I’m honored to have been asked to speak on a panel about blogging — blogging! — with Pitchfork’s Ryan Schreiber, Drowned In Sound’s Sean Adams, Hype Machine’s Dev Sherlock and more at Manchester’s In The City fest/conference in October, which as I understand it is the U.K.’s SXSW. Which means, U.K. people: I’m coming for a week and want to hang out with you. Need to, in fact, because I’ll probably have to crash on your couch and have you show me around London. Please shoot me an e-mail at rawkblog AT gmail DOT com. Non-U.K. people: I will obviously be blogging about this. Get excited!

“I wanted to give you something special,” David Child sings to open Manwomanchild’s self-titled EP, and the band doesn’t falter in that respect. The three-song set exudes the knowing rock elegance of Lou Reed or Dean Wareham, all steely male vocals and clanging guitars interwoven with the delicacy of an Hermes scarf. “Must’ve lost track of all reason / and you say goodbye,” he continues on “Reasons.” To that, we say: hello.

Manwomanchild – “Reasons”: mp3

(Buy the EP from the band on their site)

theauthor from joshua locy on Vimeo.

Here’s the premiere of Summer Darling’s video for “The Author,” the L.A. band’s otherwise hard-rocking self-titled debut album’s rare moment of folk balladry. The lovely tune gets a thoughtful video: at play are shallow depths of field, a mysterious relationship and gender dynamics in heavy discussions. Watch it above and download the band’s really excellent album for free — for free! no excuses! — from their Bandcamp.

Summer Darling – “The Author”: mp3

Let’s start with the facts: The first two Weezer albums are incredible, enduring classics. The Blue Album is great and Pinkerton is a serious work of genius — one of the best and still most misunderstood albums of the ’90s. (Note to the universe: It is a totally self-hating diary exhumation and a concept album about Madame Butterfly!) Since then, the band has flailed between outright embarrassment, fan/critic/self-hatred, flashes of brilliance and, for the most part, adequacy. Hurley, the band’s first release for Epitaph Records and also their first with dude from Lost on the cover, continues along this trajectory, presenting Marshall stack power chords, KROQ-ready choruses and pitiful, ridiculous lyrics.

Unlike the group’s last effort, Raditude, Hurley’s surprise-free: three-minute songs, a ballad or two and nothing approaching the insanity of “The Greatest Man That Ever Lived.” “Run Away,” with the addition of acoustic guitars and swaying backing vocals, almost approaches Replacements territory and is the disc’s only truly worthwhile moment. That it comes after “Where’s My Sex,” one of the worst tracks in the Mariana-plumbing Weezer catalog, is par for the course at this point. The second half has the better stuff — “Run Away,” “Hang On” — but if you manage to get that far, you’ll wonder why you’re not listening to Jimmy Eat World, or Paramore, or any band that’s ever released a competent alternative rock record in the last 10 years. If you make it to the end of “Smart Girls,” you’re a better man/woman than I. (Is it better than LCD Soundsystem’s “Drunk Girls,” though? It just might be.) Update: Our pals at TwentyFourBit report that “Run Away” is the infamous Ryan Adams collaboration, which explains the ‘Mats influence, and Rawkblog hero Michael Cera sings and plays guitar/mandolin on “Hang On.” So, you know.

Like basically every post-Pinkerton Weezer release, Hurley is a two-and-a-half to three-star record made unlistenable by the zombie band behind it, oozing puss, smelling of some unknowable tragedy and so gruesome and sad you can’t look away — time after time after time. Unless you’re 15, in which case, hey, new =W= album! Let’s post our favorite songs on Tumblr!

(Stream Hurley on Weezer’s MySpace, if you want to ruin your day)

Here’s “Run Away”:

WR by b936372

Let’s be honest: This song kinda rules. Most of her songs kinda rule. I stand by my review, though.

Flaming Lips from Black Cab Sessions on Vimeo.

The Flaming Lips get the driver involved in a wonderfully unhinged Black Cab Session.

They say you have your whole life to make your first album. That hasn’t changed, but no one makes first albums anymore. Bands make MySpace demos and Bandcamp EPs and limited edition tapes and Soundcloud embeds, half-ideas sketched on a laptop in hopes of impressing the Internet. Like Mad Men‘s Pete Campbell, they want what they want, when they want it. This isn’t the Internet’s fault: The Internet is the vaccuum. The bands, ceaselessly filling it with an endless flood of unready music, are the ones who abhor it.

So the bands who’re most interesting in 2010 are not the dozens entering it weak and screaming like so many premature babies; they’re the ones who know what they’re doing and haven’t grown boring doing it yet. Dirty Projectors. Radio Dept. Deerhunter. There are more. Now, No Age joins their ranks. Everything In Between is the L.A. band’s third album overall and second full-length proper (Their debut, Weirdo Rippers, was a compilation.) Like all great mid-period works, it sounds fucking phenomenal: Like Mount Vesuvius or the asteroid that killed the dinosaurs, they have turned the tools of their art — drums, electric guitars, pedals, amplifiers, microphones, four walls — into something inexorable and apocalyptic. While not the great leap of My Bloody Valentine or The Jesus and Mary Chain (or, for that matter, Jimi Hendrix), Everything In Between is a sonic step forward, a new way of hearing rock ‘n’ roll music, and for that reason alone, it demands to be heard. (And heard on headphones that cost more than your last night at the bar. If you don’t have them, get them. Shit’s embarrassing.)

But the great mid-period albums — Yankee Hotel Foxtrot, Alligator and the like — marry sonics with substance, and Everything In Between contains the band’s most tightly edited, best written songs. Like Deerhunter, they’ve moved slightly toward pop, just enough to shift them from the fringes toward the frontier. There’s plenty of ambience here, but it drips into a jar of elusive, intriguing hooks. “Fever Dreaming” offers a feedback stab violent enough to carve itself chorus status, while “Depletion,” were its distortion knobs turned down, is pure California skate-punk. It’s that tug-of-war, between the three-chord bone-headedness of Cali punk and the art-noise stratospheres the band seems so intent on exploring, that makes Everything In Between so essential. While bands like Wavves flounder toward pre-school, No Age went to college. They learned what they wanted to say and how to say it. The least we can do is listen.

No Age – “Glitter”: mp3

(Everything In Between is due 9/28 on Sub Pop)

The Morning Benders – “All Day Day Light” from Jack Ferry on Vimeo.

One of the Morning Benders’ rawkier rockers gets the sweet depth-of-field treatment from director Jack Ferry. Their new album, Big Echo, still rules, and you’ll remember they were totally better live than Broken Bells.