Lady Sovereign's new album Jigsaw is out and about, and so is the musical munchkin herself. Enjoy the clip above, which collects behind-the-scenes and front-of-bar antics from L-Sov's BlackBook Taste Test, held at New York's Pianos. Thanks as ever to Two Penguins Productions for the magic-making.

As the ethereal vocalist for the Cardigans, Nina Persson made a generation swoon. Now the lovely Swede calls Harlem, New York, her adopted home, following her marriage to American composer Nathan Larson (once of Shudder to Think). Nina and Nathan are also wed creatively, as singer and co-producer of A Camp; their new record, Colonia, is an enthralling amalgam of wistful, dreamy and gorgeously plaintive pop with lyrics that float between the stingingly sardonic (“Let’s raise our glasses to murderous asses”) and the heartbreakingly world-weary (“It’s not easy to be human anymore”). Here, Persson gives BlackBook a tour of her favorite hotspots and hardware stores.

Depeche Mode makes self-destruction sound like falling through the clouds. One needs only revisit the morbid, deviant pleasures of “Master and Servant,” “Fly on the Windscreen,” “Blasphemous Rumours” or “Barrel of a Gun” for a glimpse into the harrowing worldviews of Dave Gahan, Martin Gore and Andrew Fletcher, who have spun a penchant for both futurism and perversion into sales of more than 90 million. Gahan & Co. have spent a career crafting a theater of cruelty for the masses, and if the masses didn’t always quite grasp the concepts—like, why does Gore always seem to be on stage in quasi-bondage gear?—they were lured by the colossal hooks and the seething sexuality, and they devoured it all like piranhas. The Killers, looming large among Depeche Mode’s numerous acolytes, are a peculiar case. Since rocketing to fame with their explosive 2004 debut Hot Fuss, they’ve craftily mated the outré glitz of Duran Duran with the visceral earnestness of U2, all the while reaching for nothing short of the megastardom of both those bands.

Music to our ears: bold, strong, minimal, and raw. See full gallery. Photographer: David Roemer @ Atelier Management. Stylist: Christopher Campbell.

He’s the artist formerly known as Palace, Palace Brothers, Palace Songs and Palace Music, a series of monikers attached to a list of critically praised records released since 1993. Today, the much more widely acclaimed artist known as Bonnie “Prince” Billy (his real name: Will Oldham) assumes yet another identity in a New York hotel room, courtesy of a pair of spooky, deadening novelty contact lenses.

With her new album Jigsaw about to drop, pint-size English rapper Lady Sovereign, still “the biggest midget in the game,” braves a tall order of libations. New York’s Pianos is the site of the MC’s tangle with a booze medley designed to appease her surprisingly finicky palate.

On a cold, rainy afternoon in Nashville, Tennessee, supermodel Karen Elson, sequestered in the upstairs quarters of a pink-walled boutique, happily shows off a few favorite pieces. She pulls a long white tulle overdress from a rack laden with velvet bias-cut slip dresses from the 1930s.

An array of black markers, jars of acrylic paint, skinny and fat brushes, and cans of spray paint before him, Casey Spooner, one half of Fischerspooner, begins billboarding song titles from the electroclash duo’s self-released third album, Entertainment (out next month). The guerilla-style graphic rendering, Spooner says, “seems appropriate, as the entire album was written with song titles first, music and lyrics second.” It will come as no surprise to fans who have witnessed Fischerspooner’s live spectaculars that the performance artist himself became an integral part of his piece: a black-and-white sweater by Australian designers Romance Was Born, bold patterned jeans by Jeremy Scott for Tsubi and silver sunglasses by Adam Kimmel fit seamlessly into his floor-to-ceiling graffiti-style mural. The resulting piece, he says, “is a bit Stefan Sagmeister; it also reminds me a little bit of the graffiti artist Neck Face’s style.”

Bat For Lashes, Two Suns (Astralwerks) On the heels of her engrossing 2006 debut Fur and Gold, Natasha Khan (best known by her stage pseudonym Bat For Lashes) returns with the rhythmically complex Two Suns, which signals her daring sonic transition from goth-pop indie darling to high-concept sorceress. As she tells it, the album channels two distinct personae: there’s Natasha and the less-earthy Pearl. Unfortunately, neither of these narrative voices is particularly distinct. With the exception of “Pearl’s Dream,” they’re almost indistinguishable. Still, Two Suns brims with warm, burbling electronics (“Daniel”), delicious psychedelic piano pounding (“Siren Song”) and enough indelible melodies to forgive all that torpid mysticism. —Brian Orloff

For the most part, Big Man Japan is a series of mock interviews between a prodding documentary filmmaker and a mumble-mouthed loner, Daisatou (Hitoshi Matsumoto), who also happens to be a superhero. When it’s not that, it’s a flamboyant cavalcade of Harryhausen-inspired monsters laying waste to Tokyo. The contrast between these poles is the exhilarating crux of the film, mixing tonal extremes with the same nutty bravado that drives the best Pixies songs.