First up, a fantastic cover of one of my favorite Magnetic Fields' songs, Portland's The Brother Egg did "I Think I Need a New Heart" from a free 23 track album made up entirely of covers of Magnetic Fields songs called Meaningless (myspace). You can download the whole thing there, but since it's kind of a pain to download that way, so I've posted it on my server to make for easier downloading: Click here to download. Next, New York's most exciting up-and-coming band (according to me anyway), Vampire Weekend did two tracks, which will hopefully be made available shortly when they release their first 7" and digital-download EP, but for now enjoy "Oxford Comma" and "Cape Cod Kwassa Kwassa" (stream on their site). One of the things that's great about Vampire Weekend is the way they summon African stylings in their otherwise unrelated-to-Africa music. To best illustrate this, we heard Zimbabwe's The Hallelujah Chicken Run Band with "Mudzimu Ndiringe" from the quality, recently-released collection Take One (eMusic, iTunes, Amazon). Next California's Jazz newcomers The Low Standards did "If You Play Nice" (which has a touch of Nellie McKay in it) from their debut Show Some Leg EP (iTunes). Then TSiMH favorite They Might Be Giants have a brand new album coming out tomorrow exclusively in iTunes (it comes out as a formal more-widely available double-CD in July) called The Else (iTunes)... Unfortunately I can't say I'm loving it. I can say I like at least this song tho, we heard "Bee of the Bird of the Moth" which has the sort of good lyrics typified by TMBG. Finally, another post-posthumous Elliott Smith record was just released, this one is a two-disc collection of 24 rarities called New Moon (eMusic, iTunes, Amazon). From disc one, we heard the previously unreleased "Angel in the Snow". This episode features clips from the past two week's episodes of FAIR's Counterspin, about the media's reaction to the 1st Democratic vs. the 1st Republican Presidential Debates.