Once again, we have ground rules: I like three-minute pop songs. So, this isn’t exactly comprehensive and varied. I like what I like, that is all.

So, here’s the list, with occasional videos and live performances:
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Oh for fuck’s sake. I move away from Burlington and my future wife Neko Case rolls into town (in January) for a “let me preview some of my new material” concert. Sheesh.

Thank god someone’s still doing big, dumb, and a fun muzak. Here’s “Tick Tick Boom” by The Hives.

(We’ll see how long this embeddable video lasts; for some inexplicable reason, Universal Music doesn’t let you embed “official” versions of its videos. Weenies.)

Also, I’m buying as much music as possible from amazon.com’s MP3 service. If emusic didn’t require a monthly subscription, I’d be buying it there. Support non-iTunes (or non-DRM) music stores.

Somewhere in that blackness is Spoon playing at the Capitol Hill Block Party in Seattle on Saturday the 28th. I attended with the lovely and talented Ms. Sizzle Says. (Whom, as you can see in the accompanying photo, is like three feet shorter than I am.) It was an all-day event, but I wasn’t really familiar with any of the other bands. We caught a bit of John Vanderslice, who was… fine and OK and whatever.

Ms. Sizzle is a fan of Against Me!, the band that preceded Spoon. They were also OK. They sure did shout enthusiastically. It was your basic angry punk music, sounding like a less Irish Dropkick Murphys. (Which isn’t a criticism; both bands shout a lot.) There were a lot of political messages buried in the mix a bit, ones which the crowd surfing furries (don’t ask) surely grokked.

The crowd got pretty big for Spoon, and they certainly didn’t disappoint. They rolled through a nearly 90-minute set, mixing in most of the tunes from their current CD “Ga Ga Ga Ga Ga” with some of the “greatest hits” from the past (”Everything Hits at Once, ” “The Fitted Shirt,” “Take a Walk,” “Me and the Bean,” “The Way We Get By,” and a killer version of “Jonathon Fisk“).

They were tight but not boringly polished. They had a lot of energy, and Britt Daniel was in fine voice. (And here’s a random Spoon/gaming fact: Daniel used to work for Origin Systems in their sound FX department. ) Spoon just sounds cool.

In other news, The Simpsons Movie. It’s worth seeing more for all the throwaway gags in the periphery, which is generally true of all great Simpsons episodes. My favorite line? The always quotable Ralph Wiggum, upon seeing a naked Bart Simpson riding through the streets of Springfield after a dare from Homer: “I like men.”

Awesome.

No, this isn’t about The Tick.

At the risk of this becoming, “Steve’s Music Blog,” I just picked up tickets to see these guys in a couple of weeks. This isn’t my favorite track off their new CD, “Ga Ga Ga Ga Ga,” but all of their songs just sound… cool. I just dig Britt Daniel’s voice for some reason.

This is where I was last night. It was an evening full of happy sounds and confetti flying all about the room. (This video really takes off around the 3-minute mark.) It was… inspiring.

(Note: I didn’t shoot the video or anything.)

The Polyphonic Spree is a 23-member band of hippie hipsters from Texas who dress alike—the first CD, it was white robes; the second colored robes; today, it’s black jumpsuits—and clearly are very, very happy. As someone somewhere said, they’re like “Up With People” for hipsters.

And man, it’s refreshing.

Their new CD, “The Fragile Army” couldn’t be more sonically different than the White Stripes “Icky Thump,” but both are sunny and optimistic and fun and funny. And brilliant. (And I have tickets to see the Spree in July, and the Stripes in September.)

Where the Stripes are all about minimalism and tight arrangements, the Spree operate on an epic scale. It’s hard not to sound enormous when you have flutes, French horns, violins, pianos, drums, bass, and guitars supporting sunny people yelling lyrics like, “It’s like running away with the wind in our face, it’s like flying/And you and I are open wide.”

On their last two CDs, it all got a wee-bit tiresome and was best digested in small pieces. But “The Fragile Army” is a better complete work, with more variety to the themes, both music and lyrical. The first single, the jubilant “Running Away” is one of the sunnier, more traditional tracks. Others, like the title song and “Mental Cabaret,” are somewhat darker. But it’s all pretty wonderful. Go buy it. Now.

As for the Stripes, “Icky Thump” is definitely a return to the more conventional garage/blues/pop versus the rather weird “Get Behind Me Satan.” There’s more guitar, lots of blistering Jack White soloing, Meg’s drums are amped at mad-loud levels, a truly funny call and response between Jack and Meg playing junk collectors (or something) on “Rag and Bone.”

(To those who criticize the Stripes because of Meg’s simplistic stomp, sheesh, talk about not getting it. They’re all about simplicity. The lyrical themes, the music… it’s all back to basics, off-the-cuff stuff. With a “normal” drummer, it wouldn’t be the same at all… and you’d probably notice Jack’s sloppy playing too.)

There’s a couple of weak tracks on “Icky Thump”—the weird Irish ditties in the middle are just, well, weird in a less good way than the Flamenco-horned Conquest—but it’s another dozen awesome Stripes songs for your $15. Go buy it. Now.

The White Stripes new CD comes out tomorrow, and the first single “Icky Thump,” has grown on me over the last month. And I bought tickets this weekend to see them at the Paramount Theater in September.

I’m pretty sure I have a small man-crush on Jack White, and a real crush on Meg.

The greatest thing about loving three minute pop songs is that you’re constantly discovering (or re-discovering) the best three minute pop song in the world… and these things only last for days/weeks.

My current favorite is “Tiny Spark” by Brendan Benson. If you follow muzak, you may recognize his name from the coverage of The Raconteurs. He and Jack White are apparently buddies, and co-wrote the “Broken Boy Soldiers” CD. (While I didn’t totally dig that record, a few of the songs are fab.) By himself, Benson is a total pop classicist, kind of a Matthew Sweet type without the guitar wonkiness. If I had anything but rudimentary guitar skills, I’d probably create songs that sounded kind of like this.

And here’s a video for “Tiny Spark,” which is from 2002 or so.

When blathering on about my last entry, I stumbled on the video to Elastica’s “Connection,” which also led to me to its video for “Stutter.” And I’m struck at just how freakin’ great this song still sounds. Male impotence never sounded so sexy. It’s two minutes of pure manic pop pleasure.