The Thermals' Hutch Harris takes a minute to serenade his cat Cece for "Totally Low," a song for Hutch's Forbidden Friends solo project. I love how Cece's ears go back when it gets to the "woh-ohs." You can totally bet there's a couple pugs off screen playing all the instruments.

Francesca Marongiu is best known as one-half of the Italian avant-drone duo Architeuthis Rex, but it's her new solo debut under the alias Crisne that really smacks me. Think heavy analog arping alongside hyper-focused drone exploration, with updated synth and drum pads—like Chris & Cosey or Doris Norton for the modern age. Seriously, those motifs have been in need of an update for a long time, and Marongiu is proving herself exceedingly capable when handling these kind of renovations. With Albedo, she succeeds not only at breathing new life into old tropes, but also at making them entirely her own. Yeah, it's really fucking good.

Crisne's Albedo is out now on Phantasma Disques.

I wasn't kidding about it being a day for video premieres. Here's the gorgeous new video from Laura Gibson, who enlisted director Alicia J. Rose to direct this clip for the title track of Gibson's new record, La Grande. Gibson stars in the video, in which she visits Hot Lake Hotel in the town of La Grande, Oregon—that's where the name of the record came from, for those of you keeping track. Trouble is, the hotel seems to have a wee bit of a ghost problem.

NPR premiered the video today, and they have the whole story, told by Gibson and Rose. It's well worth reading. There are ghosts, and train wrecks, and 208-degree natural hot lakes!

'Tis the day for video premieres. Here's the latest from Red Fang, who once again have teamed up with director Whitey McConnaughy, a partnership that does music videos pretty much better than anyone else. (Proof and proof.)

Back in October, Red Fang put out the call for air guitarists for their new music video, and here are the glorious results in the video for "Hank Is Dead." Tons of Portland landmarks in this one, and familiar faces, plus a sexy, sexxxy shower scene at the beginning. Oh, and lots of beer drinking.

Here's what drummer John Sherman had to say:

This one came together super quick with the help of some insane Portland locals and their sick air guitar skills. We basically just threw a big party and had a blast while a bunch of cameras ran. That is my shower Aaron and Bryan and Bobcat are in at the intro, btw. It still has a weird ring around it...

Cool Nightmare comes out March 6.

WARNING: This video opens with a Korn ad sponsored by Axe Body Spray. It’s a dire commercial, one that will make you hate the internet, music, and life (in that order). But the payoff is worth it. I promise.

“Paper Thin Hotel” has always been my favorite Leonard Cohen song. There’s just something so intriguing about the thought of the songwriting lothario with his ear cupped to a hollow hotel room wall while he eavesdrops on the sounds of his lover passionately fucking someone else mere inches away. It’s the sort of salacious detail that only a Cohen song could carry—this simply would not suffice in our modern peeping-on-Erin-Andrews era of hotel voyeurism.

The walls of this hotel are paper-thin
Last night I heard you making love to him
The struggle mouth to mouth and limb to limb
The grunt of unity when he came in
I stood there with my ear against the wall
I was not seized by jealousy at all
In fact a burden lifted from my soul
I heard that love was out of my control

Rolling Stone is paying tribute to Cohen by herding in some modern songwriters to pay tribute to the Canadian musical icon in a series entitled Old Ideas with New Friends. A newly thin-ish Greg Dulli swung by and covered “Paper Thin Hotel,” an impassioned version that adds a hefty dose of crooning soul to the original, yet still remains tethered to the song’s original heartache.
If you watch one video—and one Korn commercial sponsored by Axe Body Spray—today, make it this one.

Some pretty sweet guitar looping and sound manipulation from Dustin Wong (of Ponytail):

Two weeks ago the School of Rock came together with a bunch of Portland bands, including Menomena, the Mean Jeans and others. Really great vocal performances from the kids singing Menomena and the Brian Jonestown Massacre, and hot damn, the seven-year-old playing drums with the Jeans is a goddamn shredder. And so, so, strange kids are even allowed on-stage to sing songs about getting wasted with the Jeans, or picking out Anton Newcombe's junkie jams. That said, so for it. Well done, all.

There's a whole bunch more of the performances over at the YouTube channel, including tunes from The Gossip, YACHT, The Dandy Warhols and more.

Whatever. It's a great video, with lots of terrible costumes, girls in bikinis, men in drag, and a magical van—and it climaxes in a dance-off. What more could you ask for? It helps that "Mustache Man" is the best song I have heard from Cake since 1997***, being a wholly palatable example of their lightly funkified, bro-tastic dude rock. (Ugh. I think I just grew a soul patch typing that sentence.)

*math may be slightly inaccurate
**insert preemptive joke about MTV not showing videos anymore
***note: it is the only Cake song I have heard since 1997

Here's the cupcake-stuffing video for Unknown Mortal Orchestra's "Thought Ballune," which just premiered over on Rolling Stone. The video's mash of both familiar images (oh, what a pleasant party!) and off-the-rails visual weirdness (oh, everyone's heads have become detached from their bodies and are floating around like balloons!) is a fine match for the warped track, which sounds like a psych-pop nugget turned inside out. Looks like our hapless protagonist eventually finds the right thing to do with the balloonhead of the girl he likes. Smooch!

What was in those cupcakes, anyway?

This video was directed by Jordan Blady and Ryan Knowles, and it's probably best to keep all sharp objects away from it. Unknown Mortal Orchestra, meanwhile, have just announced a tour surrounding their South by Southwest dates, for which they'll be joined by Girls for a stretch.

In other Symmetry news, Johnny Jewel gave an extended interview to Pitchfork which went up on Friday, talking about his work on the Drive soundtrack and its relationship to Themes from an Imaginary Film. (Short version: Themes from an Imaginary Film is not the rejected music left over from Jewel's work on Drive.) Pitchfork also has a series of Nilina Mason-Campbell's shots from the Italians Do It Better showcase at Branx on Saturday, with shots of Glass Candy, Chromatics, and Desire.

C.S. Lewis and his Jesus-lion would not approve.

The band conjures up plenty of mood in both the song and the clip, delving deep into the seamy theatrics of cabaret, burlesque, and dark arts, resulting in something that's sexy and just a little bit scary. Fever moved to Portland by way of Oklahoma, and they've got quite a number of elements into their sound: glam, goth, and cabaret rock, sure—but also surf, LA-style drug-noir, and maybe even some bluesy Old Weird America. They're giving "White Witches" away as a free single on their site, which you can get right now.

I just found this adorable video for R. Stevie Moore's song "Pop Music" from his beautiful 2011 LP entitled Advanced. Both the song and video are perfect—albeit unusually shiny for this master of lo-fi bedroom pop. But say no more. WATCH THE VIDEO (and be sure to stick around for the outtakes).

The video for "Everywhere, Everyone" is culled from decades of horror film archives and the grainy images only add to the duo's ultra-creepy atmospheres. It's not the kind of video you want to find in your attic or anything. It's downright unsettling, and some of the images might be considered NSFW. Still, it's a fascinatingly dark introduction to Lilacs & Champagne, one that has me very interested in what they'll unveil with their self-titled debut record, out 1/31 on Mexican Summer.

From last year's Pickathon, this is the first post in the upcoming Pickathon Pumphouse Sessions. Now, I guess I don't really know what a pumphouse is exactly, but it sure looks tiny, as singer/songwriter Damien Jurado and band cram in there, asses-to-elbows, to perform the song "To Be Sold." Recorded by Live & Breathing, this actually comes from out in the woods appropriately enough, on Pendarvis Farm amidst low light and lower ceilings.

Jurado has never been as good as he is now, and this song, pulsing with ethos and a refreshingly upbeat rhythm, is a great start to the series. Apparently over two thirds of last year's performers contributed to the Sessions, so look for more videos in the coming weeks. Pickathon returns to Portland in August. Jurado's new album, Maraqopa, comes out in February.

If Pickathon is the Northwest music scene's well-kept secret (although it seems that the secret is out, and happily so), then the Pumphouse Sessions are Pickathon's well-kept secret. Over the course of the weekend-long festival in August, many of the performing bands get shepherded out to the tiny, 10'x10' pumphouse on Pendarvis Farm, tucked away deep in the woods. There, they perform stripped-down sets—often acoustic—while cameras and recorders rolled. The result is a peerless collection of one-of-a-kind, intimate performances, captured away from the crowds of Pickathon.

The videos from 2011's Pickathon are going up on Live and Breathing, beginning January 3. Until then, enjoy this taster—and it's pretty hard not to get excited for more. That's AgesandAges' own Pumphouse performance playing on the soundtrack, and it sounds terrific to my years. (AgesandAges are playing tomorrow night at the Doug Fir as well, if you can't wait until 2012.)

Here's the video for Tope's remix of Kelli Schaefer's "Home," and it's perfectly timed for a season when many of us are in the process of traveling—specifically, going home. The low-key clip details Tope's return home to Portland with truthful details of what that return actually feels like: the time at the airport, the drive through the familiar city streets, the gradual adjustment and settling it takes to return to the rhythms of normal life. There's some joy in there, too, which you can see peeking around the edges of the clip, which was directed by A.Z. Chandler. Considering many are about to make a similar journey "home" in the next couple days, the video definitely touches upon reality.

"Home" will appear on Until the Next Time We Meet, the new album that Tope is scheduled to drop in early 2012. Meanwhile, Kelli Schaefer—whose original version of "Home" appears on her 2011 album Ghost of the Beast—plays tonight at the Doug Fir as part of the Amigo/Amiga holiday party.

The handsome black-and-white clip has both the nightmarish quality and the silly sense of fun of a vintage horror flick. Shot on a Canon 7D camera, the video tells the story of a mad scientist who brings a Bride-of-Frankenstein-like character to life. According to the band, "It took about two months, $75, and a lot of will power and gumption to make. It looks pretty good." It does indeed, doing justice to a song that was a highlight of the band's self-titled debut.

Today, Chicago's WGN's morning show had Wilco on to perfom a couple tracks off their newest record, The Whole Love. But that's not what we're here to see, this clip is front man Jeff Tweedy acting as impromptu weatherman. Draped in his slyly bemused slacker manner, the songwriter vaguely, and hilariously, points out the forecast to the greater Chicago area, assuming that "you can read, I hope. You can operate a TV." I know this video is a bit of a non sequitur for this blog, but really, this just makes me want to see some local artists get on the local news here. James Mercer on KATU? Colin Meloy on KPTV? Let's make it happen, Portland!