Modest Mouse frontman Isaac Brock uses a massive ear trumpet to really listen.

Wendy Lynch

We got a lot of thoughtful comments and replies from readers this week when we asked whether they really listen to full albums from start to finish. Much of the discussion focused on the ways we listen and what constitutes actually engaging with an entire album in a full-on listening, as opposed to merely having it on.

Most people said they listen to full albums, but many aren't giving them their undivided attention. "Most of the time, myself or my friends listen to full albums while multitasking, like driving or working or cleaning, etc.," Zak Kmak writes. "If not doing anything else is the standard, then I've never listened to whole albums," writes Sean Murphy.

Others took issue with the idea of multitasking. "If you're listening to a whole album while you work at the computer, that shouldn't fully count," Drew Hunter writes. "We're talking sitting there doing next to nothing else (maybe a very light, mindless activity), your whole attention on the music."

Randy Alberts adds that he feels "sad for (and angered by?) those who don't have time to actually get what a musician or band's art is saying. To wit, that's like only having time to look at the center of an artist's new painting while ignoring the corners."

For many, the solution is vinyl. "After 13 years of a disconnected turntable, I have rediscovered vinyl," Karl Lee writes. "I found myself having to reprogram my brain to be able to listen to analog signal again... The ritual of putting on a record. And I make the time to sit through an entire album. Read the lyrics. Listen. It's the best 40 minutes of my day."

The one thing nearly everyone agreed on is a love of full albums, regardless of how they're able to or choose to experience them.

Here at Team All Songs Considered, we're all madly in love with a fully immersive, fully focused listening experience for entire records. To celebrate as much, we're going to have a listening party. In the coming weeks, we'll pick and play an entire record, live online, and you can join us. No talking, no work or housecleaning or driving. Just you and the music.

While we're looking for a good date for the party, tell us what record you'd love to hear us play. Frampton Comes Alive, anyone?

Scottish brothers Mike Sandison and Marcus Eoin — known almost exclusively as Boards of Canada — have had the electronic music world checking record bins, podcasts and flights to Tokyo over the past six weeks for clues about the duo's impending album, Tomorrow's Harvest.

While Tomorrow still can't get here soon enough for fans, Sandison and Eoin have finally toned down the cryptic messaging and simply uploaded a great video to YouTube. It's the album's first single, "Reach for the Dead."

The stunning clip is directed by Neil Krug, a Los Angeles director and photographer who made waves with his Pulp Art Book last year. Before that, however, he actually directed an unofficial video for Boards of Canada's "In a Beautiful Place Out in the Country."

His work on "Reach for the Dead" is equally beautiful, but way more eerie — especially the final 30 seconds.

We get a lot of mail at NPR Music, and amid the booklets of money-saving coupons we use to light kindling in the fireplace is a slew of smart questions about how music fits into our lives — and, this week, tips for obsessive music fans in an age of instant online gratification.

Paul Allen Hunton writes: "I used to pride myself on discovering music first — we all did, didn't we? But in the era of YouTube, Spotify and Pandora, discovering music first and then rubbing it in everyone's faces later isn't what it used to be. What is a music snob/elitist supposed to do in this new era of digital music delivery? Will we ever reign supreme again? From a guy who loved 'Thrift Shop' in August."

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Even music snobs can find some common ground.

Diesel Sweeties

A lot of the fundamentals you describe won't change: We'll never again live in a world where tastes drift slowly and regionally; where a band that's big in Brooklyn will spend years in anonymity outside its own ZIP code absent an alchemic big-budget push from a label. As with any sea change of its magnitude, widespread digital availability has advantages (democratization, ease of discovery and distribution, the disempowerment of closed-minded gatekeepers) and disadvantages (threats to musicians' income, the decline of record stores and other in-person communities, the devaluing of music as a medium meriting ownership).

And, yes, for true music obsessives (snobs, elitists and experts alike), the rewards of in-depth knowledge are more easily duplicated with a Google search. As you note, it's gotten far more difficult to stay months or years ahead of trends, but on the other hand, is that really a bad thing — even for self-styled ahead-of-the-curve know-it-alls? For aspiring tastemakers, especially those who view themselves as evangelists rather than snobs, the good news is that the sheer volume of musical options (and the ease with which we can listen) will always make it possible to stay ahead of people with less free time to do so. If you do your job right, you can still be an early adopter — and, though trends are ephemeral, bragging rights are forever. You did it yourself, just now! You loved Macklemore & Ryan Lewis' "Thrift Shop" months before most of your friends, and nothing stopped you from pointing it out!

Finally, I encourage you to remember that every piece of music on earth is new to someone: New fans are born everyday, many people with perfectly sound tastes steer entirely clear of social media and sites like this one, and no marketing campaign ever reaches anything approaching 100 percent saturation. Be a friendly, approachable, sharing, nonjudgmental resource for your busy and open-minded friends — the more you view "snobbery" as a playfully self-deprecating word for expertise, the better — and you'll be amazed at how easy it is to impress someone.

Got a music-related question you want answered? Leave it in the comments, drop us an email at allsongs@npr.org or tweet @allsongs.

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Author & Punisher styles some serious headgear.

Marilia Maschion/Courtesy of the artist

Remember the slow-moving, ridiculously armed ED-209 in the first RoboCop movie? The poor thing couldn't walk down a stairwell, but boy, could that machine leave a bloody mess. Author & Punisher does much the same, for both the ears and whatever's left of the body.

Mechanical engineer and sculptor Tristan Shone is a master of machines. He's built a robotic entourage — throttles, knobs, rails and all — that responds to MIDI/USB controllers and makes for-real industrial doom metal. It's a thrill to watch this musical cyborg at work, as he literally fires on all cylinders and pulls levers like an executioner. But listening through headphones, the experience is just as physical and grinding. Author & Punisher's fifth album, Women & Children, adds a few traditional instruments, but you won't hear any of that in the crushing "Melee."

More than any other track thus far, "Melee" makes the case that Author & Punisher is overdue for a sidelong remix. Shone has never been shy with dub, but the traces of dark, grimy dubstep here remind me of a syrupy Milanese. Bloated, muddled beats hang in the air like zeppelins until Shone's steel-toed boot of a chorus comes crashing down. The structure is something like Nine Inch Nails' strongest songs: the build, the climax, then the chaos. The last minute of "Melee" sounds like a death march led by a million-strong war cry. The machines have taken over. You have 20 seconds to comply.

Women & Children comes out June 11 on Seventh Rule. Author & Punisher will go on tour with Down's Phil Anselmo in August.

Clockwise from upper left: Mount Kimbie, Laura Mvula, Jagwar Ma, Leah Siegel of Firehorse

Courtesy of the artists

This week on All Songs Considered, hosts Bob Boilen and Robin Hilton offer up a musical sampler of many styles from around the world. There's an upbeat, atmospheric cut with amazing harmonies from the magnetic Laura Mvula, a voice you'll hear a lot more of this year; Firehorse's blazing combination of neo-soul, hip-hop and electronic beats; a heavy, hypnotic track from New York duo Small Multiples and some transfixing psych-pop from Jagwar Ma.

NPR Music's electronic music gurus Otis Hart and Sami Yenigun also stop by to share their picks for some of the best new songs with beats: Otis has a danceable cut by London duo Mount Kimbie and Sami Yenigun brings some instrumental ear candy from Archie Pelago.

I sure do love albums. We all do. But it's gotten to be pretty impossible to give them the time they deserve. For starters, we can hear pretty much any song we want, by any artist, in any order, any time we want, anywhere. The whole world is one gigantic mix tape, now. And even if you do play an album all the way through, chances are it's mostly background noise, right? Add to that the fact that our attention spans are the most fragmented than at any other time in histo...

OMG! Have you seen this puppycam video feed?? I'm totally tweeting it.

Anyway, be honest. When was the last time you really listened to an album all the way through, from start to finish, without interruption? The keywords here are "without interruption." I listen to entire records all the time, but almost never manage to make it through one without stopping multiple times.

It's so hard that I can actually remember the last time I managed to pull it off without so much as a fly buzzing by to distract me. It was the fall of 2005, and the album was Iron And Wine's Our Endless Numbered Days (brilliant record, by the way). It was my evening's entertainment. This never happens anymore for me.

How about you? When (if ever) was the last time you really listened to an album all the way through, giving it the same rapt attention you would to, say, a new Mad Men episode or a movie?

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Brooklyn producer Laurel Halo.

Georg Gatas/Courtesy of the artist

Carnal implications abound on "Sex Mission," a new techno track from the Brooklyn-based musician Laurel Halo. There's the not-exactly-subtle title, and the EP from whence it comes is called Behind the Green Door (out May 21), a nod to a ground-breaking porn flick from the 1970s. The music itself throbs like an accelerating heartbeat. A looped grainy sample — "be still" — conjures up an imaginary lover who's about to show you a really good time.

But, like Lucille Bluth, "Sex Mission" gets off by withholding. Halo keeps things at a tantalizing simmer as the song chugs along, never quite reaching boiling temperatures. It's as tasteful as the title is crass.

As explicit as the song's title sounds, Laurel Halo's description of her song is nearly abstract. "The track is about driving energy and elevation via dynamic topographies," Halo told me over email. "Movement and introspection are paramount."

The reminder to dance is a good one, because "Sex Mission" has the power to stop you in your tracks.

We get a lot of mail at NPR Music, and amid the CDs in which the Vitamin String Quartet plays the songs of 30 Seconds to Mars is a slew of smart questions about how music fits into our lives — and, this week, the dos and don'ts of covering other artists' music.

Melissa Claire writes: "What defines a good cover song? And, more importantly, a bad one?"

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It is some sort of crime against humanity that The New Pornographers' members have never gathered to record a cover of Enrique Iglesias' "Escape."

Courtesy of the artist

To me, good cover songs are about necessity — something about the source material that needed to be revisited, revised, redone or otherwise rescued from the original production. You don't have to improve on it, exactly, but if the original is perfect the way it is, then there's not a whole lot of sense in either reinventing it or re-creating it note for note. For musicians, it must be great to pay tribute to a beloved song, and nice for your fans to hear how your favorite music would sound if you sang it, but the appeal is naturally limited by the presence of a superior original. There's a reason certain singer-songwriters — Tom Waits, Daniel Johnston, Vic Chesnutt — get covered a lot: They've written a ton of incredible songs, and their own recordings are rightfully celebrated, but their own voices are polarizing in ways that, for some, can disguise the genius of the songcraft.

As for what makes a bad cover song, it's totally fair to pick on milquetoast arrangements that anesthetize an original's heart, soul and guts. But I'm even wearier of sarcastic piss-take goof-offs — punk covers of "Feelings" and whatnot — that are all about positioning bands as cooler than the material they've deigned to mock. Maybe it's my own exhaustion with eye-rolling as a form of expression, but if a song already evokes knee-jerk negativity, then why not challenge that instead of merely reinforcing it?

Great covers abound, and my favorite of the moment has Shearwater and Sharon Van Etten tackling Stevie Nicks and Tom Petty's 1981 smash "Stop Draggin' My Heart Around." Van Etten and Shearwater's Jonathan Meiburg clearly remain faithful to the original — they find the exact midpoint between their own voices and the singers they're covering — but they still sound like themselves in the process.

Part of the fun of cover songs lies in dreaming up pairings that haven't yet been recorded. About a decade ago, when I was editing The A.V. Club, I tried and ultimately failed to launch an album of covers called The Reclamation Project, in which great artists would take lightly regarded pop songs and make them great. The concept was based on that idea of necessity, but also a (since more widely accepted) belief that it's silly to look down on pop music; that production and interpretation are often all that separate pop from more critically appreciated genres.

Two of my dream covers — songs I'd planned to commission using a budget that never materialized — have existed in my brain, fully formed, for roughly 10 years. For starters, it is some sort of crime against humanity that The New Pornographers' members have never gathered to record a cover of Enrique Iglesias' "Escape," with Neko Case singing the hook: "You can run, you can hide, but you can't escape my love." The whole song has a skeleton made of pure, unalloyed power-pop sunshine, and The New Pornographers would prove it.

The other is a version of "The Power of Love (I Am Your Lady)," popularized by Celine Dion but also recorded by Air Supply and many others, performed as an acoustic dirge by Iron and Wine's Sam Beam. Beam has given this treatment to other songs, including The Postal Service's "Such Great Heights" and The Flaming Lips' "Waitin' for a Superman," but what kills me about "The Power of Love" — as it's always been performed — is that it's not a song about the fine art of bellowing a chorus. There's a gorgeous melody in there, and in the lyric is an intimate, vulnerable expression of devotion that borders on desperation. It's a song versatile enough for subtlety, and I've never heard it receive that treatment.

Got a music-related question you want answered? Leave it in the comments, drop us an email at allsongs@npr.org or tweet @allsongs.

Vermont folksinger Sam Amidon says he intentionally borrowed lines from older songs for his new mountain ballad "As I Roved Out." The result is an erratic narrative, played out brilliantly in an absorbing (and comical) new video about a

"What is it, banjo?" Amidon asks in the video, just as the seemingly possessed instrument jerks the singer around, lurching through the forest. "You have the sense that you are actually listening to a guy wandering around a bit drunk," Amidon writes via email. "[He's] taking sips from his bottle, occasionally bursting out into snatches of different songs that he knows — whatever pops into his head to suit his boisterously heartbroken mood."

The singer's random thoughts, director John Hardwick writes, create the surreal world he and other characters in the video inhabit. "I like to think that Sam, [drummer] Chris Vatalaro and the lovely bearded siren who dances nimbly between the bushes all exist in different eras," he writes. "And that they're only summoned together for a moment by the beautiful song. Like moths or ghosts who share a brief flicker of light."

The video ends with a spectacular aerial view as the camera rises into the treetops. Hardwick says they relied on "witchcraft" to get the otherwise impossible shot. "[We] researched the costs of a crane, then concluded that spells were cheaper."

"As I Roved Out" appears on Sam Amidon's new album, Bright Sunny South.

Do you have a favorite record label? These days, it can be hard to tell. Truthfully, I barely know what artists record for which label in the digital age. I love the new William Tyler guitar record, the new Baths album and Sonny and the Sunsets, but ask me to name the label ... and I'm blank. That information never comes up on my computer when I play a song on iTunes — or my phone — or on SoundCloud or Spotify. Back in the analog days, I'd put on a record and seeing those labels spinning at 33 1/3 rpm would forever seal an association between artists and their labels for me: The Beatles on Capitol, Pink Floyd on Harvest, Aretha Franklin on Atlantic.

It's unfortunate, too, because it used to be one of the great ways to discover music. Record labels telegraphed the sort of music you'd hear. They had a philosophy, an aesthetic and a standard (and still do, of course). As someone who bought a lot of records, I could walk into a store, see an unknown band (such as Triumvirat) on the Harvest label, buy it and know that it was probably going to be a good prog-rock group, most likely from Europe. (It turned out I loved that first Triumvirat record, by the way.)

All that said, despite the realities of the digital age, music geeks will be music geeks and there are plenty of you loyal to plenty of labels. If you've got a favorite, how did you find it and how do you keep up with its releases?

Or maybe you're not even aware of record labels. If you don't know what label your favorite bands record for, how do you find new music? Who do you trust and what is it about them that you've come to trust?

Exitmusic's Passages was one of 2012's darkest and most arresting ambient rock albums. Now, the band returns with an equally transfixing new video for one of the album's standout tracks, "White Noise."

Credit: Courtesy of the artist

The Gothic, gorgeously shot video shows Exitmusic's Aleksa Palladino and Devon Church as they slowly drift and turn in a dark pool of water. "'White Noise' is such a visual song," Palladino and Church write via email. "Most of the lyrics are images, like a mental flood of disjointed experiences that you are trying to stay afloat in long enough to spot land."

Director Monica Perez says the video and song are, in part, about a struggle with inner demons. "The idea behind the video was to portray a fractured self," she writes. "Two sides of a person, each struggling to dominate the other. Rage, fear, despair, defeat [and] solace were emotions I was interested in exploring. I wanted to capture these dark places that are sometimes hard to emerge from, but I also wanted them to look beautiful, considered and filmic."

Clockwise from upper left: Baths, Daughter, Sam Phillips, The Front Bottoms, SQURL

Courtesy of the artists

We kick this week's show off with a lot of noise from filmmaker (and past guest DJ on All Songs Considered) Jim Jarmusch and his gloriously gritty side project called SQÜRL. The band, with Carter Logan and producer/engineer Shane Stoneback, originally formed to score the 2009 Jarmusch film The Limits Of Control. SQÜRL has a new, self-titled EP coming out this month and we've got a preview cut called "Pink Dust."

Also on the show: Remarkable new electronic music from Baths; the atmospheric English pop trio Daughter; beautiful, ramshackle pop from singer Sam Phillips; power punk and a healthy dose of humor from The Front Bottoms and the melodic and transfixing rock of Lemuria.

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Mbalax band Jeri-Jeri — led by Bakane Seck (he's wearing the white shirt and gold necklace) — with German producer Mark Ernestus.

Ndagga

One of my favorite songs last year was a collaboration between a Sengalese drum collective and a German techno producer. The producer, Mark Ernestus traveled to the West African country to work with Jeri-Jeri, a group that plays a popular dance music called mbalax. The result was "Mbeuguel Dafa Nekh," a trance-inducing maelstrom of percussion with soaring vocals, and it ultimately ended up on NPR Music's 100 Favorite Songs of 2012.

I was thrilled to learn earlier this year that Jeri-Jeri and Ernestus didn't stop with one song. There's a full-length mbalax album due out June 11 called 800% Ndagga, as well as a dubbed-out "versions" collection of the same songs.

Credit: Ndagga

The first single from the album is "Gawlo," which features famous Senegalese singer Baaba Maal. The accompanying video focuses on Maal's vocals and Jeri-Jeri's dancers, Fatou Mboup and Sidy Diop, and was shot by Ernestus himself in Maal's backyard. There are no images of sabars — the indigenous drum at the core of mbalax — so I asked Ernestus about how he chose to shoot the video:

"With 'no budget' being the only method, you look at the circumstances and come up with something spontaneously. We drove to Baaba Maal's house with our dancers, a basic HD camcorder and a ghetto blaster, then it was all shot outside in the yard, in one or two hours."

I asked Jeri-Jeri leader Bakane Seck if his band's sound has changed at all since he began working with Ernestus:

"This project of course comes from Mbalax and Sabar, but we have something new, a lot of changes and ideas come from Mark. In the beginning he just came to Dakar every few months to find the way how to go about this project. Then in addition to Jeri-Jeri, which is my family — a very big family of sabar drummers — many big musicians are playing in these recordings, but everybody was happy to work with Mark because he is bringing something very new that nobody has done here."

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Kyle "KMFH" Hall.

Jeremy Deputat/Courtesy of the artist

Sometimes all you need for a banging dance track is an unstoppable rhythm and a nuanced hook. Tweak the hook every couple bars, don't mess with the beat too much, and you've got a potential stomper on your hands.

That's the recipe on Kyle Hall's juggernaut "Dr. Crunch," the largest song on his new full-length, The Boat Party. (You might remember Hall from a recent All Songs Considered electronic music podcast when we premiered another song from the album, "Measure 2 Measure.") Hall, operating here under his KMFH moniker, is one of Detroit's most exciting young producers; his tracks incorporate techno, funk and hip-hop, but usually with a rough DIY edge, so there are always some teeth to whatever he releases.

I asked Hall about how he made "Dr. Crunch," and he offered a detailed response that gearheads will appreciate, but even more interesting than the make and model was the previous owner of the mixing board he used:

""Dr. Crunch" was created with two pieces of gear: The Alesis SR-16 and Nord Lead. I had the SR16 (which is a really basic digital drum machine) from the early '90s doing a few drums, but at the same time having it send MIDI note values to my Nord Lead. From there, I would just tweak some of the parameters on the Nord while my sequence was running. As far as signal path goes, I was overdriving the sounds through a cheap old analog 12-channel board and recorded it straight to a Maxell cassette tape. I really like the nice harmonic saturation you're able to achieve by slamming machines to tape. After I made the track, I found out the board used to belong to Carl Craig and he told me that he did a lot of his 69 project on that board. It's really funny sometimes how gear travels between producers here in Detroit, even amongst different generations! That board probably has about 15 years on me."

The Boat Party is out May 13 on Wild Oats.

We get a lot of mail at NPR Music, and amid the ironic promotional cassingles is a slew of smart questions about how music fits into our lives — and, this week, how a regretful fan of vinyl records can re-create her discarded collection.

Kirsten Elbourne Mathieson writes: "I'm big-time regretting getting rid of all of my record albums years ago. Any advice for someone starting from scratch with vinyl after all these years? What albums must be heard on vinyl rather than CD/digital?"

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For fans of vinyl records who regret discarding their collections, it's not too hard to start over.

iStockphoto.com

First off, I feel terrible for you, because sometimes the hardest losses to overcome are the ones we've imposed on ourselves. Fortunately, your situation is largely reversible, though I've got a fairly overwhelming batch of follow-up questions to get us started.

How big was your collection? What made you decide to get rid of it in the first place? Did you replace the music with CDs or digital files, or did it drop out of your life altogether? What is it about vinyl that you miss — the artwork, the warmth of the sound, the smell of the records in your basement, the cachet of the medium? Are there specific albums you miss playing on a turntable, or do you simply miss thumbing through row upon row of LPs?

It's an overwhelming bundle of queries, so let's stick to the one most likely to produce an illuminating answer: What do you regret about your decision to dump your vinyl?

If there are specific records you miss playing on a turntable, start by replacing those — dig through flea-market bins and thrift stores and garage sales and eBay or Craigslist postings to track them down. My sister managed to acquire virtually every punk and new-wave record she'd loved in the '80s in bulk at a single estate sale; be patient and resourceful, and you can cobble together a formidable vinyl collection without too much expense. (Newly pressed records, on the other hand, will cost you.) Remember that you're not the only one who's given up on the format and dumped a collection unceremoniously; befriend your neighborhood trash collector, and you can probably even get records for free.

When it comes to identifying albums you absolutely must hear on LP — music that just doesn't sound the same in digital form — I'd encourage you to look to your own past. What records have you loved hearing in your basement, or rec room, or most private personal space? Which records did you play in your bedroom as a kid? What albums speak to you personally and trigger emotions?

To me, the chief strength of vinyl is the flip side of its chief weakness: You can't take it with you. Every other music format this side of piano rolls can be heard portably while you do other things, but a turntable holds you captive — records so often sound like home in large part because that's the only place you're likely to listen to them. Start with the coziest music you can conjure, and comfort will follow.

Got a music-related question you want answered? Leave it in the comments, drop us an email at allsongs@npr.org or tweet @allsongs.