Glancing below, and listening to the songs in today's post, I've got to tell you. There is some fine, fine music to be found here. So please, dig in.

White Hassle - "Life is Still Sweet". Clatter, chummy oohs, the honk of a big-grin harmonica. Dan sent me this bursting berry song, this stomp with friends through a field. You close your eyes as you dance, wag your hands a bit, let your suittails fall across the face of your 7-year-old cousin, Poppy. She laughs. Life is sweet! No - no. Wait. It's not just that the world rules, that it's "totally amazing". No, life is still sweet. Still. Regardless of that other shit. White Hassle play the happiness that comes after you've recovered from a tumble, after your lover comes up behind you in the rain. "Just forget what I said last week." It's like Bishop Allen with a humble peacock singer, a glad conductor who's stolen bits of Clem Snide. It's a single and it's fun and it sets toes a-tapping, cattails a-wagging, life a-sprinkling. I'll take some more, thankyouverymuch, even with the "toaster"/"wonder" rhyme. [buy]

Wolf Parade - "Killing Armies". The band's signed to Sub Pop, but the new EP's not, and so I do a thing I rarely do - make two posts about one record. This is Wolf Parade's second untitled EP. They're from Victoria and Montreal. They're Frog Eyes with Franz Ferdinand, a brawl between weirdos. "Killing Armies" tumbles over itself as it leaves the gates. Spencer rants like a stoned Oscar Wilde. He lets his hair down; he "heard she's very startling." We clop and sway and sprint and smash, we stall, then - Wait. "I heard you're killing armies now-" And there it is, a guitar that claws at the sky, that runs through houses. Fire and motion and- military back-and-forth, organ climb, Dracula disco, and lassitude sedative trilling noxious driftoff to slee-

(yes, a mess of things. which is fine.) [for you, scott!]

Read a fine review of the EP at My Life As a Reptile. And you can mail-order it from Montreal's Cheap Thrills. Do.