About ten days ago, my right ear just went bust. It either will never work right again or is just filled with snot. My doctor thinks it’s just filled with snot. He gave me a prescription for an antibiotic (two pills each day to be taken with food) and the Nasonex nose spray (two sprays in each nostril every morning). I have since taken all the pills and have squirted the Nasonex for a week solid.

And still–I get nothing from my right ear.

I tried to listen to this over the weekend. It was like listening through a paper bag. A wet paper bag filled with snot.

I have since given up listening to anything but NPR. Does anybody have any remedies that may save my right ear? I can’t take NPR much longer.

This week’s installment comes from The Modern Tribe, the upcoming album by Baltimore’s Celebration.

The reason to play this one loud: Singer Katrina Ford. The song is just about perfect. But it’s Ford’s voice that makes the difference. Not what you’d expect from Baltimore as this neither features cartoon characters trapped in reverb or zany concepts. Still great, though.

DOWNLOAD: Celebration, “Evergreen” (MP3)

Because the in-office mood here sucks, I think we all need something as crazy stupid as this burner from Spank Rock and Benny Blanco’s upcoming EP, Bangers & Cash.

As they say: Crank This Motherfucker Up.

Listen to “B-O-O-T-A-Y” here.

Hilarious? Over the Top? What’s your favorite line? Tell the Bag!

While hip-hop’s beasts–the 50-saurus and the Kanye-don–battle on this allegedly auspicious Tuesday, a furry mammal scurries among them: Le Loup, an ambitious little D.C. act that signed earlier this year to Hardly Art, a sister label of Sub Pop. The band, which today is releasing its debut, The Throne of the Third Heaven of the Nations’ Millennium General Assembly, is only “little” in the sense of its commercial profile; it’s physically big, with about 8 or 9 members. And its sound has become louder and grander since founder Sam Simkoff recorded his initial batch of laptop-based songs last year and quietly put them online. Here’s a taste:

DOWNLOAD MP3: Le Loup, “We Are Gods! We Are Wolves!”

Georgie James. Ris Paul Ric. John Davis and Chris Richards have already made their post–Q and Not U presence felt via ambient pop and Tod Rundgren–style balladry.

But what the hell ever happened to Harris Klahr? You know, the talented multi-instrumentalist who unintentionally named this blog when he wrote/sang the song “Black Plastic Bag.”

Well, let it now be known that Harris Klahr has become President. He’s just released his first full-length Take Music on the download-only Friends label—which means that you’re only a few clicks away from enjoying its delicate krautrock grooves and afro-pop inspired call and response melodies (also available via iTunes).

Speaking of recovering junkies, Anton Newcombe of the Brian Jonestown Massacre has posted a downloadable preview of his (possibly?) upcoming record, My Bloody Underground on the band’s Web site. How much this stuff has to do with the final product or who actually made it is debatable. I’m pretty sure some of these lyrics are being sung in German, but the songs are definitely meaner, darker, and edgier than possibly any Jonestown record since, well, ever.

Soon it might be easier than ever to use Metal Machine Music as your ringtone.

Moguls generally don’t maintain their status by being impulsive, so it’s no surprise that Rob Garza of Thievery Corporation has taken a few years to develop his rock project, Dust Galaxy, which will release its self-titled debut disc on Nov. 6. Despite Garza’s well-documented musical taste–and all his studio tinkering with a slew of guest stars in London–the album represents a bit of a risk: It’s possible that many Thievery fans and indie kids will greet it with a collective shoulder-shrug. Or maybe it’ll go pop; Dust Galaxy is certainly piling up the amigos. Check back with us in a few months. For now, Garza has released one single (the psych-flavored “Come Hear The Trumpets”) and is dropping another one (the funkier “Mother Of Illusion”) this week. ESL Music cleared us to share that track’s B-side, “River Of Ever Changing Forms,” which features Ashish Vyas of Gogogo Airheart on bass, Darrin Mooney of Primal Scream on drums and Adam Blake of Cornershop on sitar:

DOWNLOAD: Dust Galaxy, “River of Ever Changing Forms”

The Pam Berry mix has got me in an indie-pop mood, digging this and that.

And I’ve been jamming to the new Brunettes album, Structure & Cosmetics. The New Zealand duo has been putting out super twee stuff for a while now. This is their first stateside release. While I wish the girl-group refs weren’t so obvious, it’s still solid all the way through.

You can listen to “Small Town Crew” on your way out of D.C.

Like most tech-savvy music fans in this age of aesthetically-pleasing-yet-flimsily-constructed electronic gadgets, I own an Apple iPod. And, as happens to many iPod owners, mine eventually broke.

I continue to hold no suspicion that the inevitable demise of my fourth-generation “click wheel” iPod had anything to do with the near-simultaneous release of Apple’s fifth-generation, full-color, video-capable iPod. I’m sure it was just a curious coincidence, and not some nefarious scheme on the part of Apple executives and manufacturers to give consumers that last push needed to keep them constantly upgrading their music technology. Yet I can’t quite bring myself to purchase the latest edition of Apple’s digital media player. Maybe it’s because my current iPod still works, kind of–as much as 25 percent of the time on a good day. Or perhaps it’s because I’m still paying my current one off. More likely it’s because I know that, by the time my brand-spanking-new fifth generation iPod (which was originally released in October of 2005) arrives at my doorstep, Apple will announce the upcoming release of its sixth-generation iPod. I imagine that one will have full pay-per-view-porn capabilities, and Lord knows I’m willing to wait it out for that much.

As a music fan on the go, however, this situation leaves me more than a little screwed. Without my iPod, how exactly am I going to be able to listen to Fugazi while taking the Metro? Like an Internet junkie contemplating what life used to be like before the World Wide Web was created, I scoured my brain trying to remember how I used to accomplish this ever-so-important task. Then it dawned on me–the Walkman. Perhaps you remember the Walkman? Many moons ago, that stack of unattended CDs collecting dust on your bookshelf used to serve a purpose. It’s hard to fathom but, once, society actually used the CDs themselves to listen to, as opposed to simply uploading the music onto iTunes before casting the CD into the ethereal void. (Trust me on this one. I looked it up on Wikipedia.) The Walkman allowed you to listen to your CDs outside of your own home–as you walked.

Let me tell you about my Sony S2 Sports Walkman, which I found in a long-forgotten cardboard box (along with a broken drum machine and a four-track tape recorder) in the back of my closet. In a pre-iPod society, the Sony S2 Sports Walkman was king. This sweet beauty had an ergonomic joystick that allowed you to play, pause, stop, and skip tracks—as well as control the volume—with only the thumb of the hand it was strapped to. It had a built-in FM/AM/TV/weather-band digital tuner with 51-station preset memory. It had a durable, water-resistant casing designed for active use. It was compatible with such digital musical formats as CD’s, CD-R’s , and CD-RW’s. It got close to 50 hours’ worth of playing time on only 2 AA batteries. And let’s not forget the “Skip-Free G-Protection” technology, which guarded you against music interruption while you jogged. (I’m not sure what the “G” in G-Protection was for, but I always assumed it was for “fucking amazinG.”)

I didn’t take me very long to fall back in love with my Sony S2 Sports Walkman. In fact, I’m starting to wonder why we ever parted in the first place. In many ways, the thing actually seems more convenient than an iPod–and it’s certainly more reliable. But it has become very apparent to me that the rest of you do not feel the same. I can feel your disapproval, your mockery, your hatred with every passing glance you cast at me and my Walkman. “Get with the times, loser,” one set of eyes says to me. “Where’d you get that thing, your mom’s attic?,” another set asks.

On the Metro, while rummaging through a stack of CDs in my messenger bag, I catch such a glance. Flustered, I drop a few CD cases to the ground; one CD pops out of the case and rolls a few feet down the isle. Someone snickers. My face red with embarrassment, I suddenly feel like the guy in the Pringles commercials. You know: the tubby schlub, sitting on a park bench with a bag of generic potato chips, who is covered in broken chip pieces and wearing a shirt with multiple grease stains while the rest of the chip-eating world dances by with cans of Pringles in in their hands and shit-eating grins on their faces?

Damn you and your superior chips. Damn you and your superior digital music players. My Sony S2 Sports Walkman and I are happy with each other. Can’t you all just leave us alone?