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We were a bit confused by the first couple tracks off Comedown Machine, the fifth LP from perennial New York bar soundtrack fixtures The Strokes, who’ve struggled since the opening strains of First Impressions of Earth to land a killer track. “One Way Trigger” was just awful, but “All The Time” was a return to excellence. So now here’s the whole thing, which awaits your steely final judgment.

If you’re feeling rushed and out of time, pull up a seat and listen to all nine minutes of this. You’ll still be running late, but you won’t be in a hurry anymore.

When you assemble a summer musical festival in a tiny park in an affordable city, you're already doing something right. When you manage to nab R. Kelly, Bjork, and Belle & Sebastian as headliners, you're basically suggesting that every other musical festival just go ahead and give up. The Pitchfork Music Festival, which was arguably already the best summer festival our nation had to offer, has just announced its three amazing headliners. The festival will take place July 19-21 in Union Park in Chicago. [via Pitchfork]

With spastic, psychedlic melodies and distorted sonic warbling, Animal Collective's new video for their song "Applesauce" is intended to be viewed in complete darkness. And to be fair, most music sounds better after sundown with the curtains closed tight, but in this case, the request for lightlessness stems from the visually entrancing nature of their latest video, directed by maestro of fucked-up cinema, Gaspar Noé, whose affinty for sexuality and neon-colored violence is like a swallowing a pill succumbing to whatever he puts before you. 

How many times have you heard some old person complain about what the kids are listening to these days? (Oh, yesterday, from me?) It's a certainty, like death and taxes, that popular music will only cause the furrowed brows of the cool kids of yesteryear to become more creased, their now wrinkled hands forming into limp fists raised slightly in the air as the loose skin on those arms shake with a ferocity only matched by the senility so depressingly spouting from their typing fingers. Do not dare hush them! They have opinions, and they are always correct! Ladies and gentlemen, Michael Musto has something to say about the current state of pop music! 

Last night my friend said he was in danger of overdosing on rapper Kendrick Lamar’s major-label debut, good kid, m.A.A.d. city. “It’s so good,” he said, “and I need to ease up.” But easing up is exactly what Lamar never seems to do—he’s relentless, both in his delivery of memoiristic narrative and demonstrations of technical skill.

Fans of sludgy, lo-fi, aggressive rock have only had one name on their lips this year: Ty Segall. The 25-year-old Californian, whose shaggy blond hair and baby face make him look like a young Thurston Moore, has already put out two albums in 2012. One, Slaughterhouse, has a spaced-out wall of guitar sound, while the other, Hair, is a lo-fi, feedback-filled, shambolic psychedelic trip. These records are the best kind of genre exercises: wildly fun and playful, but still operating within conventions that make them easy to listen to. Both records were deemed “Best New Music” on Pitchfork (average score: 8.45), and praised up and down the blogosphere. Stereogum spoke for many fans and critics when they called
 Slaughterhouse “a confident attempt at
making the ‘evil, evil space rock’ Segall
has repeatedly cited as his ideal sound.”

In 1986, David Byrne made a movie called True Stories, a mockumentary of sorts about the fictional city of Virgil, Texas. With a nod to the ugliness of industrialized civilization predicated on a mass killing of the native people, animals and vegetation, his treatment of the town—look at this field, where they build houses; the shopping mall is where people socialize on the weekend—comes in its own brand of wry compassion, with the same degree of bite as A Prairie Home Companion.

HAVE YOU HEARD THE NEWS? There is a list of albums released in the last 15 years! They are representative of EVERYTHING, but most importantly, THE BEST MUSIC of the last 15 years!!!!! God bless the people at Pitchfork and the people who read Pitchfork and the people who listen to music that is covered by websites such as Pitchfork for FINALLY breaking down what is surely a great cross-section of what important people listen to. Me? Well, I forgot to vote. Whoops! (Don't worry, I just registered to vote in New York, as I'm sure if it weren't for me Brooklyn would go for Romney. If only I had voted in this Pitchfork poll to sway how well Radiohead did!)

Finally: a day in which the weather wasn’t actively working against us. Well, other than the fact that it was 95 degrees, which after two days of rain and heavy foot traffic led to Union Park smelling like the world’s most depressing petting zoo. Nevertheless, if you’re going to spend the day at an outdoor festival, “hot” beats “rainy” ten times out of ten. And as long as you followed John Dwyer’s (of Thee Oh Sees) advice to “stay hydrated, goddamn it”, it was a solid day to catch some great performances from Milk Music, Thee Oh Sees, The Field, and The Men. Oh, and Lady Gaga was there, if that’s your thing.