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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Wild Pitch Records is planning a bunch of reissues this year, including Main Source’s spectacular Breaking Atoms and the arguably less excellent but more, um, powerful Ride the Rhythm, by Cool Rob G. [SOHH.com]

The 2008 Newport Folk Festival’s line-up has been announced. [Pitchfork]

Art Brut’s Eddie Argos has formed a new band, Glam Chops, who sound a lot like, well, Art Brut meets glam rock. [NME.com]
 
Classical music magazine Gramophone has announced plans to expand into the digital market. [NYTimes.com]

As if getting his own label wasn’t enough, Perez Hilton will now appear on New York’s HOT 97 for a minute-long gossip segment, beginning May 5. [Allhiphop.com]

NIN has announced the openers for its summer tour. [Idolator]

This week, Rhino Records finally delivered something that many rock & roll fans had been dreaming about for years: remastered, expanded reissues of the Replacements’ Twin/Tone albums. Their four Reprise albums will follow this fall, but the Twin/Tone LPs — 1981’s Sorry Ma, Forgot to Take Out the Trash, 1982’s Stink, 1983’s Hootenanny, and 1984’s Let It Be — were in greater need of such treatment and they’re also where much of the band’s legacy lies, so it’s a thrill to have these records finally out in the deluxe editions they deserve.

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After the sublime excess of his two takes on William Blake, with Song of Innocence and Songs of Experience, David Axelrod went bonkers and issued the single weirdest record of his career that stands pretty much unparalleled more than 30 years later. Earth Rot is in effect a cantata for the planet, or, in Axe’s own words, “contemporary music with ancient yet timely words set to the theme of ecology.” Those ancient yet timely words come from the Book of Isaiah in the Bible and a Navajo legend called “Song of the Earth Spirit.” There’s a nine-piece choir singing these texts, accompanied by a 15-piece orchestra that includes Ernie Watts, Earl Palmer, Willie Green, and Jack Kelso. Capitol’s Studio B must have been humming with the mojo for these dates.

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Attack of the One-Man Bands is exactly that, 58 different one-man bands spread over two discs of raw, crude and fascinatingly brilliant blasts of sonic madness, most of it so ragged and urgent that it makes vintage punk sound like Air Supply. So unhinged that it’s probably a serious health risk, this set delivers cut after cut of glorious bedlam with all the subtlety of an amplified jackhammer set loose in a glass house, and anyone sane should probably hate it, but like a child’s tantrum, it’s impossible to ignore, and like the child that throws that tantrum, it’s impossible not to love. Each of these one-man bands is currently active, and while most are decidedly lo-fi, even the ones who wandered into real studios seem to treat them like giant boom boxes, creating a clatter and din that shoves the needle into the red from note one. While a good deal of what is here is vicious punk rockabilly like Phillip Roebuck’s crude, spare and dangerously kinetic “Jackass Blues” or Pete Yorko & the One Man Music Band’s “Like Me” assault, some of it, like Royer’s One-Man Band’s version of the fiddle classic “Train on the Island” or 1Man Banjo’s deconstruction of “Mole in the Ground” (simply called “Mole” here), is seriously bent and skewed bluegrass mountain music. Train Wreck Washington’s banjo piece called “Walked All Night” sounds like an old wax cylinder field recording, and feels like it was recorded a hundred years ago. Uncle Butcher’s “No Judge No Trial” is as raw and frightening as a running chain saw thrown on a feather bed — chickens flying everywhere, as they say. Then there’s The Amazing Elephant Man’s primal “Can’t Go Outside,” which is literally a child’s frustrated rant given rhythm and electricity. Scary, unsettling, fascinating, delightful, vital, urgent and insistent, these 58 tracks are somehow — for all their abrasiveness — oddly comforting. Just like that one vigilant dog barking away relentlessly down the street late at night, it means someone is watching after all, and they ain’t gonna keep quiet about it, even if the rest of the world is trying its best to sleep.

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