At first I thought I was looking at Billy Corgan,

but then I realized that it was the drummer of my most beloved band. Phil Selway I guess has been working on a new solo album and he’s doing some touring around Europe right now and this clip is from an Italian show I believe. I have no idea what this song says about Phil as a member of Radiohead but I’m not going to really think about it too hard and neither should you really. It’s an okay song and kind of just interesting. If anything, I hope we hear some more of Phil’s voice on Radiohead’s next record. That would be cool. Anyway, enjoy!

It seems artists tend to write only depressing songs about Baltimore, ‘Raining in Baltimore’ by Counting Crows, or not write about Baltimore at all! I believe Chiddy Bang mentions Baltimore in their song, ‘All Things Go’. That was relatively exciting. Well this lack of representation drew me to Deer Tick’s song titled, ‘Baltimore Blues No 1′. I did not expect it, but this unassuming song  lead me to download the rest of Deer Tick’s album, War Elephant, and become infatuated with every folky, indie, incoherent aspect of it.

I am predicting that Deer Tick may be to me in 2010 what The Antlers was to me in 2009. A small band, full of talent, that I fall in love with and devotedly follow. We will see though. Deer Tick hopes to release their new album, The Black Dirt Session, this May.

In spirit of SXSW, here is Deer Tick’s performance at this festival in 2008. With songs like, ‘sink or swim’, it’s hard to deny that their music screams Dylan. But, whatever, they do it well and you’ve got to love the skinny white kid on the double bass who reminds me all too much of one of our friends who plays the cello. Below is ‘These Old Shoes’.

‘These Old Shoes’

Our mad fanboyism for the Gorillaz has no end.

The video for the first Plastic Beach single, “Stylo”, gets a standing ovation of approval from the aphera team. It has me licking my lips for more but also scratching my head as to what’s really going on. References to other songs and amphibious automobiles just make the video worth a second/third/fourth time through it.

Click the image above or RIGHT HERE to watch the video.

Hopkins provides us with one gift, and it’s called intersession – the time between winter break and the start of the semester that occupies most of January. It is a period during which we have time to do everything and anything we want and for most of us, that is doing absolutely nothing.

However, for the more ambitious, intersession gives us time to create masterpieces like what you will find below. A video, made ‘with a lot of construction paper and a guitar.’ The creator, a particularly brainy Hopkins student, admitted that he ‘needed something else to do’ during his free time. Although, in the interview below, he doesn’t consider himself an artist or guitarist, I sure do hope that we see some more creations from him in the future before he goes off to med school. Because I’m pretty sure they don’t grant you anything like intersession there…

When asked what he’d like to tell us about the video, he wrote…

‘First, I am not an artist or guitarist just a hack. I made this video during winter break from college because I needed something else to do. I was playing too much guitar and wanted to give my hands a break-I thought I was getting carpal tunnel.  I usually play classical guitar, but onlyhave my acoustic at home and came up with this little riff while messing around playing John Denver and Grateful Dead tunes.  The dog that crashes the party is a miniature dachshund puppy named Luigi (Wuigi)!’