pit of similar sounding pop songs. Although Miike Snow’s music is clearly poppy (the production team behind singer Andrew Wyatt, known as Bloodshy and Avant, were responsible for hits such as Britney Spears’ “Toxic”), it also had a really distinct sound. On their debut album they created a pop album that didn’t feel like most pop. Their hooks were huge, and synths were plenty, but it each song sounded like 5 or 6 really powerful elements working together instead of 20 weak elements posing as a unit.

When you listen to this Stuart Price mix, it sounds incredibly polished, but to me it comes across as a bag of party tricks compared to the original work of the producers behind Miike Snow. Every 5 seconds a new synth/sound effect/back-up vocal is thrown in the mix. By the end, I was expecting to hear an airhorn or a rapper jump in with a verse. Any Miike Snow fans out there have an opinion?
The Rabbit – Mike Snow

Beth Ditto is so badass. Why aren’t there more Beth Ditto’s in the world? Maybe if there were, I wouldn’t appreciate her like I do. This video is for The Gossip’s feature single “Heavy Cross” off their forthcoming album, Music For Men, out June 23. “Heavy Cross” is a song laden with gnarly guitar hooks and danceable beats, and of course, Ditto’s unmatched vox. Also, there’s gold. And there’s glitter. There’s also gold glitter. At one point, Ditto spews the stuff from her mouth. I can’t imagine what she’s getting at there. *wink wink*

The Eclipse Soundtrack has leaked and it’s pretty good. The album has tracks from artists such as Band of Horses, Vampire Weekend, Fanfarlo, and this song from Florence + The Machine. I feel like Florence and her machine parts wrote this specifically for Bella and Edward (not that I know the character names psh). This track is Florence doing what she does best, delivering emotionally driven vocals over powerful drum heavy instrumentals. I’m beginning to think this bitch could make anything sound awesome. Florence could sing the ABC’s and make it sound epic.
Heavy In Your Arms – Florence and the Machine

New song by Kid Cudi from his Sophomore album Man On the Moon: The Legend of Mr. Rager, which is schedule for a September 14th release. Track is produced by Plain Pat and definitely comes correct on this one.

OK GO has done it again in the Music Video department with the release of their newest video for the track “End Love”. This time around the guys have decided to mess with TIME itself and have created a magnificently executed stop-motion like colorful adventure. Now, I wouldn’t say this video is as tehcnical and as difficult as the video done for “This Too Shall Pass” but its amazing nonetheless and of course it was done all in one camera shot. These guys make music videos worth watching because in recent years it seems like music videos aren’t as important as they were back in the 90′s and less effort is put into them nowadays. I’ve collected tons and tons of music videos on my computer so that one day I can say “See I actually have good music videos from back in the day” but if OK GO motivates other groups to put tons of effort into their videos; we won’t have to be forced to watch videos from our younger years but actually look forward to future productions. Check out the video and notes about the video from the director:

“The fastest we go is 172,800x, compressing 24 hours of real time into a blazing 1/2 second. The slowest is 1/32x speed, stretching a mere 1/2 second of real time into a whopping 16 seconds. This gives us a fastest to slowest ratio of 5.5 million. If you like averages, the average speed up factor of the band dancing is 270x. In total we shot 18 hours of the band dancing and 192 hours of LA skyline timelapse – over a million frames of video – and compressed it all down to 4 minutes and 30 seconds! Oh and don’t forget, it’s one continuous camera shot.”

Mark Ronson f/ Q-Tip + MNDR “BANG BANG BANG” from Warren Fu on Vimeo.

Mark Ronson has released a video for his first single “Bang Bang Bang” which will be featured on his upcoming album entitled Record Collection. You get to hear Q-Tip featured on the track and he always has that “get the party started” voice going on. The album should be dropping this upcoming fall and after watching the video you will anticipate the project because it looks like it will inject some newness into the music arena but doing so by going retro.
Mark Ronson – Bang Bang Bang

Here’s the visual to Dirty Money’s “Hello, Good Morning” remix, which features Ricky Ross & Nicki Minaj. It’s basically the same as the original video except for Nicki’s part. Also, below is the mastered MP3 of the remix.
Hello Good Morning