Weekender : a tremendous winning situation

FREE MUSIC: 65daysofstatic have been enthralling the increasing minority over the last few years with their post-rock glitch pummelling, but by the sounds of it they're reconfiguring it for new album The Destruction Of Small Ideas. Don't Go Down To Sorrow starts with mournful piano and slow burns its way through layers of muted mathrock, quasi-orchestral layers and a time change and eventually turns into Explosions In The Sky. And then it stops and you're left trying to work out what's just gone on.

HEY YOU GET OFFA MYSPACE: It must be somewhere between accident and design that The Playing Fields are evading the wider critical radar. They call their sound 'Urban Desert', whatever that entails. In this context it's darkly, melodically enormous anthemry that strives less to follow Coldplay into arenas and far more to follow the audibly influencing likes of recent Low, Yankee Hotel Foxtrot Wilco and hi-fi Will Oldham towards the ATP crowd, throwing in elements of Elbow's unpretentious widescreen and the Hotel2Tango post-rock brigade plus a lyric sheet of doomed poetry. Beguiling to the last.

VISUAL REPRESENTATION: Before They Were Famous is our loose topic this week, brought forward from a planned future week by being tipped off about an extraordinary clip of a youthful, wedge haircutted, sports top-sporting, actually intelligible Pete Doherty interviewed while queueing for, of all things, Be Here Now. As it was WIP there's not a lot we've found so far, so do leave a comment if you know of any other YouTube clips in this sphere to match the none more 1985 electronic pop of Cleveland 'modern music' outfit Exotic Birds and their keyboardist Trent Reznor, French hip hop producers Tommy Hools' 2003 single Givin' Up featuring Contempo's Richard Archer and U2 doing I Will Follow in 1980 on Get It Together, the ITV kids' pop show fronted by Basil Brush's Mister Roy. Note Adam Clayton's transitional haircut and the then current vogue, often deployed by the Jam on Top Of The Pops, of sticking the drummer at the front.

VIRAL MARKETING: While the Flaming Lips work on their new album, film, album and whatever else a live DVD, UFOs at the Zoo is coming out in July. A document of a spectacular gig at Oklahoma City Zoo last September, the trailer promises much - obviously there were unofficial cameramen capturing Wayne Coyne's arrival as well as the official Warner Bros ones - as does the state of the stage during She Don't Use Jelly.

FALLING OFF A BLOG: In case you thought we'd got away without the usual Swedish element this week, Swedesplease is a blog full of the ever moving, never really able to tie down to one type Scand-scene.

MORE SONGS TO LEARN AND SING UPDATE: Everyone who's volunteered or been contacted - can you get back to us now? It's ten days away and we've had all of two entrants (not the right term but it'll do for now) in. Almost inevitably we've not even got the full complement yet for the series, so if you want to write about the song everyone should hear, let us know.

EVERYBODY GET RANDOM: And still those band specific review blogs keep on coming. Let's face it, whatever the credentials they're far more interesting than a thousand pieces about teenage bands using The Myspace Revolution to overhaul the music industry that somehow neglect to mention that Cajun Dance Party have just signed to the sort of major label they're portrayed as kicking against.* Anyway. As a sideline from the excellent Fractionals Ian Mathers is giving the back catalogue of Low (just added to the bill of Summer Sundae, Summer Sundae fans) a going over on Too Many Words, Too Many Words; I Got A Message For You prepares for the headache that will surely follow studying Robyn Hitchcock lyrics for too long; and as if inspired by Robert Pollard's own prodigiousness My Impression Now is the second Guided By Voices-only writeup anthology in as many weeks.

(EDIT: Yeah, we remember now that XL is an indie, having been under the impression that it was part-owned by someone else (and, in the original version of this edit, under the impression that it was V2. Really, we should have left this whole grey area alone. But the point about these innumerable pieces stands, largely on the back of one in yesterday's Independent that seemed to make out Pull In Emergency will become as big as Coldplay any second)

IN OTHER NEWS: La Blogotheque's Takeaway Shows remain nigh on unmissable given the right circumstances, and you know STN well enough by now to know three songs outside a church by Jeremy Warmsley is very much a right circumstance. Since we first featured the Takeaway Shows they've also invited by The Shins, Andrew Bird and Alan Sparhawk of Low as well as uploading a first anniversary selection of previously unseen performances by Grizzly Bear, Guillemots, the Spinto Band, Jens Lekman, Cold War Kids and The National, all of whose full sets are archived.