Jerry Lee Lewis — yes, that Jerry Lee Lewis — has a new album, Mean Old Man, due in September. In amazing/transcendent news, Jon Brion plays all over it, joining the legend on a handful of the deluxe set’s 18 tracks. In amazing/surreal news, Jerry Lee is doing it Santana-style, which means, for the first time in recorded history, you’ll get to hear the legend, Ringo Starr, John Mayer and Jon Brion on the same song. Jon also joins forces with Sheryl Crow and Tim McGraw. Um, fingers crossed for Jon to produce the next Taylor Swift album?

Inception is, in many ways, the anti-Matrix. Its protagonists are not reality-warping superheroes; it offers no tangled web of religious ideologies to make sense of. Its characters are not grappling with fate, but serving their own purposes.  And yet, it gives us worlds within worlds, real and unreal, dreams and waking life and what lies beneath both. In some ways, The Matrix is its better: Inception‘s action, a barrage of anonymous gunshots and punches, lacks the visual invention of the Wachowskis’ bullet-time or even the balletic choreography of the Bourne trilogy. But Inception, full of it as it may be, is not an action movie. It is a heist movie, a suspenseful one, and also a love story, set against the backdrop of complex hard science-fiction that requires one’s full mental energy. Inception is a thinking person’s summer blockbuster, if only because it requires you to pay attention: do so, and the dots will connect themselves.

The story tells itself better than I could, so I’ll spare you the details. But Inception, while not quite the masterwork of director Christopher Nolan’s The Dark Knight, finds the writer-creator delivering his most direct, emotionally resonant statement. In The Dark Knight and its directorial predecessor, The Prestige, the characters concluded the films by spitting out terse proclamations of their motives, gruffly outlining Nolan’s themes — not the screenwriter cardinal sin of talking the plot, but perhaps a worse one: unearthing the subtext. His reliance on such oral deliveries reappears here, but in Inception‘s world, the key lines are evocative, almost poetic — they feel revelatory instead of the opposite. This is largely the product of the love story, a complicated, beautifully visualized relationship that finds Leonardo DiCaprio’s troubled Cobb examining who, exactly, Marion Cottilard’s Mal is to him through the lens of his own subconscious.

In its third act, Inception stretches the suspense’s elasticity almost to the breaking point, but the film’s brilliant last shot is well worth the effort. The film makes necessary compromises: it builds a world (a half-dozen of them, really) without an origin story and lets it run wild, which leaves much of it still mysterious (though vastly more believable than anything from Lost). It is, for better (mostly, this) or worse, a Christopher Nolan movie, one both as visionary and limited as his imagination. One can only wonder if he dreams of electric sheep.

Pitchfork 2009 / photo by matthewnorth

Like last year, Pitchfork is being generous enough to live-stream their annual Chicago music festival. (This is my favorite new festival trend, by the way.) It kicks off at 3:30 CST (so 1:30 West Coast time, or rather, right now), but I’d wait to tune in until Liars go on. The full three-day schedule after the jump. Read the rest of this entry »

Many-genred folk-rockers Calexico have just released a free, 320kpbs bootleg of a recent concert to celebrate their latest tour. Get it, and the dates, on their site. They’ll be in L.A. (at the Hollywood Bowl!) on September 19. (Photo via Wikipedia)

Yesterday, Ryan Adams made some more Facebook updates (which it looks like he’s since deleted) that I’ll attempt to remember: basically, archival Cardinals album III/IV is ready to go, Black Hole is being mixed again, he signed on with a new distributor (which means, Orion latecomers, you’ll be able to get these), he’s been in New York tracking a new album and also, he loves metal. A lot. Just kidding. He’s gotten really into photography, though. (Photo by Ryan Adams)

Previously: Preview: Ryan Adams and the Cardinals – III/IV

This weekend’s best #P4kfestpickupline: “Have you heard the new Cut Copy single?” Here’s your cheat sheet: It trades in the band’s In Ghost Colours dance grooves for labelmates Tame Impala’s psych-sounds, all wild harmonies and still-New Order-y exuberance. The album’s not due till January 2011, but give the 2008 band of the year a hand for being sweethearts and delivering a just-in-time summer jam. (Photo by Leo Cackett; RSSers, click through for the download.)

The legendary former Beach Boy himself piles his band into a black cab to perform a Lucky Old Sun tune as well as a mind-boggling bit of the Katy Perry-annihilating “California Girls.” I love you, the Internet. Watch it on Vimeo.

via Facebook

This one’s a heartbreaker. Elspeth’s “Song for Goodbyes” treads into exhaustively mapped territory (spoiler: Bends-era Radiohead) and still manages to find new ground. The Irish band’s lead singer aims for Thom Yorke and lands straining somewhere below, but it’s the visible effort that offers tug-of-war emotion. Carefully plucked acoustic guitars evoke the haunting instruments of Mojave 3′s “You’re Beautiful,” with the red-eyed late night/early morning mood much the same. It’s a “song to say goodnight,” the chorus goes, but it seems Elsepth won’t be sleeping just yet.

Elspeth – “Song for Goodbyes”: mp3

(Hear a handful of free tracks from Elspeth on Soundcloud)

More: New Music | 2010 Album Release Calendar