On Gemma Ray's latest record, 'Lights Out Zoltar!,' she leads with a track called '100mph (in 2nd Gear),' a song that's steeped in a southwestern sound with Ray's sweeping voice sounding quite panic stricken. For the accompanying video, she takes a page from the David Lynch storybook, creating a surreal yet loose narrative of a lounge singer who's in some sort of wild dream state. She winds up with her getting into a car with a mysterious stranger, who just happens to have a rubber band.

"I wanted to bring out the visual poetry of how the song sounds," Ray tells Spinner of the video shoot. "Juxtaposition is the way I write -- bringing two extremes together, it lends a few possible ways to look at the song."

As the charismatic frontman for Art Brut, Eddie Argos has a lot of experience starting bands -- it was even chronicled in the group's first single, 'Formed a Band.' Now, along with his girlfriend and keyboard player Dyan Valdes of the Blood Arms, Argos has started another act: Everybody Was in the French Resistance ... Now!

"We were talking about how a history teacher used to say people would alter history," Argos tells Spinner. "So it made sense that we'd want to try ourselves. We're trying to be a pop band and we wanted these pop songs that weren't meant to be funny. Sometimes it's hard to find the anchor though and not write about myself for a change."

It's said that only a thousand people bought the Velvet Underground's debut album when it was first released in 1967 -- but every one of them started a band.

Veneno may be the Andalusian Velvet Underground, at least in that regard. Coming a decade later, Veneno's lone album didn't bear much musical relation to the VU, but it marked a similar place in the history of Spanish rock, a revolutionary, raw and progressive take on flamenco traditions that barely made a blip on the pop radar but could well be seen as a wellspring of a new era. Not least of that was that as the Velvet Underground led to the higher-profile solo careers of Lou Reed and John Cale, Veneno begat the teaming of brothers Raimundo and Rafael Amador as the iconic nuevo flamenco duo Pata Negra, as well as a solid solo career from leader and eponym Kiko Veneno.

Now there's another chance to embrace this bracing music. 'Veneno' is being reissued by the Spanish label Vinilisssimo. And in a nice bit of symmetry, it's a limited edition of a thousand high-grade vinyl copies, available in the US via Forced Exposure. It's part of a Spanish rock reissue series that also includes another flamenco-prog classic of the era, 'Gipsy Rock,' the debut by the group Las Grecas, fronted by sisters Carmela and Tina Muñoz Barrull -- which did have a greater commercial impact.

"I'll be at the gym and suddenly I've got Right Said Fred playing and I'm so mortified." --Victoria Beckham

The former Spice Girl has fallen victim to one of her soccer star husband's (hilarious) pranks. Unfortunately for her, she can't get rid of 'I'm Too Sexy' because she's admittedly "rubbish with phones."

After 40-plus years on the sauce, Rolling Stones guitarists Keith Richards and Ronnie Wood have both decided to give up the hooch. If that's not enough, the recently estranged bandmates have reportedly mended fences and come together to help one another with their mutual recoveries.

"Keith and Ronnie hadn't had much to do with one another but now they're back in touch," friends of the rockers tell U.K. newspaper the Express. "They've both given up alcohol recently so they can obviously relate to each other's situation. They've been giving one another plenty of moral support."

With recording and all the related tasks completed for Hot Chip's new album, 'One Life Stand,' the band faced just one more task before hitting the road this month: learning how to play the songs.

"We had to learn how the actual sequences go," multi-instrumentalist Al Doyle tells Spinner. It seems like the song structures are something the English electro-pop band would know intimately, having just finished the record. Turns out, though, that the band writes and records in piecemeal fashion.

Electro-pop duo Goldfrapp embraces their positive side on 'Rocket (Richard X Eight Four Remix),' the club-ready single off their forthcoming fifth album, 'Head First.' "I got happy," Alison Goldfrapp admitted to Rolling Stone in a recent interview, attributing the group's newfound optimism to a series of unnameable life decisions.

While the London musicians are no strangers to synthesizer-based pop, they put extra emphasis on songwriting this time around. According to Will Gregory, "It was more about the way the songs work melodically than it was about being a big electronic racket. We're just trying to evolve, get closer to the essence of what a bloody good song is."

Have a listen to the exclusive song premiere after the jump.