Abigail Lapell - "Self-Sympathy". Girl and guitar, sure, but really it's a bare and windy street, clumps of cloud falling from the sky, landing on the dry pavement. The wind blows the little packets of fog around; they collect by storm-drains, in the grafitti-smeared entrances to tenements. A raw ache that's been wined and dined, enlisted for use by a sweet voice. Lapell's guitar-work isn't anything special, but there's beauty indeed in the smoke that flows from her lungs, the way her words disperse storms, set the sky to gently falling. Like a sort of Sandy Denny, Natalie Merchant or Beth Orton, but Abigail lacks the twinkly eyes; instead, round dark things. She's from Montreal and this is from her EP. She has a new album I haven't heard. [buy direct from her]

Nas vs The Knife - "You Take My Nas Away (Barbaro edit)". Via Martin comes a superb mash-up from Barbaro, a Stockholm dj. Nas makes belligerent rhymes over the The Knife's high heaving electro-pop. (The Knife is a Swedish group and Fluxblog golden-boy.) Everything fits together like a chalk jigsaw-puzzle, glittery blackcopper left on your fingers. A steel drum leaves a wistful mark, girls sing like a disconnected Greek chorus. Nas hates the game, hates the game, hates the game... But we play on.

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Over at Teaching the Indie Kids to Dance Again, Keith's posted an outstanding song called "The Ratatat remix of Dizzee Rascal's 'Fix Up Look Sharp'". I refer to it as such because it's in that elite class of remixes; it recreates the song as something altogether new, a full-fleshed beginning-middle-and-end. Gone are the barren ghetto whoops, replaced with a wheeze of synths and the flickerflash beats of a predicted nostalgia. Instead of standing solidly over the production, Dizzee's drowning a bit in it, a victim of circumstance, swallowed up like one little kid in an enormous brushed metal city.

#644 is a brilliant new musicblog with mp3 updates, written by my friend (and StG commenteer), Andrew. He's my go-to man for smart hip-hop, downtempo electronica, and Edinburgh pop. Better still, he's funny. (Yes!) And he's off to a great start with thinky criticism-and-accolade posts on Aidan Moffatt (he doesn't like), Grandmaster Flash and Roots Manuva (he does), and Blue States (he wishes they had been hit by a bus, after Nothing Changes and before The Soundings). Do visit..