"The Physics of Meaning." One day we'll have a physics of time-travel, okay, and Daniel Hart & Alex Lazara can go back in time and change their band's totally stupid name. The undergraduate cleverness of the name was enough to make me dismiss them outright - and my opinion did not improve as I perused the nonsense on their website.

But - (buts being so often responsible for the best things in life) - The Physics of Meaning is well on its way to great. While Hart plays a violin (yes, like Final Fantasy, Patrick Wolf and Andrew Bird), his band sounds more like Grandaddy, Broken Social Scene, John Vanderslice - crunchy drums, backward-spinning electric guitars, tumbles into cut glass. Though the lyrics sometimes carry the insipid philosophising bemoaned above, often they fall closer to the giddy side of emo: everyday phrases repeated until they begin to glow. The strings are arranged marvelously, with unexpected harmonies and then sudden dashes of feeling. At their best - stripped to modest pretensions, pop music instead of treatise, - they're electrifying.

The Physics of Meaning - "Down at Columbia and Cameron". See this is what I'm talking about. Roll-over-and-over drums, blended vocals that would make Fountains of Wayne blush, and it's a song about girls (or maybe boys - he doesn't specify). There's a breeziness here, the way the synths bump into the strings like they've been distracted by some cherry-blossoms. More exciting still is the way the band finds another vibe in the second half - a woozy regalness, the prince having a lazy spring fever spazz-out. The sort of song you want to parcel into a parcel, tape up, and send over the water to make someone smile.

The Physics of Meaning - "Manhattan Is An Island". Drum machine, boy and girl, Notwists of synth: a slippery song, slick and supple, strings sneering. And then the slap of sound, the surge of static, the ceiling slipping. I love the aqueous feel of the whole thing, with the vocals set slightly apart. (On an island, natch.) But when the voices stop and the skyscrapers begin to fall; well, they fall.

Also highly recommended - "Oregon, My Only True Friend", available here.

[buy for a scant US$12]

Mogwai - "We're No Here". The final track of the upcoming Mr Beast has a massive girth, a total ambivalence to everything - like the fat Mr Beast has come strolling through your door, stamping down the kids, tearing handfuls out of the drywall, gobbling your chandelier, raking finger-nails through the art. If he drinks, it's milk, and water, and crude oil. It's not him that lights things on fire - it's the punks who follow. Mogwai's always been a part-time metal band but now at last they're playing fat metal chords, too; they're playing with the gravity of the melody, seeing how weighty this instrumental rock can be, seeing how far they can throw the rock down the well.

[album not available for pre-order yet, so buy Mogwai things here]

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The trailer for Sofia Coppola's next movie, Marie Antoinette is now available. And holy cow does it look great. I love the braveness in its choices, the period-drama mixed with late 20th C coming-of-age: arm waving out the side of a coach, royals scampering down the manor stairs to the electric yellow of Bernard Sumner's voice. History is just lives, and how I love to see these lives filled with a familiar shade of vitality. The title graphic makes me grin ear to ear.

A newly uncovered Elliott Smith song at (the indispensable) You Ain't No Picasso.

New little Skinny live reviews by me: Hawk and a Hacksaw/George, Martha Wainwright.

Last chance: Our BMR/haiku contest ends Monday night is now closed.