Today's Pick

Life is a technicolor fantasy, at least it is in Coldplay's "Mylo Xyloto" world. The platinum-selling band continues their latest CD's neon-hued theme in the newest video from the album, "Charlie Brown." In the just-released visuals, the lead singer Chris Martin and his British alternative rock band find themselves in the middle of a pulsating, colorful whirl of a club scene, performing for the masses as the gyrate along with the music.
According to Martin, this latest track holds a special place in his heart, "which was the centrepiece of this other record we started first." The song takes its name from the fact that it originally included lyrics inspired by the comic strip "Peanuts," whose protagonist was a young boy named Charlie Brown. It was the first song recorded during sessions for the band's then-upcoming fifth studio album, with the intention of being included on what later became "Mylo Xyloto."
The standout from their headline summer slots sounds even more monumental on record, "Charlie Brown" is one of the best things Coldplay have done. Jonny Buckland's hypnotic guitar lines lead the way, the band channeling The Joshua Tree-era, the heady holler-alongs of Arcade Fire and a teeny bit of Sigur Rós stargazing as the song launches into its adrenaline-veined climax. Whilst the music is wonderfully overblown, Martin keeps the vocals cool and calculated, singing of "taking the car downtown to where the lost boys meet," which might be about nipping to Spar on Hampstead High St, but probably isn't.
"Mylo Xyloto" is a concept album about two characters: Mylo and Xylotomy in a scary, oppressive world. The two protagonists fall in love and this song finds them running away together. Directed by Mat Whitecross and Mark Rowbotham. the newly debuted visual sensation from the album features a young man sauntering through London before meeting up with his girlfriend, and utilized footage from a collection of concerts they had performed the song amongst the crowd at throughout the band's 2011 Summer Festival Tour, after stealing a car and driving downtown to a black-light party.

Featured alongside Nicki Minaj on Madonna's "Give Me All Your Luvin'," which you may watched the trio Sunday at the Super Bowl halftime show, M.I.A., aka Maya Arulpragasam, has also premiered the new music video via Noisey for her next single "Bad Girls," a remix of the "Vicki Leekx" track, and will be the first single from the Sri Lankan-British artist's upcoming fourth studio album, expected to be released this summer.
The midtempo worldbeat rap ballad, "Bad Girls" incorporates Middle Eastern and Western musical influences and instrumentation. M.I.A. stepped up to the role of hustleress in the song. The 36-year-old rapper brings fast cars and "bad girls" to the Moroccan dessert for the accompanying new video, which features Arabic street racers, ghost riders, desert bonfires, and women in blinged-out burkas touting semi-automatics. The flashy video lives up to song's provocative lyrics, which include the classic, "Live fast, die young, bad girls do it well."
Shot in Ouarzazate, Morocco, home to one of the world's largest film studios over four days and behind by director Romain Gavras. Set to M.I.A.'s Punjabi-laced chill-banger, "Bad Girls" is a lady gangsta fantasy but one that plays off very real ingredients from life in the Middle East. There's crumbled architecture, sustained over years of attack; smouldering oil tankards; young men in kaffiyeh, standing around dangerously bored; mysterious women covered from head to toe, with only their kohl-lined eyes flashing out.
"It was dope to have so many people from so many different backgrounds speaking so many different languages come together to create something that we believed in," says M.I.A. about the video. The video is meant to evoke a Persian Gulf landscape – dusty, baked, semi-apocalpytic and in the hands of M.I.A. and Gavras, utterly hard-core. It's an interesting take on culture, blending lyrics about having sex in cars with Americanized imagery of Moroccan culture, but it's definitely not for the easily offended. The action-packed video is without a doubt a visual stampede of insane stunts and strange dance moves.

Are you ready for Super Bowl, the most-watched TV event of the year today? Madonna isn't going to let her halftime show be the only moment for her to get some Super Bowl-related attention with a new music video for her new single "Give Me All Your Luvin'," the lead singer appears on the Queen of pop's upcoming album, "MDNA," the title being the consonants in Madonna's name. The song features guest vocals from Madonna's fellow New Yorker, the rapper Nicki Minaj, and English singer M.I.A.
The effervescent, dance-and-clap-inducing track is an '80s-inspired electro-thumper complete with a cheerleader chant of 'L-U-V Madonna!' It's peppy, catchy, somewhat infectious and utterly boring to the point of tears. Lyrically the song finds Madonna warning a potential lover that he needs to be straight with her as she's "a different kind of girl" who won't be mucked around. In keeping with the current Marilyn Monroe vogue, the three pop stars also don blonde wigs during the electro dance-pop song's hip-hop breakdown section, all three singers fit the bill as strong women who know what they want.
Minaj certainly does her best, her typically frantic rap an exercise in squeezing as many words into a 10-second space as possible, while M.I.A.'s more laconic drawl loses momentum. Madonna has stated she wanted to work with M.I.A. and Minaj on the track as they were both strong, independent girls with a unique voice, and that she liked their music and what they represented. The "Material Girl" songstress paid tribute to the stars, saying "They're not conventional pop stars and I really admire them both. I love both of them actually."
Directed by MegaForce, the video has football and cheerleader theme, inspired by her upcoming halftime performance at Super Bowl XLVI. In this goofy and fun clip, the 53-year-old pop legend tosses aside the accouterments of motherhood and morphs into the late-1980s/early-1990s version of herself, with white lingerie and short blonde hair. The rest of the video is lighter in tone and slightly more whimsical than is usual for Madonna, with Minaj and M.I.A. cheering her on with cheerleader pompoms.

Adam Lambert is the only person in the new video for his sweeping new single "Better Than I Know Myself," but the striking clip adds a level of context to the song, shifting its focus from an external relationship to an internal one. The new track is the first cut off American Idol runner-up's upcoming sophomore album, "Trespassing," which he said takes his fans on, "an exciting journey through the past two years" of his life.
The moody midtempo and electro-pop piano ballad finds Lambert belting vocals about a lover who knows him better than he knows himself. Lyrically, the song revolves around romantic regret, and the 30-year-old explained the song's meaning is, "about the relationship you have with yourself, between your dark and light side. It's about duality; it's about that balance and finding it and struggling to maintain it and what it means. No matter what kind of relationship, everybody can relate to that moment."
Lambert is seen in two completely different sides to the performer's personality in the Ray Kay-directed new clip. one warm and homey, the other cold and sinister as he battles his inner-demons and wins. Evil Lambert, the glammed-up, liquor-chugging, dark version is on one side, while tea-drinking, meditating Adam is on the other. While Lambert's blue-eyed good side has 100 percent oxygen pumped into the room, the bad side douses the floor in alcohol and lights a match. And in the final shot, it appears that his dual personae have merged.
Lambert's soaring and impeccable vocals on this melodically challenging song, and his more stripped down and sophisticated look. MTV called the song "one of Adam's biggest, boldest and most beautiful tracks to date." The clip is highly stylized and gothy noir; The cinematography is lush and vibrant, nicely capturing the juxtaposition between the light and dark sides of his personality and that's exactly what Lambert's said "Trespassing" is all about, so the video serves as an ideal introduction for what fans should expect on the album.

Canadian pop-punkers Marianas Trench debuted the explosive video via MTV for their second single "Fallout," which is also the first since the release of their third studio album "Ever After" in last November. The foursome's latest video, "Fallout," explores the treacherous minefield that is a crumbling relationship.
Written by lead singer Josh Ramsay himself and then finessed into an accompanying booklet, "Ever After" are going to tell fans one long, continuous story of a man who finds himself trapped in a fairytale feud with an evil heart-stealing queen in a continuous flow of music that has every song cycling into the next without a break. It's an actual physical experience; a warm throwback to the album era when your music was more than a bunch of orphaned songs sitting on an endless iPod playlist.
"All the songs live on their own as songs, but they also serve the purpose of telling the story throughout the record," Ramsay explains. Much like the album, the band plans to make all the videos line up to make sense continuously, Ramsay said in an interview for MTV's Push. "This one's a little more abstract. It's not quite as literally right out of the story as the first one is, but there's definitely still elements of it for sure. I think later when people see all the videos from the
record, it's going to be cool and all line up."
The video follows Ramsay as he dodges explosions and memories set off by a recent breakup. He was on-and-off with his girlfriend in their last video "Haven't Had Enough," and "Fallout" picks up where they left off - permanently off. It opens with Ramsay and his girlfriend under a cloudy sky in a vacant field as he begs her to try to make their relationship work - cut to flashback sequences of the better times and the not-so-better times. The Vancouver emo punks plays through the wreckage as they narrate the breakup. At the end of the video, she hands Ramsay a bogus key necklace. Might that be a key element in the band's next video?

The Script have released a music video for "If You Ever Come Back." This heart-rending tale of a love that once was, is the third single from Irish alternative rock band's recent No.1 sophomore album, "Science & Faith," which has an addictive blend of hip-hop rhythms, flowing melodies, sparkling hooks and poignant, story-spinning lyrics, with the lead singer Danny's mellifluous soulful vocals riding high over huge, anthemic choruses.
Suffering the aftermath of a bad breakup, your lover just break it off with you, and you can't seem to let go? This song is for you! "If You Ever Come Back," hints always leaving the door open for the possible return of a loved one. It's all about asking forgiveness and wanting another chance and just simply starting over. Once again beautiful lyrics, and great Song. This follow-up to the successful leading track "Nothing," will surely be another chart-stormer.
The pop rock song finds its protagonist retaining a secret hope that his lost love will return. In an interview with iVillage UK, Script member Glen Power was asked if they are a band of romantics. He replied: "The song's also reflective of us on the road, away from home and our families. But I do think creative people, in general, are romantic by nature." The Dublin trio impress once again with this heart-rending tale of love and loss, all the while showing that their hearts are as big as their choruses. Subtle hip hop inflections lend the lovelorn track a contemporary edge.
In the video, we watch the Irish outfit perform inside a circle of folding chairs representative of an alcoholics anonymous meeting or the like. This is intercut with the story of a woman being trapped in a world she can’t leave, but a loving stranger on the subway decides to step in and take her to a meeting to get help. The song is so touching on its own, and the accompanying video definitely does the lyrics justice.

Taking a pile of machinery and building the rap superstar, David Guetta flips Nicki Minaj's switch and literally turns her on in the pair's new video for a steampunk-inspired affair "Turn Me On," the fifth single from French disc jockey's fifth studio album "Nothing but the Beat." and the song will be also featured on Trinidadian raptress's upcoming sophomore CD, "Pink Friday: Roman Reloaded."
The uptempo club song, with heavy beats features Minaj singing the chorus with her own (maybe slightly auto-tuned) pipes. Guetta told UK newspaper The Sun: "People don't really know her as a singer and she's killing it on that track. People know her for her crazy rapping but that shows what she can do as a singer. Sometimes I meet people by accident or they call me up but with Minaj it was me chasing her. For a year I wanted to work with her and she was hard to reach. But the moment we got into the studio and had the music it was great."
It's cool that Guetta is going for a little bit of a different sound, but different for him sounds like what everybody else is doing in the dance music world. Still, having Minaj sing makes the tune worthwhile, even if “sing” must be used in quotes because of all the voice-processing. The best results come when Guetta mercilessly rips artists from their comfort zone - take Minaj in songbird mode on "Turn Me On," which showcases a suspiciously melodic performance by the calmer side of Harajuku Barbie, with massive hooks that somehow let her make the transition from freak to diva.
Guetta plays a mad scientist creating his very own Minaj from scrap parts in the Sanji-directed ‘Frankenstein’ feel promo, which opens on Guetta trying out some early cosmetic-surgery tacticsin an old-school lab, putting the final touches on his Minaj doll plans, and unleashes it onto the world as she slowly transforms into the very human-looking Minaj. The clip ends with Minaj continuing her journey through town, as other female dolls make their escape chasing after Minaj.