Monsters of Folk continue to blanket the airwaves and intertrons with performances from their self-titled debut, which we found to contain precisely 8 PMEUs (PopMatters Enjoyment Units) out of 10. “Temazcal” is a cool affair, maybe deserving better treatment than the video can deliver, what with its sepia tone and cheesy scratched film effects and all, but such is life.

—Tyler Gould

Grizzly Bear continues to get mileage out of Veckatimest with this video for “Ready, Able”. The song is as good as ever, but the stop motion video by Allison Schulnik is the real star here.

—Tyler Gould

Will Stratton is in the habit of releasing music for free, so it comes as no surprise that he’s giving away a couple from his new album, No Wonder. The lyrics aren’t anything special, with nary an inspired image between the two songs, the kind of interchangeable ruminations that do nothing to distinguish him from any number of other songwriters, but they are inoffensive and pleasant enough, and the heavy bow of dissonance in “Your California Sky” gets him a pass.

Will Stratton
Your California Sky [MP3]
     

Who Will [MP3]
     

—Tyler Gould

J. Tillman‘s video for “Though I Have Wronged You” is barely a video, consisting only of a low-res conversation between green and pink pixel clusters. What do they talk about? The usual: feeling disconnected when we’re technologically connected to more of the world than ever before, the difficulty of living from within as opposed to building a persona out of tweets and status updates, the way the Internet feeds narcissism by allowing us to submit parts of ourselves for judgment by our peers so we can then judge for ourselves whether or not we like the reaction to the self that we’ve put out into the world, the modern desire for ultimate power over ourselves and others through calculation, mediation, modulation. The conversation is is engaging enough to detract from the song itself, making them two disparate conversations cruelly sharing the same .flv file, which suits the mood about right.

—Tyler Gould

Here’s a video for the title track from Cocker’s Further Complications, slinky stage presence and paper airplane transitions included.

—Tyler Gould

The Roots joined Jim James, Conor Oberst, M. Ward, and Mike Mogis on stage Wednesday night to kick out the jams, as they say. The debut album from Monsters of Folk is out now on Rough Trade.

—Tyler Gould