As if topping a number of those godforsaken year ends lists wasn't enough, Robin Pecknold and the rest of his Fleet Foxes are performing on the 1/17 episode of Saturday Night Live, which will be hosted by Rosario Dawson. She's currently promoting Seven Pounds, her film with Will Smith, but don't hold that against her. As far as the other foxes, we're told they're only the sixth indie-label band to play on the show during its 30-something years. (Can you name the others?) Make sure to tune in to NBC next Saturday at 11:30 PM EST to see what songs they play. And to see if Robin stands up.

Lists! Just can't get enough of those 2008 lists, I'm going to post one every day until I kill myself for being the worst. Actually I think we all safely thought year-end list season was over, except that obviously it's not over. This last one -- Hype Machine's painstakingly compiled Zeitgeist aggregate -- is by necessity a late comer, pooling data from 774 music blog rankings to make one blogger-sanctioned meta-list beast. The project had its inception a few years back with Heartonastick's perfectly named Bloggregate, which later merged with/was subsumed by Zeitgeist: powered by Hype's inherent ability to track what the rest of us are getting hyperbolic over. Being what it is, there aren't many surprises (i.e. look here for hints) but the end product is well assembled, featuring a Blog Fresh Radio component (discussing results with various bloggers), links to raw data and individual source lists, and most impressively, full album streams for each of the top 50. Here it is in a glance:

Matthew Houck, aka Phosphorescent, loves doing covers. In fact, you could argue the guy's addicted to them. Our last few posts on MH have dealt with his takes on Nick Cave's "Right Now I'm A-Roaming," the Righteous Brothers' "You've Lost That Lovin' Feelin'," and the truly coverable "Little Boxes." Now we have ourselves some Willie Nelson: Houck's put together an 11-song covers collection To Willie documenting his love of the man. Take a listen to the opener "Reasons To Quit."

NAME: Phoenix
PROGRESS REPORT: Wolfgang Amadeus Phoenix, out in Spring 2009. Recorded at Philippe Zdar's studio in Montmartre, Paris.

"Fast and intense" is how Phoenix's lead singer Thomas Mars describes the band's next record. The Paris-based foursome are men of few words, or maybe few English words and more French ones. Either way, though they've just completed their followup to 2006's It's Never Been Like That, they're not giving away details in any language. But if the record is "fast and intense," then it sounds like it travels further down the same path as It's Never Been Like That, a rougher LP for a band whose discography was all rounded edges and glossy textures. Or perhaps the new record will fuse both. "Our production on It's Never Been Like That was pretty raw, this time we wanted to get back to something more sophisticated," guitarist Laurent Brancowitz explains. "Looking back I realize that this new album shares many similarities with United, our first one." Mars has a slightly different take on Wolfgang Amadeus Phoenix. "I feel like we started this record without any specific goal in mind, which wasn't the case with our last one," Mars says. "The last record was about our present, this one is about our future."

It's an annual thing, this BBC list. Last year they bestowed the top three slots upon Adele, Duffy, and the Ting Tings. So, music supervisors for Apple commercials and Saturday Night Live, here's another list to pick over. This year's spread numbers 15 -- five honorable mentions with the top 10 ranked -- based on a poll of 134 UK music pundits including magazine editors, newspaper critics, DJs, radio/TV program directors, bloggers, and cetera. Some you've heard before (Passion Pit, Little Boots, Empire Of The Sun), some you've yet to hear, and some you'll wish you never did. Here's the list with listen links affixed for your clicks:

The Black Cab Sessions latest posting features a session with Ry, joined in the backseat and on additional guitar/harmonies by Cardinal mate Neal Casal, singing Cardinology cut "Sink Ships." It's pretty and straightforward from a viewer's perspective, and was also literally straightforward from the cabbie's perspective. The Black Cab kids write:

There was a slight concern at the start of the Session though: Ryan gets car sick. Ryan's manager warned us of this and asked that, as much as possible, we drive in a straight line. It's definitely one of the stranger requests that [cab driver] Jason's ever had...

Ryan Adams being strange. I can't believe it.

I don't have anything to back this up aside from the implication in Black Cab's accompanying blurb, but this appears to the first time a cabbie actually requested an audience with one of the Session performers. Cabbie Jason was in Nashville on some unrelated business, learned of the series, went back and professed his Ryan Adams fandom and got himself the fare of his dreams. Strange request sure, but that guy's never been so happy to drive a straight line in his life. Cute story. Watch here. Also, check out this take on "Red Moon" by the Walkmen, which was my favorite song on one of last year's best albums. Ham looks a little distracted, but whatever.

So what we have in the lead single to Tonight: Franz Ferdinand is the Kapranos crew tumbling one of their signature disco hooks through some Spoon, some dirty club synths, and a narcotic, half-time (and somewhat throwaway) bridge. The video picks up on all of it, and also the crime scene album cover, showing the guys in their signature suits but looking like they've been out too late on the town with an eight-ball. As evidence I'd cite the hollowed out eyes and the restless hotel room shots, but also the strip club, the midnight run through the desert, the manic cackling, and most definitely the late night trip to the laundromat. There's only time when all of that's a good idea, and that time is when you are a coke zombie.

Yes, Blooming Onion-Gate ended up being one of our most discussed posts in 2008, but before that mess, we were busy debuting their songs and trying to tell the world (sorry) that with their update on classic C86 (plus early Slumberland) and Spectored three-part harmonies, Vivian Girls were a band worth checking out. Of course, they still are -- their debut is a good one. All that said, the trio stopped by the Laundromatinee's "VIBES II performance space" and performed four songs, two previously heard ("Tell The World" and "Wild Eyes") and two (at the time) new. Judging from the summer wear and a quick Google refresher, the recording took place in August and MP3s of the tracks have been floating around since then, but the video footage is just going live now, so let's forget about the past.

Fucked Up's first official video edits together footage from their Blitz covering, Chemistry Of Common Life promoting 12-hour marathon. The footage, shot by Brendan FitzGerald of VBS.tv, was edited together by Bajir Cannon. We probably could have done without the after effects and fancy splicing, but it's a nice enough snapshot of the Toronto band in their live element. Keep watch for the Vivian Girls doing backup vocals.

Hard to believe, but it's just about time for a trip to Austin, Texas. (03/18 - 03/22, to be more exact.) In the midst of these tough economic times, it's unclear if things will be as hedonistic as in years past (free Sparks? No free Sparks? Sparks without the active ingredient?) or if we'll be forced to bring down our own discount BBQ and bulk beer from New York. What is clear, though, is that there will be actual bands playing. We have the proof: A partial list's been revealed. Buckcherry's not on it. But Black Cherry is, along with two Crystal bands and the oldest Gallagher. You can also catch Dead Prez, Primal Scream, and Peter Bjorn & John, among others. Process:

Okkervil River's performance of "Pop Lie" on David Letterman last night wasn't sweetly sung or especially succinctly stated. The The Stand Ins track sounded pretty shaggy dog (like hirsute Will Sheff, trying out for Mastodon in the accompanying screengrab), especially in comparison to that more staid singing interview from a couple months back. For his part, Dave claps and gives a shout out to Austin, but doesn't seem half as excited to be there.

Yesterday we posted the New Year's seasonal effective "MMV." Today, more firmly entrenches in the post-Holiday work week, Bubba and Matt Kadane take us on a lonesome trek through an airport in the self-directed video for an updated, chillier version of The New Year's "Seven Days And Seven Nights." The album's guitars are traded for a piano, which gives the song a more spectral, lonesome feel. The video comes complete with subtitles, the lyrics a 9-5ers muted post-vacation resignation.

Scooping phish.com and phish.net, Billboard has announced a string of confirmed reunion tour dates for the second generation jam-scene stalwarts and the trustafarians who love them. The trek commences a couple of months after the previously reported Hampton run in March, with a pair of shows at the Jones Beach Amphitheater in New York and rolling through the month of June. More shows will surely pop up, but for now there's a conspicuous hole in the itinerary where a stop in Manchester, TN would fit (6/12-13), giving some more credence to those Phish-and-Bruce headlining Bonnarumors. Here's how it's looking:

The Hold Steady are a band you loved commenting about in 2008, even though Stay Positive didn't place as high in those year-end lists as past HS offerings. Regardless, Craig Finn & Co. donned tuxedos and helped Jools Holland ring in 2009 as part of his New Years Eve Hootenanny with a couple Positive anthems. This version of the title track's more interesting than the stylized video treatment (not hard). Finn sounds a bit hoarse, which adds some urgency.

Yesterday we got a rare glimpse of Phil Selway singer-songwritering at one of the 7 Worlds Collide shows in Auckland this week. As mentioned, the series yielded something just as rare and even more bloggable in Jeff Tweedy's take on "Fake Plastic Trees." And here it is. The world-collision quota is nearly fulfilled by this performance alone: Jeff on vocals, RadioEd and Phil on their respective instruments, Johnny Marr on his. (The footage is sorta crappy, but you can also make out BTW Liam Finn playing the role of Jonny, which would make sense 'cause this whole party series is papa Neil's baby.) As you'd expect from a makeshift band comprising 40% of Radiohead and 100% of awesome, it's a very faithful and dynamic cover, all big guitars and perfect sound swell for "She looks like the real thing..." Also not surprising but great to hear -- Jeff gives good Thom.

The last official Paul McCartney video we posted came via Michel Gondry and starred Macca along with Natalie Portman and a bunch of raving ghosts. This Marco Sandeman-directed clip for Memory Almost Full bonus track "222" takes a darker, more minimalist and psychedelic route. It looks a bit like a high school science experiment. As far as the song? Something very Vince Guaraldi-on-Spoon going on here.

Read that any way you wish and you will be bingo. Fab Moretti's side project made their network debut on the NBC-funded public service to insomniacs that is Carson Daly last night. "No One's Better Sake" is a great song, a summery Strokes-on-the-beach jam, and the Fab crew made great work of it here. Moretti is little more than a figurehead standing at the mic with his acoustic (I can't really hear his voice), but still he gets screengrab honors because the only way you're allowed to sound so Strokesy is if you have a Stroke in your band. Lesson learned, Stroke wannabes.

This past Saturday (1/3) Brian Eno gave a fairly impassioned speech regarding his thoughts on the current Israel/Palestine situation during the Stop Gaza Massacre protest in London. He titled his speech "An Experiment in Provocation: Stealing Gaza," and his thoughts are clearly also a provocation. Maybe the most divisive thing he's done since producing Coldplay. He begins:

It's a tragedy that the Israelis - a people who must understand better than almost anybody the horrors of oppression - are now acting as oppressors. As the great Jewish writer Primo Levi once remarked "Everybody has their Jews, and for the Israelis it's the Palestinians". By creating a middle Eastern version of the Warsaw ghetto they are recapitulating their own history as though they've forgotten it. And by trying to paint an equivalence between the Palestinians - with their homemade rockets and stone-throwing teenagers - and themselves - with one of the most sophisticated military machines in the world - they sacrifice all credibility.

The Israelis are a gifted and resourceful people who fully deserve the right to live in peace, but who seem intent on squandering every chance to allow that to happen. It's difficult to avoid the conclusion that this conflict serves the political and economic purposes of Israel so well that they have every interest in maintaining it. While there is fighting they can continue to build illegal settlements. While there is fighting they continue to receive huge quantities of military aid from the United States. And while there is fighting they can avoid looking candidly at themselves and the ruthlessness into which they are descending.

He continues along these lines, which you can hear for yourself in this video footage.

Courtesy of ateaseweb.com, we have some acceptable footage of Mr. Selway fingerpicking his way through a droning little acoustic number from a live performance in New Zealand last night. The YouTube label has 7 Worlds Collide affixed, which is the title of a 2001 album culled from various performances spearheaded by Crowded House's Neil Finn and including Johnny Marr, Eddie Vedder, Ed O'Brien, and others. As previously reported, the global all-star troupe are reprising the project, with notable addition Jeff Tweedy, via a new LP and a series of shows that took place in Auckland this week. We'll assume this is Phil's contribution:

SXStereogum alum Blitzen Trapper put out the very fine Furr album last year, releasing the title track as a freebie. In posting Brandon said "The track's mellow and straight-up folky until they let a harmonica in with a few electronics, making it a little coyote spacey but still pastoral." I was really taken by their performance on Conan, which cut the digital squiggles and embraced the back porch stomp of it all, with a new round of earthy Trapper harmonies in tow. Director Jade Harris does the track proud here, sticking to the lyrics with a sepia photo flipbook of Blitzens and lupines and mice on magical beanstalks. Solid.

We thought it would be wise (and witty) to start the New Year with the New Year, so this week's Drop found the post-Bedhead Kadane brothers-fronted Touch & Go quintet offering up "MMV," a suitably thematic track from their excellent self-titled third collection. Professor Matt Kadane ably answered our questions about the track and the year ahead. You can read and hear his words here.

This week also offered you a chance to take home a Kodak Zi6 HD Pocket Video Camera, with which you can document your own New Year.

Before the holidays, a Swedish website surprised us with the world premiere of "Lay It Down," a new Peter Bjorn & John song ostensibly from their upcoming album. We can't be sure because we don't understand Swedish. Tonight comes the leak of a second song via Kanye West's blog. It's cool though, they gave him PERMISSION.

When we posted about L.A. prog-gospel crew Bodies Of Water's "Under The Pines," we mentioned that at least in name, the song reminded some of us (me) of old-time Siltbreezers the Strapping Fieldhands' In The Pineys EP. The video, written and created by Bodies David & Meredith Metcalf and directed by Andy Bruntel, finds David looking like a fieldhand, albeit not so strapping. Story wise, it's good to see Meredith putting her past acting skills to use. But dog (and sweetmeat) lovers might want to avert their eyes.

Apple always knows how to grab headlines for its sense of theater and savvy in rolling out new products, and the company's last ever MacWorld presentation was no exception. Except in the sense that it was totally an exception, because the big news coming from San Fran is a variable track-pricing model in the iTunes store? (Now in three flavors: run-periodic-tasks.69, run-periodic-tasks.99, and .29.) That, and all its 10 million songs will be available in DRM-free format by March, which is great news if it was 1999 and also if you still pay for music (and if you do, we salute you because check out these deals). No fun gadgets, nothing that will significantly impact your music lifestyle unless it's your dream for Garageband 09 to offer music lessons from Sting, John Fogerty, and Norah Jones for .99. That dream has finally come true, so nice work. There is a new 17" MacBook Pro with environmentally friendly batteries, but I won't mention it because this is a music blog. HOWEVER, there was one great thing to come out of this last MacWorld:

Last January we saw Sam Beam perform "Flightless Bird, American Mouth" by his lonesome. A year later, he's reprising The Shepherd's Dog closer on Leno with band in tow. If you haven't seen Twilight it might seem strange that he's making the Late Night rounds for an album that came out in the Fall of 2007, but beyond teenage vampire movies, the song's take on the loss of innocence/an idealized America, materialism and fat cats devouring flightless birds is all the more chilling amid the dust of our fucked economy and feels like the better reason to be singing this particular song. You can watch it at Hulu.

Regular Knife visual collaborator Andreas Nilsson offers an eerie video for "If I Had A Heart," the dark, pulsing, ambient first single from Karin Dreijer's new project, Fever Ray. It's pretty great -- a couple of kids carry a torch and take a boat down the River Styx toward a spooky mansion housing a victim of foul play in a red dress and Dreijer in her skeletal face paint -- but nothing will ever top the quietly anthemic "Pass This On" clip. Then again, this track is more Svarte Greiner than "Heartbeats," so the bleakness is more than apropos.

Malawian-born, London-based singer Esau Mwamwaya teamed with European production crew Radioclit on the highly enjoyable mixtape The Very Best, a global brew straining various forms of African music into original tracks, covers, and remixes, the likes of which include blogger baiting captures of M.I.A., Architecture In Helsinki, Vampire Weekend, etc. And so we bit. The first vid from The Very Best is for "Kamphopo" (i.e. the AiH one), building on steel-drum sun of "Heart It Races," and it captures Esau's first homecoming to Lilongwe, Malawi in nine years. Smiling and dancing ensues.

Matt's reclaiming his good name from the realm of the pronouns next month with Hold Time, a 14-track followup to 2006's excellent Post War. We're excited. The album's got a nice little guest list -- Grandaddy's Jason Lytle, Lucinda Williams, DeVotchka's Tom Hagerman, Ben Gibbard's girl -- although the title track sounds like Matt alone (sounding a little like good buddy Jim James). It's a beautifully produced affair, with strings and distant pianos and a languorous tempo, all suspended animation and golden croon. M. directs, helpfully adding subtitles to black-and-white slow-motion footage of a futuristic people-mover. It's all in the contrast.

Yesterday we took a look at Dan's shady forest/bright tent album art for his forthcoming Bromst, compared in turns by you guys to past covers from Gossip Girl-fave Department Of Eagles and cannabis-fave Phish. You guys have a lot of reference points. And you won't need any of them on this first listen from the album: "Get Older" is a Dan Deacon song through and through, with some acoustic instrumentation (drums, marimba) rounding out the usual electro whiplash.

With "Snowblind," +/- {Plus Minus} showed us they weren't afraid of dramatic, narrative video treatments. Same goes for X's On Your Eyes's slighter "Unsung," which sadly isn't a Helmet cover. What it is is a sweet song accompanied by a David Lobser-directed video starring Alice In Wonderland with a pierced nose and a forlorn look along with her inexpressive White Rabbit and a helpful Jiminy Cricket that leads her to an hidden surprise -- which makes her mushroom-tea party a bit more exciting.