I tried, and maybe if it wasn’t everything you needed, you should expect less from me or I should promise less

Here are two very different awesome brand new albums by old favorites.

First, Daft Punk's Random Access Memories, which is so good that even everyone knows it and it debuted at #1 on Billboard's Hot 100 last week. It is hard to pick one song from this disco epic, but here is Instant Crush, with Julian Casablancas of The Strokes on vocals:





Next, from their new album "Trouble Will Find Me", the ultimate Brooklyn woodsman musicians' musicians The National with "Pink Rabbits", which could be the next "Sorrow" and bears listening to again and again and again, and whose lyrics will blow the fragile doors off any 43 year-old romantic's rickety heart:


 

I actually am well on my way to legitimacy

Something's in retrograde, I'm sure of it. Inconvenient and downright gross things keep happening, though it was way worse for the car behind than it was for us.

So a couple of weeks ago I had the great good fortune to hear Arcade Fire's violinist Sarah Neufeld play a couple of tracks from her forthcoming album. Of course she is prodigiously talented, like all Canadians.

Here is the title track Hero Brother:

you remind me of you on ambien

What a musical month is May! I'm going to David Byrne and Fatboy Slim's experimental musical about Imelda Marcos "Here Lies Love" on Saturday, co-hosting The Kitchen's gala to honor Brian Eno on Tuesday (at which Byrne is going to perform along with other up-and-comers like Michael Stipe) and then hoping to make it over to London for Thursday's album-launch gig by my new band-crush Savages. They're an all-girl punk quartet that sounds like the bastard 20-something daughter of Siouxsie Sioux and The Raincoats.

Here is "She Will", and after you hear it, YOU WILL be a fan of Savages...