The Wrong Trousers - "Video Killed the Radio Star (live)". Some would say that you need to see The Wrong Trousers to appreciate them. But this is a lie. Yes, you should watch the video of them busking - because they look funny, and nice, and like a lot of fun. However the people who say you need to see them are doing the band a great disservice. They've not been listening to the way they play this song, how well and brightly and gut-wrenchingly they play this song. At the end of the clip, amid all the applause, a woman exclaims "Yea-ah!", amid a kind of laugh, and this isn't the exclamation of a girl who's just been amused by a novelty, by a kind of musical Star Wars Kid. It's a "Yea-ah!" that says: I can't believe how much that music was fucking great. A "Yea-ah!" of surprise & pleasure, of respect, of wonder come burbling happily from the gut. Because ok The Wrong Trousers are high-school kids who don't look anything like rock-stars; they're a trio on harp and ukelele mandolin and upright bass; but they have Herman Dune's instinct for the true, for making awkward things, peculiar things, feel affecting and real. It's in the way their voices jostle together, "aw-AW-AW-aw" and "oh-a oh!", sounds we feel every day and which usually go unsung.

[originals at their MySpace / a couple more covers here]

Charlotte Hatherley - "Behave (Luke Smith remix)". Sometimes love is a robot with a giant top-heavy box head and spindly legs. And you're in that box head, your whole world is in that box head, and as the robot lurches through the downtown you're thrown across the room - from floor to ceiling to wall, knocking over the floor-lamp and crashing through the coffee-table and splayed sideways over the chesterfield. And some joker's standing at the door flicking the lightswitch off & on & off, just to fuck with you, friends.

[MySpace]

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Elsewhere:

Forget LOLCATS: The Architectural Dance Society has invented LOLDERRIDAS.

Somehow, without any campaigning or even knowing it was going on, -- I don't know a single person who voted! -- Said the Gramophone came in at no. 7 in the Montreal Mirror's Best Montreal Blog poll. (And on write-in votes!) And "Space Jail", starring Dan Beirne, was voted 7th-best Montreal Play (coincidence?). Anyway - thank you so much to all who voted. What a nice surprise.

I've enlisted the aforementioned Herman Dune to thank you properly: see here.

(Or send your own beautifully sweet "Wish That I Could See You Soon" greeting.)

illustration from "i loved you at all the wrong times", by (of course!) sam brown