Shantel Mitchell/For NPR Music

Wild Flag (and former Sleater-Kinney) drummer Janet Weiss, performing live at the NPR Music day party, during the South by Southwest Music Festival in Austin, TX.

This week's quiz comes courtesy of Janet Weiss, drummer for the band Wild Flag (and former drummer for Sleater-Kinney). She's got some killer fills and intros here that (I thought) ranged from pretty easy to pretty hard. But see what you think.

Drag the intro or fill (or beat) to the album it's from. If you get it right, the song names will appear.

As always, if you've got a drum fill or intro you think would be good for the quiz, let us know in the comments section.

More Drum Fill Friday quizzes.

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Electronic music producer and DJ Monty Luke, who will perform at the Movement Electronic Music Festival in Detroit on Monday.

Courtesy of the artist

Electronic music producer and DJ Monty Luke, who will perform at the Movement Electronic Music Festival in Detroit on Monday.

There's an awesome music festival taking place over Memorial Day weekend, featuring some of the best DJs in the world. Can you name it?

OK, so that's a trick question. There are actually two fests taking place this weekend with big-time electronic artists. In Detroit, we've got the Movement Electronic Music Festival, formerly known as the Detroit Electronic Music Festival, which for more than a decade has catered to devoted electronic music fans. Then there's the Sasquatch! Music Festival, known for its rock predilections and gorgeous locale in Washington's Columbia Valley.

Even though there's far fewer electronic acts at Sasquatch, the handful of DJs on the schedule may have as many American fans as all 100 of the Movement performers combined. Pretty Lights sits at the top of its bill, right next to Jack White, Beck and Bon Iver. The man born Derek Vincent Smith is headlining the festival's main stage on Friday night (along with Girl Talk), which makes some sense when you consider both his and Sasquatch's background. Back in 2002, the festival's first lineup was jam band central, while Smith made a name for himself playing with acts like Widespread Panic and the Disco Biscuits. His giant sound and crazy lazer show is a logical next step as the communal concert experience adapts to the available tools and technology of the 21st century.

Get Familiar With Detroit Techno: 10 Essential Songs

Movement, on the other hand, is almost entirely DJs and producers who make their money spinning in dance clubs, with the exception of Sunday night headliner Public Enemy. Now celebrating its 13th year, the festival spotlights the biggest names in house, techno and their myriad sub-genres, but it might best be defined by what it (mostly) lacks: progressive house and dubstep, the two electronic sounds that fill stadiums with teenagers these days (and attract attention from Wall Street and numerous media outlets).

That isn't to say DJs at Movement are completely averse to "dropping the bass." Borders are always shifting in electronic dance music and boundaries exist to be flouted. It's just that many of the DJs heading to Detroit are more interested in subtle surprises that fit into longer narratives where rhythm trumps song and journeys matter more than drops.

There's so many different styles converging at Movement this year, we asked Detroit producer Monty Luke to give us a glimpse of what we can expect. And by we, I mean my NPR colleague Sami Yenigun, who will be attending the festival and reporting back next week. The tracklist is below.

Monty Luke's Movement Mix:

Andres, "Sha's Revenge"
Lil Louis, "Video Clash"
Carls Davis, "Sketches Pt. 3"
Benoit & Sergio, "Principles"
Claude VonStroke & Jaw, "Le Fantôme"
Nina Kraviz, "Ghetto Kraviz (Amine Edge Edit)"
Marcellus Pittman, "Chicago Nights"
Kyle Hall, "Friendly Skies"
Monty Luke, "In Love With A Dancer"
Davide Squillace, "The Other Side Of Bed"
Lil' Louis & The World, "Club Lonely (Shield Re Edit)"

Note: This week's All Songs Considered offers a preview of the upcoming Maryland Deathfest.

Courtesy of the artist

As a small child in the '70s, metal bands absolutely horrified me. I didn't grow up in a particularly religious family at all, but I understood that, let's face it, if you listened to metal you were probably going to hell because everyone knew those bands were messengers for the Prince of Darkness.

I guess elementary school was a very impressionable time for me because I basically believed every urban myth all the other kids told me. Led Zeppelin, I was told, used back-masking on "Stairway To Heaven" to trick us into praising the devil. Someone else said AC/DC stood for "antichrist/Devil child." The band Kiss was actually an acronym for "Knights In Satan's Service." There were countless tales like this.

But of all the bands I feared, none were more terrifying than Black Sabbath. The name alone sent chills through me. Everyone knew lead singer Ozzy Osbourne, during a concert, once threw a box of puppies into the audience and told everyone the band wouldn't play until all those puppies were dead. (He didn't). Everyone also knew the members of Black Sabbath had sold their souls to Satan in exchange for fame. (Pretty sure they didn't). And everyone knew Osbourne had bitten a bat's head off (okay, that one is true, but he didn't think it was real and it was after he left Black Sabbath anyway).

Fortunately, thanks to an older brother and other wiser friends, I eventually grew up to love Black Sabbath. This year we celebrate the (unbelievably) 40th anniversary of the band's classic record Vol. 4. Here's the (so awesome) opening cut, "Wheels Of Confusion/The Straightener."

I'm pretty sure God has forgiven me for loving this so much. Besides, as Ozzy Osbourne told Rolling Stone's David Fricke years after leaving Black Sabbath, despite the band's inextricable ties to the occult, black magic and Satan, the group "couldn't conjure up a fart."

For more on all-things-metal, check out this week's episode of All Songs Considered as we preview the upcoming Maryland Deathfest, with NPR Music's resident metal fiend and Viking berserker, Lars Gotrich, and metal writer Kim Kelly

You can also get more fantastic metal and outer-sound music picks from Lars in our Viking's Choice series.

Is it possible to make a top ten list of albums everyone can agree on? With your help, we're going to try!

Each week, now through the summer, we're asking you to give us a thumbs up or thumbs down on a list of records. Just tell us in the survey below whether you do or don't love the record.

Quizzes by Quibblo.com | SnapApp Quiz Apps

And, of course, in the comments section below, tell us what albums you think we should include in future surveys. We hope to use the results to compile a list of the ten most universally loved records by sometime in August.

Last week's survey.

You can also hear us talk about the quest for universally loved albums on All Songs Considered.

Warning: This post, about a song by Balthrop, Alabama (a 10-piece Brooklyn band, not a extremely musical township), includes numerous instances of coordinated jazz hands and chorus line kicks. The band's new song "You've Gotta Be Gay," is filled with theatrical sounds from all different places and times: stomps, grunts and rattles from a 1930s chain gang, a tinny player-piano from an old-timey saloon and an accordion out of every stereotypical Parisian boulevard scene. The lyrics don't wink as much as hit you on the head with obvious references. But despite all of the joking around about "happy endings," the song has a definite positive message. It may be wrapped in the cheesiest package, but underneath it all is a declaration of acceptance and support in the face of intolerance.

In the song's video, a campy romp filled with prisoners and parasols, the band is joined by drag king known as "Mr. Showbiz," Murray Hill. On a ridiculously tiny stage, Hill leads the band as master of ceremonies/warden through a spirited performance of the song. Like the Mucca Pazza video we posted last week, the video gives the feeling of a cohesive group of people having fun and putting on a show. It's kind of dorky and not everyone can kick very high, but they sell it by staying connected with each other.

In an email, director and Balthrop, Alabama founding member Pascal Balthrop talked about the inspiration for "You Gotta Be Gay" and creating the video with Hill:

My sister Lauren Balthrop and I were goofing around on a subway platform, pretending we were writing our own Broadway show. I think the first germ of the idea was the image of some fellas with umbrellas. Everything kinda fell into place around that image. [It became] a queer-positive manifesto to the benefits of facing life's foibles with a smile. Pretty early on Murray Hill came to mind [as the video's main character]. He's a well-known comedian and entertainer, a legend of New York City nightlife. He just seemed perfect for the role. I used to work with Murray in another life back in San Francisco, and we've kept in touch. So I reached out to him and he said "Of course I'm in!" He really makes the video.

We Have Electricity, Balthrop, Alabama's new album, is out now.

Maybe YACHT wouldn't be that sad if the complete and total annihilation of the human race happened tomorrow. The video for their song "Beam Me Up," off their recent album Shangri-La, finds the band playing around with the upsides of doomsday in a laser tag arena. Think of a future where cyber-soldiers fight each other in the smouldering metallic ruins of society, except with children shooting fake lasers.

"Beam Me Up" begins like the opening to an "invaders from outer space" sci-fi and ends with a yelp of exasperation. Singer Claire Evans, sounding like a new-wave Siouxsie Sioux, sings, "High above the clouds somewhere / The cold of space spreads thin / We endeavor to look out / They are looking in."

The sentiment in the chorus — that one day the narrator will watch her planet burn — sounds unfortunate. By the last stanza, however, it's obvious that the first impression is faulty. This narrator can't wait for the whole crummy Earth to blow up: "There are nights that I burn out / I drink deep from my cup / I look all around me / and think, 'Oh god, beam me up!'"

A song so enthusiastic about the downfall of mankind needs an equally dystopic video. Thankfully, when the band was traveling through Portland, Oregon earlier this year they met up with Into The Woods, a local culture/music/video blog, and performed as part of the blog's Far From Home video series. This series takes artists and gets them to perform a song in an unusual space — tour buses, arcades, and under bridges to name a few. Director Hannah Gregg and the Into the Woods team paired the retro sci-fi of "Beam Me Up" with the blacklit world of laser tag. The band gets into the manic energy of all the kids running around, playing along with the gigantic fake battle raging around them.

For YACHT's singer, Claire Evans, the combination of the "Beam Me Up" and laser tag was perfect:

Our song, "Beam Me Up," is about being so exasperated with the human race that rapture via alien abduction begins to sound appealing, so it was a perfect concordance to shoot our episode of Into the Woods at the heart of a fictional intergalactic war. That is the premise of laser tag, right?

In an email, director Hannah Gregg talked about the challenge of filming in the middle of a fake cybernetic war:

A laser tag arena is the epitome of challenging for a live performance shoot, and I knew it would take a band willing to commit to the strangeness of it all. We had a laser tag arena in mind for a shoot for a few months, but hadn't nailed down an artist that felt right for the shoot. It wasn't until two days before the band was to play a homecoming show in town that everything clicked — YACHT was the perfect fit. I emailed [YACHT member Jona Bechtolt] and 48 hours later we were hauling YACHT's gear into Laserport in Beaverton, OR. I knew this would be a challenging location, both for shooting and performance. Playing there meant setting up in the dark to perform in a weirdly situated blacklight room with little kids running around, techno dance remixes bumping between takes and two crews of cameras. It was sort of weird and stressful, but that was the point.

I was most excited about shooting YACHT in a laser tag arena because I wanted to see how they confront being in this strange and challenging location, and document the performance that arises out of that extra stress and unfamiliar territory. While the location is sort of funny in nature, to make this successful it needed a band that was going to take seriously actually how awesome of a location it was and be totally committed to the concept, and YACHT did just that. As an added bonus, it turns out Laserport is located right near where Claire grew up, so while it was far from the band's new home, there was a nostalgia for the area and the party room and the vests and the video games that made Laserport home for the afternoon.

Yacht's album Shangri-La is out now.

Enlarge Courtesy of the artist

Courtesy of the artist

The concept behind Ghettos and Gardens is simple: pretty strings over gritty basslines; dainty vocals atop punchy percussion; beautiful and foul servings of 4/4 beats. Justin Martin puts it this way:

"When creating music I usually set out to sweep the listener away with beautiful melodies only to lead them to earthshattering bass lines."

It's something he's done time and time again with singles released on the Dirtybird label, a San Francisco-based beacon of oddball house music, and it's what he does on "Don't Go," the first single off of his new debut album.

Listen: Justin Martin, 'Don't Go'

Don't Go

• Artist: Justin Martin
• Album: Ghettos & Gardens

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First, we hear a female voice sing the song's title over a skipping pattern of high hats and a looped string melody. So far, so lovely. Then the sounds swell (a distant echo creeps its way into the mix) and give way to a brief, suspenseful moment of silence, which is swiftly shattered by the attack of a drum kick paired with an electronic clap.

Martin works this mix of power and grace in a number of ways on the album. On the title track, the vocals are even daintier: delicate whisps of sound that evaporate into bass lines which, when heard on the right system, could conceivably do bodily harm. On "Butterflies," Martin sets cascading runs of keys fluttering around a barking synthesizer, and then peppers this dance with stabbing chords and metallic spasms.

Across Ghettos and Gardens, Justin Martin has managed to come up with a number of ways to communicate the same idea, but he does it well enough that the idea never gets old. It's a simple concept, handled with an impressive level of complexity.

On May 31, we'll live webcast and broadcast a concert by Regina Spektor from New York's Le Poisson Rouge. You'll be able to watch the whole thing live on NPR Music and via our apps as it's happening, beginning at 10 p.m. ET.

But if you're in New York City on the night of the show and want to go, we've got free tickets for you. Tickets are very limited, so grab one for you and a guest while you can on a first-come, first-served basis.

[UPDATE: TICKETS ARE NO LONGER AVAILABLE]

While Spektor's latest album is richly orchestrated, her performance at Le Poisson Rouge will be a stripped-down set, with Spektor joined by an additional keyboardist, a cellist and a drummer. She'll perform old favorites and introduce highlights from her new album, What We Saw From the Cheap Seats, out on May 29.

In addition to watching our live video stream, you'll also be able to hear the show broadcast on NPR stations, including WFUV and WXPN.

What record could you put on that would make everyone happy? What are the albums you think we can all agree on? That's our summer project, to find the 10 albums everyone can love. We're not asking for your favorite album or the best album. We're looking to find those few albums that are universally loved.

So, each week, now through the summer, we'll be asking you to give us a thumbs up or thumbs down on a list of records. Just tell us in the survey below whether you do or don't love the record. We start off with 20 albums.

Quizzes by Quibblo.com | SnapApp Quiz Apps

We'll need more nominations for future polls, so in the comments section tell us the records you think we should include. These should be the records you think you could play for anyone and they'd love it.

You can also hear us talk about the quest for universally loved albums on the latest edition of All Songs Considered.

Can a song that's about the fragility of life and the struggle to survive make you want to bounce around merrily? Somehow the Spinto Band's new song, "The Living Things," does just that. The song's lyrics that on their own could seem depressing — "true to life and in the flesh / though hanging on by just a thread" for example — are pushed aside by the jangly afrobeat-like melody. It's a song that, even though lead singer Nick Krill's voice wails about how he'll "be no good," leaves you with your toes tapping and a smile on your face.

The band's video for "The Living Things" also mixes this darker edge with a cheery outside. The video can be divided into two parts. The first segment follows a series of cute blob critters as they bend, twist, break apart, devour each other and explode. The drawn animation feels raw and reminds me of a few classic Sesame Street segments or a sunnier Don Hertzfeldt. The work is fluid and impressively keeps up with the jumpy instrumental bridges. My favorite part of the entire thing happens near the 1:50 mark into the video, when the band kicks up and an assortment of fantastic creatures quickly pop up on the screen and then vanish as fast as they came. It makes me want to go through frame by frame to see exactly what is drawn when.

"The Living Things" then switches its style but not its tone in the second part of the video — transforming to stop motion animation of the band wriggling and floating around an abandoned rooftop. While the people lack the impossible flexibility of the goo monsters, their herky-jerky style (very much like a flip-book) has an endearing charm.

Spinto Band singer Nick Krill told us he was surprised to see how similar director Phil Davis' take on the song was to his imagined music video:

It is strange, when I listen to this song I imagine people dancing under a big tent made of colored lights ... and when the song gets more rambunctious I picture them running at each other, jumping in to the air, locking arms (like in a square dance) and spinning around in mid-air until they kind of meld into each other. kind of strange, but there you go ... anyhow, I was excited to see that the director, Phil Davis, independently came up with a sort of similar idea and brought it to life ... but instead of people they are little amoeba things.

In an email, Davis described how he created "The Living Things'" animations:

"The Living Things" is a combination of hand drawn animation and pixilation (stop motion animation of humans). All of the roughly 2,000 drawings in the animation were created frame-by-frame by me over the course of 20 months. The animation frames were timed and synchronized to the music using an x-sheet, a method that dates back to the earliest sound cartoons created by the Walt Disney studios. The pixilation animation was greatly influenced by the work of Canadian animator Norman McLaren.

The Spinto Band's new album, Shy Pursuit, is out now.

I haven't kept an official ticker, but if government agents kicked in my door and forced me to pick the one album I've listened to more than any other, I'd have to say Neil Young's Everybody Knows This Is Nowhere. It came out 43 years ago this week.

I'm assuming people still bond and develop lifelong friendships over a shared love for a given album, but Everybody Knows This Is Nowhere is also the last record I can recall playing such a vital role for me. I'd only just met the person who introduced me to it years ago and we went on to become close friends, in no small part by spending hours and hours playing extended versions of "Down By The River" on our acoustic guitars. Even now, months can go by without seeing each other, but when we get together, we can pull out the guitars and play seemingly endless versions of the song, much to our wives' glee!

So happy birthday, Everybody Knows This Is Nowhere! Thanks for the memories, and massive thanks to the dear friend who first gave it to me.

Take a humongous group of excitable jokers who have too much free time on their hands, mix in enough instruments to satisfy an entire marching band variety, toss a few gigantic pom poms and enormously-loud/elaborate outfits their way and you'll get Mucca Pazza. The Chicago-based band is a 30-piece (yes, 30 trombonists, trumpeters, guitarists, cheerleaders, and more) community of "circus punks" that makes music that sounds like the results of a rowdy weekend at band camp.

Mucca Pazza's new song, "Boss Taurus," feels like a musical debate: the trumpets make a declaration; there's a response from the guitars; and the lone tuba tries to get a word in edgewise. The pieces constantly break apart and then get back to working together to get you bouncing in your chair.

The video for "Boss Taurus" has a remarkably simple concept — the members of the band perform and goof off on a tiny stage for three minutes. Its simplicity makes it easy to be swept up in the wave of exuberance and flashy colors packed into those minutes. In that short time, we can easily recognize the personalities of the performers — the single slightly-harried tuba player compared to the funky sax machines compared to the cocky guitar gods. I could easily see this video as an excerpt of a much longer film where the band has to put on a show to save their community rec center from an evil oil baron. Everyone's slightly awkward, a bit askew and having the time of their lives on the stage.

Director Jim Newberry described to us in an email how he wanted to focus on all the boisterous personalities in the band:

For this video I wanted to keep things simple. The musicians of Mucca Pazza are incredibly vibrant, energetic, and anarchic, and I didn't want to get in their way by using a lot of self-conscious film-making tricks. So we decided on a simple but lovely set with one camera locked down in a wide shot with occasional roving close-ups. I had worked with the band before and seen them perform many times, so I knew I could pretty much let them do their expressive, hilarious, inspiring performance the way they wanted to and it would be fabulous.

One of the things I love about the band is how there are so many of them — over 30 — yet each band member has his or her own distinctive personality; each wearing their own non-uniform uniform. They're definitely a cohesive unit, but each individual's personality shines through. That's what gave me the idea of having shots of them one at a time, either running or walking through the frame, or just standing there.

Mucca Pazza members Meghan Strell and Sharon Lanza talked about planning and designing the video with Newberry:

Our dear friend Jim shot black and white portraits of everyone in the band a few years ago. When we asked him to shoot a video, he proposed making a video portrait. We started out talking about individual portraits and developed the idea to capture the interaction of each section of the band, or section portraits. We shot the whole song all the way through a couple times with each of the seven sections, to provide Jim with a lot of material to sort through in his editing process. We wanted to capture and contrast individual interaction on the section level, and convey the personality of the trombone section vs. the drum section, for example.

We intentionally made the set too small for the whole band, riffing off our experience at many rock clubs where our 30 piece band performs on a 12'x15' stage ... or less. Jim wanted the set to be "beautiful" in a way and inappropriate for a marching band. The quick turn around and collaborative nature of the process are representative of the Chicago arts community that Mucca Pazza is so lucky to be a part of. Chicago is a city of generous and multi-talented artists that get things done.

The band's new album, Safety Fifth, will be out June 12, 2012.

Note: This is a recurring series in which we ask our unimaginably young interns to review classic albums they've never heard before. Until very recently, Jenna Strucko was an intern for NPR Music.

Courtesy of the artist

My musical relationship with Simon & Garfunkel began with an influence that any self-respecting, music-loving twenty-something would now be ashamed to admit: The Garden State soundtrack. From there, my knowledge of Simon & Garfunkel continued to be informed solely by incomplete pop culture encounters with the duo. Even though I've heard "Mrs. Robinson," I've never seen The Graduate in its entirety. "America" breezed right by me in Almost Famous, and I never quite understood why the song surrounding a particularly poignant scene in 500 Days Of Summer was called "Bookends."

But now, my narrow cinematic context of Simon & Garfunkel has been broadened. Listening to Bookends was like reuniting with an old friend I didn't know that I had: only after hearing the album start to finish did I recognize that these songs have been around me all along.

Simon & Garfunkel hit on so many elements of music that I am naturally drawn to — simple instrumentation, thought-provoking lyrics with narrative leanings and arrangements that allow both to shine.