I wish I could name the trailer for Ridley Scott’s Prometheus as the Video Of The Week, because holy shit that movie looks amazing. I just wish somebody could beam it directly into my brain this second; I’m not emotionally equipped to wait until June to see it. But there’s pretty much no way I can call that thing a music video, as much as I might like to. And as it turns out, we got some pretty great music videos this week, five of which are below. Oh, and we’re counting down to the best one from here on out, because that’s how countdowns work.

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After long sojourns through the American West while on tour with Yeasayer, Javelin worked up material influenced by the vivid landscape and the region’s associated cultural oddities for Canyon Candy, a multimedia project that serves homage to the Old West as well as its vintage Hollywood depictions. The band introduced the album in April with the lead track “Cowpoke”; here, Javelin unveils the full short film. Filtered through Javelin’s playful, beat-happy musical cypher, the soundtrack Javelin built for Canyon Candy is a stylistic mishmash of folksy, organic instruments like mouth harps and guitars as well as the usual sampling the band is best known for, creating an idiosyncratic mix that showcases a vivacious curation of sounds. The film itself is a worthwhile counterpart, a tone-matching ballad of Wild West intrigue replete with slaughters and duplicity. For the full experience, NYC’s the Clocktower Gallery is presenting an immersive Canyon Candy multimedia experience through 1/31. Check out the 16-minute Canyon Candy after the jump and grab a download of one of the soundtrack’s jams, “Estevez” while you’re there.

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Brooklyn-via-Providence duo Javelin shift the frequency for their forthcoming Canyon Candy LP, the follow-up to their JAMZ N JEMZ collection, their remixes, and their proper debut LP No Más. For that earlier material these crate diggers wore their influences on their sleeve — in the case of “Twyce,” quite literally via multiple record sleeves — and crafted studied, whimsical dance music that took itself seriously without sounding self-serious. That playful spirit remains, though its focus has shifted wholesale, for this forthcoming LP which is a “Western album” that takes inspiration from the “frontier ballad songbook.” They’re cowboy songs, as fits the title of Canyon Candy‘s first single “Cowpoke.” This is not the Javelin you’re used to. This is Javelin sitting by the campfire, packing a chaw, working on on some rawhide style. Listen:

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Darwin Deez’s “Bad Day” is a “fuck you” song of the mildest kind. It’s directed at someone he hates, but he’s too nice to wish more than lost keys and rainy days on his adversary over the song’s bright guitar and jangling rhythm. Brooklyn duo Javelin did this remix for the single (Deez’ LP came out in the UK last year, it’s out stateside in February). Their bubbly analog synths and blunt bass don’t make his threats more menacing (if anything it’s more fun, less angry), though the line, “I would like to be your girlfriend / So I could dump you” has its own set of issues. Listen:

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Welcome to summer, welcome to free and legally downloadable summer jams. Time to CELEBRATE on ROOFTOPS. But you know, oil spills. And crazy people waiting in lines for phones for hours. And poorly officiated soccer games. The world’s topsy turvy, and so then is this mix, to reflect its time and place. It’s America’s weekend, so both volumes begin patriotically: DOM’s “Living In America” kicks off Vol. 1, HEALTH’s “USA Boys” the next.

But it’s also in honor of a rollercoaster of a summer, kicking off upbeat and euphoric (AS IT SHOULD), popping bottles on tabletops (Le Chev’s “Lifted Remix”) in order to celebrate the days of our lives, to go outside, to come with me. Fun! By the second volume it’s a dance party, though soon enough you’re dancing on your own, wishing he was your boyfriend, scarred for life even if it worked out. All this won’t last forever. All around and away we go. Washed out thoughts about you and I. Then you go away, look ahead down a long hall. Things get melancholic, but remember: it’s still summer. There are still summer girls. Stop. Reset. It’s still Independence Weekend, and it’s still sexy to be living in America. Until the flood in 2012, anyway.

Download links, tracklist:

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We saw a bunch of bands this past week. Not every set was memorable, but there were more than enough highlights to make the stiff necks and barking feet worth it. Here’s Wednesday, Thursday, Gibbarday, and SXSW’s metal shows, and more. This last post contains our notes, and photos from our intrepid photographers — Ryan Muir, Graeme Flegenheimer, Pooneh Ghana (and her polaroids), and Linda Flores — from Friday and Saturday in Austin. As the news cycle speeds up, it’s difficult to hear groups for the first time at events of this sort, but we did stumble upon a few things. Including things we’d like to forget, a la the disappearance of the taco truck on Red River, the unseasonably cold weather, ice tea-flavored vodka, and that people actually use the term “glow-fi.” That, and plenty of unforgettable things that were far from new, like Bone Thugs-N-Harmony and “Hole.”

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While you’re waiting for Eric Wareheim to take Dr. Steve Brule‘s catch phrase to the realest level with his next video directorial assignment for your HEALTH, there’s this new remix to keep you busy. Because all you do is track down Tim & Eric news and wait for HEALTH jams. The band’s called this Javelin remix of Get Color‘s “In Heat” “Track 3 of DISCO2,” and further said that the DISCO2 album art looks like 1989 Donruss, suggesting to me there will be something released called DISCO2 (smart). HEALTH//DISCO was the remix album of the band’s debut which gave us memorable spins from Crystal Castles, CFCF, and labelmate Pictureplane, so a sequel is welcome. Especially as advertised by this introduction from BK-via-Providence beat-duo Javelin, who recently dropped a winner their own, here retaining the vocals but reforming the original’s nuclear reactor meltdown abrasions into a gleaming synthed and funky bit of just after disco-era dancefloor dust.

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First listen from previously loved crate-digging Brooklyn-via-Providence duo Javelin’s forthcoming long-player, the follow up to their odds-and-ends collection Jams n Jemz and pair of Thrill Jockey 12″s (Javelin and Number 2). This time out the record is being pressed under the penumbra of David Byrne’s world music imprint Luaka Bop, with a title to fit that billing (No Mas). Last time out I called their audiophilic dance jams n jemz “a mutant stew that cuts across genres, generations, and genealogy,” which is fully fleshed here on “Oh! Centra,” too — 8-bit beats ala “Soda Popinski,” pitched-up helium-filled ’80s schoolyard raps, crackling warm live backbeats, and a tease or two of “Push It” by Salt-n-Pepa (progenitors of the Jams n Jems conjunctive, so, fitting). Audiophilic and crate-digging still, dudes stay close to their concept of choice all while breathing off-beat and refined (if unpredictable and erratic) smarts into their dance music. Like it.

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After getting artsy in L.A. earlier this week, Yeasayer returned to their adopted home in time for a snowstorm, and for two sold-out shows at Bowery Ballroom and the following night at Music Hall Of Williamsburg. We sent Ryan Muir, fresh off a triumphant photo set at Glasslands gallery, and it turned out Ryan doubled up on his Class Actress intake for one week — not a bad thing, at least not on the back of the free-spirited night-closer at Glasslands last Saturday. Alongside Class Actress on opening duties was the crate-digging dance of Javelin, the Brooklyn-via-Providence duo whose audiophilic and sometimes 8-bit dance jams are a mutant stew of genre-/genealogical-/generational-crossing samples and beats. Solid bill, and a partial preview of what our European friends will get starting next week when Javelin and Yeasayer do a bunch of dates together there.

Yeasayer are still in town tonight, hitting 30 Rock to do Fallon’s show (Jimmy’s having a very Gummy week — tomorrow he’s hosting Neon Indian) before setting off on a long tour for which we’ve got the full dates below. In fact, stack that with a new remix of “Ambling Alp” by one-time A+P mastermind Alan Wilkis, and a three-part video-interview with the Yeasayer Three for M(usic)TV in which they go through Odd Blood track-for-track, and this is a jump worth taking:

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Before catching them multiple times this past CMJ, we last saw the cousinly Brooklyn-via-Providence duo of Tom Van Buskirk and George Langford aka Javelin giving the Very Best’s “Julia” a dope re-do. As mentioned then, Tom and George were set to follow-up their Jamz N Jemz LP with a five-song self-titled EP, both digitally and via a unique physical distribution plan: a limited-edition run of 500 12″s will be available, but rather than having uniform cover art, Javelin will be housed in the used-bin record sleeves of other artists — from recognizable acts like Simon & Garfunkel and the Temptations to more playfully obscure stuff. Each cover was handpicked by the band and silk-screened with the band’s stamp by Crosshair in Chicago. Javelin’s is an audiophilic-strain of dance music, a mutant stew that cuts across genres, generations, and genealogy, and the pair are often said to possess a crate-digger’s mentality — a descriptor they’re not diminishing with that release plan. Start with a listen of the EP’s “TWYCE” — a buoyant groove meditation that’s both electronic and hand-percussive before winding up at a late night cowbell dance party — hosted in a player that’s flashing a cross-section of the silk-screened Javelin album jackets you might get if you pony up the $$ for it.

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