Kanye West performing "New Slaves" on Saturday Night Live

It's probably fair to guess just about everyone under the Sun has seen Kanye West's performance on Saturday Night Live's season finale at this point. Or maybe they caught the video for Yeezy's new song "New Slaves" playing on the side of a building somewhere around the world. Or maybe they've seen the man himself perform live recently.

Whichever way you heard it, most people are quickly becoming familiar with the new, darker, rawer Kanye presented on the songs "Black Skinhead" and "New Slaves." Opinions vary, of course, which is predictable any time an artist steps outside the boundaries of his or her most predictable sound. But the truth is, Kanye's new sound may be the most exciting, original thing to come out all year so far. Here's why.

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A couple of caveats to this list: first, it actually includes more than ten songs. Since one is sung primarily in English and another isn't technically a "foreign" language, they're considered halfsies, making up one whole.

Also, no songs sung in Spanish are on this list. I'm not saying Spanish isn't a foreign language -- please don't call the Minutemen or anything -- but I am saying that Spanish isn't that foreign to me. Also, I could go ten songs deep with those songs alone; so, no songs sung in Spanish on this particular foreign-language song list.

Finally, these songs aren't necessarily Billboard's top-selling international-flavored songs, either. No "99 Luftballoons," "Macarena" or Psy songs to be found. At least for this list let's let platinum sales mean less than songs that haven't had all the fun sucked from them by Manchurian Candidate-style repeat plays. You know, songs like these:

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Alan Alda as Caryl Chessmen in Kill Me If You Can

Not to brag, but I've got a copy of the new Hates album, People's Temple, and it is (as usual) a fantastic little CD that every punk fan in Houston should own. We're still waiting on a confirmed release party at Cactus, but before that happens there's a song on the disc we want to talk about, "Do the Caryl Chessmen."

Today marks the anniversary of the execution of Caryl Chessman, who expired in the gas chamber even as his stay of execution was being sent over the phone in 1960. Chessman had spent most of his life in and out of prison before being convicted for 17 counts of robbery, kidnapping, and rape in 1948.

Note that murder isn't on that list. Chessman ended up with the death penalty due to a quirk in California's kidnapping law that said if a person dragged his or her victim a sufficient enough distance it counted as kidnapping, a capital crime. In Chessman's case he dragged a rape victim only 17 feet. The courts found that sufficient.

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Do not download Bradley Munoz's, better know as P.L.X.T.X., album Selective Mutism. In fact, don't call it an album at all, because that is in no way what it is.

Munoz's insistence on sending me a physical copy to review irked me in the digital age, but I played along because he's a nice kid who happens to frighten me a little. I'm glad he insisted, because Munoz has crafted something that can only truly be appreciated when its digital listening mode and physical medium are combined.

You open Selective Mutism, and the first thing that happens is a CD-R falls out along with a small black and white picture of Munoz. The CD-R bears a homemade sticker, and the picture is handwritten on the back encouraging you to make a copy to give to a friend. Inside the casing is the message, "Fuck Hollywood and their lobbyist."

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Traffic, traffic, lookin' for my Chapstick...

Marconi, Tesla, Steve Jobs and some other folks we rarely mention should be elevated to hero status for creating the means and devices we turn to while spending hours in traffic.

Groups that geek out on such stats suggest at least ten percent of Americans spend about 90 minutes a day behind the wheel on the way to and from work. That time can explode exponentially in a city full of inattentive drivers and nonchalant road crews.

Thankfully, we have music to ease the pain of bottlenecks and unexpected detours. More often than not, it does its job and whisks us off to a better time and place than parked in the shadow of an F150, pondering its dangling set of "truck nuts."

But occasionally a song will actually aggravate matters. If "matters" are already bordering on a Michael Douglas-Falling Down-bazooka attack on gridlock, the following songs should quickly be skipped in favor of sports talk or a podcast.

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Photo by Anthony Rathbun

Bang Bangz remains one of the best things about the Houston music scene. The trio of Mario Rodriguez, Elizabeth Salazar, and Vik Montemayor specializes in an ambient, repetitious, synth-driven kind of indie music that is really quite spellbinding. In particular, Salazar and Rodriguez's vocals cut through the binary wall of sound like a modernist version of Flowers and Machines.

Red City is the trio's first full-length release, coming a year after their stellar self-titled EP. At the time you could clearly feel the band looking for its identity apart from Rodriguez's work with Tax the Wolf, but warming to their potential as a new direction.

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They sound exactly like this looks.

Unless you're actively seeking out the absolute gnarliest music you can find, it's easy to forget that there's a whole world of extreme sounds out there, roiling just underground. Local grindcore destructors P.L.F. (neé Pretty Little Flower) have seen a pretty big chunk of that world. Since forming in 1999, guitarist/vocalist Dave Callier's trio of rage-aholics has toured the U.S. seven times and Europe three times. This year, the band plans to add Australia to the list.

That's a pretty long reach for a group plying the most excruciating mutation of heavy metal yet imagined, but if you want your music heard in a scene as tight-knit and far-flung as grindcore, you go to where the audiences are.

"I sometimes compare it to people who are really into extreme horror movies or really into hot sauce," Callier says. "They're more in a minority around the world than people who are into regular food or regular movies. But people who are into that stuff are like freaks about it."

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While we all wait for the remaining members of New Order to do more expansive touring (read: Houston or Austin and not just Dallas) or record new material, their camp released a mini-album from the Waiting For the Sirens' Call sessions in 2004.

For now, we will take what we can get.

Lost Sirens was released digitally on January 15, comprising eight "new" songs that were supposed to be released soon after Waiting came out almost eight years ago. Waiting itself was 12 tracks long, and the band made eyes toward a double album at the time, but it didn't happen.

Drummer Stephen Morris was happy to get these eight cuts to the public.

"The intention was always to write four or five more songs and then put it out 18 months or so after the first one," he said in a press release. "When we unearthed it from the cupboard recently, with the intention of red-editing some of the songs, we all agreed they didn't actually need it, and it should just be out there."

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One would think that after releasing three albums in a year, an artist might consider taking a "hiatus"; anything from a drug binge to a bender in Mexico. Not Ty Segall, he doesn't take breaks. He has formed yet another new project with guitarist Charlie Moothart, appropriately called Fuzz, and the 7-inch single has already sold out.

No one knew what Fuzz was, at first, or who was even in the band. Chicago-based label Trouble In Mind received the "unsolicited e-mail submission" and described them as a "San Francisco mystery band." Later, Segall disclosed the band's true identity in a magazine article.

The new tracks remind me of Slaughterhouse, the loud and unforgiving 2012 summer release. Who would have guessed that when Segall got behind the drums and Moothart took center stage, they would explode into a 1960s California version of Black Sabbath?

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Yeah, I should probably be beaten badly and left in an alley to think about what I did for making that pun, but trust me; The Escatones' "Out of Sight/East Beach Stomp" is indeed worth the price of the 45 record.

The Escatones are usually described in conjunction with their jangling surf guitars and psychedelic approach to things. Comparisons to the 13th Floor Elevators and Dick Dale usually come up, and I can see that. However, "Out of Sight" brings me back to my absolute favorite subgenre of alternative music, the '90s who-gives-a-shit desolation bands.

I'll explain. Back in the '90s you had bands like The Dandy Warhols releasing songs like "Not If You Were the Last Junkie on Earth." The approach was always loud and painful, but at the same time kind of gleeful. Or take Sponge's Wax Ecstatic album. That is some hopeless but high-as-balls stuff, and that's the best way I can describe "Out of Sight." Hopeless, but tripping absolute pennies.

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