FIVE BRAND-NEW MUSICAL BISCUITS

1. "Just" by Mark Ronson feat. Andy Greenwald, from the Radiohead tribute album Exit Music: Songs for Radio Heads. This is an entirely different and blissfully funked-out version of the dark classic from The Bends. Ronson enlists the horn section from Brooklyn's The Dap-Kings.

2. "Meet Me in the City" by The Black Keys, from the Chulahoma EP of covers of obscure bluesman Junior Kimbrough. The way the shimmering guitar washes over you in this song will make you smile.

3. "Bullshit" by The RH Factor with D'Angelo, from Distractions. This isn't in the same league as anything on D'Angelo's two classic albums, but we'll take whatever we can get from him these days. (I'm sure I'll discuss the sad saga of this tortured genius in another post.) This is D with Roy Hargrove.

4. "Vein of Stars" by The Flaming Lips, from At War With the Mystics. Their whole outer-space shtick comes across as a bit too obvious sometimes, but the band's trippy vision is perfectly executed on this track, where the spacey instrumentation (synths & wah-wah guitars) just accentuates what is already there: a simple, haunting vocal melody accompanied by nice acoustic strumming.

5. "Ghetto Story" by Baby Cham, from the upcoming Ghetto Story. I don't even own this, I just hear it on the radio all the damn time. The beat is incredible and the lyrics are vivid and brutal. It appears to be the "Welcome to Jamrock" of 2006.