It’s hard to imagine a meeting between Marc Bolan and Prince. What would the two pint sized wizards talk about? How hard it is to find pants in x-tra small? How easy it is to score with women when your talent far outstrips your shoe size? I guess we’ll never know, but we can listen to a musical mash-up of the two thanks to Pop Levi. While the UK based Levi’s first album, The Return to Form Black Magick Party, quite pleasingly leans toward the mystical bump and thud of T. Rex, his new song seems to lean toward recapturing “Kiss”-era Prince and dipping it in some pretty thick glam sauce. We’ve got video evidence here but a quick trip to Levi’s MySpace page also provides a few more previews of the forthcoming Never Never Love album, which will be unleashed sexily later this summer.

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Orange Juice worship will get you far with the AllMusic blog. Chic + the Velvet Underground is the kind of musical equation that can’t be topped when calculated properly. Quick examples: Edywn and the lads on “I Can’t Help Myself”, Franz Ferdinand on “Take Me Out”, and now the Lodger’s “The Good Old Days”. The UK trio’s first album was fleetingly great indie pop with nice hooks and some songs you’d want to throw on a mixtape, but it lacked the one big song to help them break out and really be something special. “The Good Old Days” is the one, a sparkling summer jam for the sweater set to fall in love with. The soon to be released (May 19th on Slumberland) album Life is Sweet is destined to be a classic if the rest of the tunes are up to this level of gooey goodness. Keep your fingers crossed …

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Hanging tough after 22 years, New Kids On The Block appeared on The Today Show this morning to announce an upcoming reunion tour and brand new album. [Today.msnbc.msn.com]

Bobby Brown makes some sensational claims about his ex-wife in his upcoming autobiography, “Bobby Brown: The Truth, the Whole Truth and Nothing But.” [tv.popcrunch.com]

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Mariah Carey and Madonna both surpassed two of Elvis’ chart records this week. [nytimes.com]

The New York Times has launched Measure for Measure, a songwriting blog with Andrew Bird, Suzanne Vega and Roseanne Cash among its contributors. [nytimes.com]

Razorlight’s Johnny Borrell will play an “Irish murder victim” alongside Samantha Morton and Robert Carlyle in Irvine Welsh’s upcoming film The Meat Trade. [nme.com]

The Velvet Revolver split is getting ugly. [AOL.com]

Mötley Crüe continues to exist; hypes new album. [RollingStone.com]

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Photo Credit: Ginny Suss

It took two long years, but Al Green’s Lay It Down is just about ready for the street: the new album drops on May 27 from Blue Note. It was produced by drummer Ahmir Thompson (a.k.a. ?uestlove) from Roots, and keyboard giant James Poyser, whose work with Erykah Badu and Common are well known. Some of the other players are heavyweights as well: the Dap King Horns are part of the mix as are the voices of Corrine Bailey Rae, Anthony Hamilton, and John Legend. Rounding out the band with Thompson and Poyser are guitarist Spanky Alford from the Mighty Clouds of Joy, and Joss Stone’s band, and Jill Scott and bassist Adam Blackstone (Jill Scott, DJ Jazzy Jeff), to name a few more. While it’s true that some superstar collaborations have been underwhelming, there is something kinetic about the vibe on this set.

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The weather in Chicago today is chilly and cloudy, but you’d never know it based on the sunny sounds of the Windy City’s Allá (pronounced “ayê-ya”). The trio’s globally savvy pop embraces not just their Mexican heritage, but immaculate Swedish pop, Brazilian Tropicalia, Krautrock, and Chicago’s post-rock scene. Singer Lupe Martinez sounds alluring no matter what backdrop brothers Jorge and Angel Ledezma put behind her, whether it’s the languid guitars on “Golpes del Sol” or “Un Dia Otra Noche”’s giddy strings and handclaps. Allá spent four years recording self-financed sessions all over the globe, stopping at musical ports of call including Chicago’s Soma Electronic Studios and Sweden’s Tambourine Studios, where Jorge worked with arranger Patrick Bartosch to get the string and horn sounds that have graced the Cardigans’ and Eggstone’s music.

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Tilly and the Wall’s first two albums (Wild Like Children and Bottoms of Barrels) are wildly passionate, barely under control blasts of post-teen angst and desperately romantic emotions that spill out of the grooves like big fat teardrops.

Their big gimmick was using tap dancing as a rhythmic base and it worked pretty well, though it may have distracted listeners with short attention spans into thinking the group was some kind of novelty act, which they most definitely were not. No, they were dead serious every minute — until now it seems. Their new single “Beat Control” is a silly, dancefloor-friendly slab of chunky disco with no audible tap dancing, cheerleader-esque backing vocals and few deep sentiments beyond letting the beat control your body and getting as wild and loose as possible. The song isn’t on their upcoming album (O, which has a June 17th release date scheduled) so maybe the goofy, light-hearted sound of the song would be out of place among all the broken-hearted intensity, or maybe the record is so amazingly good there was no room to include a brilliant pop single.

Check out the video:

In an attempt, perhaps, to offset the widespread leak, Gnarls Barkley’s highly-anticipated new album, The Odd Couple, has been pushed up from April 8 to, well, today. Currently it’s only available digitally, but according to the press release the physical product should hit stores anytime in the next week. Considering the Cee-Lo/Dangermouse duo creates music that people actually want to buy, this could be a smart move by the already-floundering record companies to help stop its free downloading, although the statement (from an “unnamed spokesman for the band”) that “With the shifting seasons, furtive romantic entanglements and fierce college basketball rivalries, the latter half of March can be confusing. People need to be soothed and inspired now” seems just a tad bit forced.

In a similar maneuver, although one apparently precipitated by the artist, the Raconteurs‘ new album, Consolers of the Lonely, is also being hurried to stores in time for a March 25 street date.