by SHANE SINNOTT

In what’s being billed as the “first significant leak of 2008,” the new Stephen Malkmus (or Stephen Malkmus & the Jicks, if you want to be picky) record has found its way onto the usual file-sharing sites. Titled Real Emotional Trash, the fourth album from the former Pavement frontman since that band expired (fourth! My God, I’m almost 30!) finds him in familiar and always pleasant territory. You can get the track “Baltimore” at tinyurl.com/ywxyc5, complete with lines like, “I’m in love with a soldier from Baltimore. Baltimore! Baltimore!” and a two-minute guitar solo. Also available is the decidedly less epic “Cold Son,” at tinyurl.com/3ahu4j.

The other big record to be released into the wild recently, if by “wild” we allow ourselves to imagine a worldwide network of interconnected computers sharing electronic information, is The Bedlam in Goliath by the Mars Volta. Started by the two guys with the crazy hair from At the Drive-In, the Mars Volta play an elaborate type of rock that’s usually classified as “progressive,” and which you can hear in a track from the new album, called “Wax Simulacra,” here: tinyurl.com/2qe8u3.

Known for concept albums, the band has created an elaborate, and creepy as hell, online game called Goliath: The Soothsayer, which you can play at tinyurl.com/3cfyso. The pitch is that the game will allow you to “uncover the dark story that inspired the Mars Volta to produce their latest album.” The story is supposedly true, and supposedly starts like this: “Omar Rodriguez Lopez (guitar, producer) was in a curio shop in Jerusalem when he found the Soothsayer, an archaic Ouija-style ‘talking board.’ Had he known at that moment that the board’s history stretched far beyond its novelty appearance, that its very fibres were soaked through with something terribly other, that the choral death and desire of a multi-headed Goliath was waiting behind its gates...”

Ooookay. The album will also be available as a USB-Stick, designed to look like a Ouija piece to really drive the point home. For people who like smoking pot and listening to concept albums, the future looks good.