As per usual, lots of music came out in April, some of which was great and some of which was not. Here are four great ones.

Santogold — “I’m a Lady” (from Santogold)
This is not the best track off Santogold’s excellent self-titled debut (that honor would go to “Creator,” nor is it the most representative (”L.E.S. Artistes,” probably). It is, however, the most unexpectedly wonderful, its unabashedly catchy melody nearly impossible to not start humming along with, if not already singing at full volume. (MySpace)

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Kissey Asplund, “Beam Me Up” (from Plethora). Like a number of tracks on this Swedish space cadet’s first album, “Beam Me Up” seems to materialize and evaporate rather than begin and end. Half of the time, Asplund’s either fading in and out of consciousness or singing in her sleep, her multi-tracked voice about as tangible as the aimlessly swarming waves of synths. There’s more punch to the remainder of Plethora, laced in varying combinations by the French production team PapaJazz, who are — like most other exponents of off-center R&B these days — children of Dilla and Premier, but nothing is quite as hypnotizing as this, even if it could use some Vulcan lute.

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Jim Ford only released one album, 1969’s Harlan County, during his life but he had plenty of stray singles that accumulated over the years. Most of these found their way onto Bear Family’s 2007 release The Sounds of Our Times, which reissued the full Harlan County album, along with these 45 rpm rarities and unheard demo tapes. As Bear Family was compiling that superb disc, Ford revealed to journalist LP Anderson that there was a whole bunch of unheard tapes not sitting in vault but rather in a canvas bag in his trailer. The notoriously ornery, uncooperative Ford eventually agreed to release these tapes but he didn’t live to see the release of Point of No Return, a 2008 compilation of unheard songs from Jim Ford. Unheard doesn’t necessarily mean unknown, as this contains Ford’s own versions of “I’m Ahead If I Can Quit While I’m Behind” and “Harry Hippie,” songs popularized by his disciples Brinsley Schwarz and his friend Bobby Womack, who also cut the title track, “Point of No Return.” As to why these recordings — all full-blown studio recordings apart from the fragile, lovely acoustic “I’m Ahead If I Can Quit While I’m Behind,” one of Ford’s finest songs — weren’t released at the time, there are no specific reasons revealed in the liner notes. Yet the succession of stories of how Ford sold the same songs to five or six different publishers, how he demanded exorbitant fees to cut a country album, how he brawled his way through LA in the ’60s, and how he was incessantly asking for cash after the release of The Sounds of Our Times leave no doubt that he was one difficult SOB.

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Dallas Frazier is known as a songwriter whose tunes were recorded by George Jones, Charlie Rich, the Oak Ridge Boys, and the Hollywood Argyles, who gave Frazier his first success by turning “Alley Oop” into a hit in the early ’60s. He also had a recording career, which is where he debuted perhaps his best-known song “Elvira,” later cherry-picked by Rodney Crowell for his debut album and then turned into a smash country crossover in the early ’80s by the Oak Ridge Boys. His songs — not just this pair, but “Mohair Sam,” “There Goes My Everything,” “Son of Hickory Holler’s Tramp,” and “True Love Travels on a Gravel Road,” among others — were well-known, but his own records weren’t, and they remained unheard until Raven issued Frazier’s two albums for Capitol, 1966’s Elvira and its 1967 follow-up Tell It Like It Is!, as a two-fer in February, adding three singles (”Tennessee Sue,” “King of the Jungle,” “Make Believe You’re Here with Me”) to fill out the CD. This is a major reissue as it offers a case that Frazier was as distinctive a musician as he was a writer, cutting albums that hold their own with Charlie Rich’s funky country-soul for Smash and Epic, as well as Elvis’ 1968 comeback.

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If you’ve been following underground hip-hop at all these past couple of years, chances are you’ve heard of Black Milk, the Detroit producer/MC who’s been releasing impressively and consistently good material since 2005, when his solo debut, Sound of the City, came out. And if you haven’t been following underground hip-hop, Black is a good reason to get started.

His connection with Slum Village (he’s been producing tracks for them since 2002) and his Motor City roots make him an easy comparison to the late James Yancey, and while there are certainly similarities in their styles, Black Milk is much more than just a Dilla protégé. He’s a smart artist with an ear for melody, as likely to invoke Just Blaze as he is the left coast, which makes him well-suited to work with a number of MCs, the variety in his beats able to match the variety in the others’ flows. His preference is Detroit rappers, and his records are full of collaborations with Phat Kat, SV members, and Guilty Simpson (with whom he’s planning a full-length, alongside Sean Price), but as his recent — and very excellent — mixtape with Bishop Lamont, Caltroit, showed, he’s got the skills to produce for (and spit with) MCs around the country.

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Say you’re a huge fan of Canadian indie rock and and you don’t have the good fortune to live in Canada. Gee whiz, think of all the excellent CBC Radio 3 sessions you’re missing out on. Why, maybe A.C. Newman, Destroyer, You Say Party! We Say Die!, Tokyo Police Club or even the New Pornographers hit the studio recently to record sessions and you’ll never hear them. Think again, hoser! Thanks to their seriously sweet website you can access boatloads of archived sessions and concerts recorded for the station by some of Canada’s top indie rockers. Go to CBC3’s main website http://radio3.cbc.ca/, then click on Concerts & Sessions and you’re in. You can see the five most recently added shows or browse through the archive and find some gems.

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Kids may be too transfixed by Super Smash Bros. Brawl to bother going outside to ding dong ditch a neighbor, and caller ID easily thwarts the idea of ordering 15 pizzas to a stranger’s house, but despite an abundance of laziness and an inherent lack of anonymity in the cyberage, there’s still a good ongoing gag. The “pull my finger” of 2008 is rickrolling. If you’re not familiar — and you’re fortuitous enough to have never been rickroll’d in the past year — essentially, it involves tricking someone to watch the music video for Rick Astley’s “Never Gonna Give You Up” by claiming that it’s something enticing. (Rocketboom gives the history of rickrolls here.) On this day of false hopes, you need to watch your back more than ever. Next time your pal sends you a link to an interview with Corey Worthington and his famous glasses or concert footage of Amy Winehouse singing jibberish on crazy sauce, you should be prepared for a surprise from a ginger-headed goon doing a terribly stiff dance.

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It’s a big, old, shiny, and gleefully dancetastic world out there and it seems like everywhere you turn there’s a new batch of girl singers getting funky, fresh, and foolish on the dancefloor. Some past favorites around here include Norway’s Annie, the U.K.’s Goldfrapp (in her more frivolous moments, anyway), New Jersey’s own Miss TK of Miss TK & the Revenge and, most recently(ish), Sweden’s Robyn. Her self-titled record that’s been kicking around since 2005 is a kind of landmark achievement in dancefloor brilliance that we can’t get enough of. Still, if you made it this far it’s clear that you’re ready for some new kicks, so let’s take a quick trip around the discoball globe and see what kind of gems we can find.

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