Clara Clara - "One On One". It's Said the Gramophone's beloved François Virot here, yowling over "One On One"'s bristling bassline. Clara Clara are all push & pull, warp & weft, tension with little resolve. There are small human touches (drumsticks, handclaps, the playground lyrics), but the organ and cymbals rise like symptoms - there's doom in the water, blackness in our ventricles. Even the coda, darkly fun, is the sound of stamping a garden into dust. [MySpace/coming soon!/more Clapping Music preview]

The Hidden Cameras - "In the NA". I don't know if "the NA" is a place-holder, a macguffin, or whether there's a secret acronym I've not decoded. It doesn't seem to matter. Joel Gibb sings it over and over: he raises curtains, and there the NA is; he casts a line, draws back, there's that bucking NA; he lifts it from top-hats, extracts it from gums, fires it like buckshot from a rusty Ontario rifle. The important bit is the song's silly gleam. The synths wiggle & wiggle, the men yell hey!, and they all play it straight - it's Monty Python over here, po-faced in the eels. [shop / from You Ain't No Picasso's Best songs of 2009]

---

The band Antarctica Takes It, who I have long celebrated, are raising money to release their second album. Go invest at Kickstarter. (Thanks, m.)

I mentioned the Torture Garden on Monday, but they've now also posted their top 50+ songs of 2009. I'm still wading through, but go listen.

---

Haiti has been devastated by this week's earthquake. If you're hesitating to donate, see photographs. Read. Please give.

RIP Jay Reatard.

(photo source unknown)