by SHANE SINNOTT

Next Tuesday, our favourite Scientologist Beck will release his latest, titled Modern Guilt. I dutifully tracked down one of the leaks floating around on the net for you angels, called “Chemtrails” (tinyurl.com/6hqudw). It’s pretty easy on the ears, sounding a lot like Caribou, which I guess isn’t really a stretch for the likes of Bek David Campbell. What I’m enjoying more is the stream that’s available of “Orphans,” featuring Chan Marshall (aka Cat Power) and loaded with a ’60s summertime vibe that’s nicely appropriate these days. Listen here: tinyurl.com/6h6o34 (and don’t be fooled by all the iLike crap—you don’t have to join if you don’t want to, just click on “listen”). Also available on the site is a stream of “Gamma Ray,” which ditches all pretence and goes straight to the ’60s surf-rock hook. Prepare to hear this everywhere starting next week.

Weezer frontman Rivers Cuomo has recently finished his Let’s Write a Sawng project, in which he spent, like, three months writing a song in collaboration with fans, primarily through YouTube. In a series of Webisodes (yuck), Cuomo solicited input on every aspect of the song, posting the slowly emergent results every few days. It’s an interesting project: he started with episodes settling on “attitude” and “title”; by Episode 7, Cuomo was dividing the fans into two camps to rework lyrics; and by the end, “post-chorus” hooks are being worked on. It starts out being called “80s Radio” and progresses to “We’re Turning Up the Radio,” and finally “Turnin’ Turnin’.” The result is better than a lot of Weezer songs, and you can see the video here: tinyurl.com/4baneu. To see the process, search for the earlier steps on YouTube—here’s the first few to get you started: 1 & 2, tinyurl.com/5evayb; Step 3, tinyurl.com/3upfcr; Step 4, tinyurl.com/3qqeov; Step 5 & 6, tinyurl.com/4gbg67; Step 7, tinyurl.com/4o6eok.

And finally, remember a couple weeks ago, when I was going on about how EMI (and a lot of the industry) was betting most of its future on the new Coldplay album? Well, 721,000 poor saps bought the record in its first week. Go Figure.