SILVERSUN PICKUPS headlined the big outdoor stage at the WFNX CLAMBAKE this past weekend, and were quite clearly up to the task. Below, we have a bunch more video, plus photos and audio of WFNX's interview with the band.

VIDEO: Silversun Pickups, "Panic Switch"

DOWNLOAD: Ryan Walsh, "Famous Last Words (Faces on Film cover)" [mp3]

DOWNLOAD: Mike Fiore, "Nurses 5 Float Past (Hallelujah the Hills cover)" [mp3]

We couldn't have been more surprised, or delighted, when this ultra-exclusive two-fer landed in our email a couple of days ago: a matched pair in which the respective frontmen of Hallelujah the Hills and Faces on Film, longtime friends, perform solo covers of each others’ songs, perfectly timed to coincide their show together (on a bill with Dear Leader) at the Paradise this Friday.

The good news is that you haven't been inseminated by former Porn Theater Ushers front man Nabo Rawk or his new accomplice, DJ Paul Foley (or maybe you have - who knows?). The bad news is that these two famed dance-and-party happy Boston rap degenerates are dropping a dual effort under the group name Wasted Talent

DOWNLOAD: Age Rings, Rock and Roll Is Dead [mp3]

Used to be, when we wanted to hear an AGE RINGS number, we’d just wheel ourselves over to Will Spitz’s desk and poke him with an uncapped Sharpie until he acquiesced with an a cappella version of the song of our choosing. Last time, it took only three dots.

DOWNLOAD: TAB THE BAND, “HEAVY IDEA” [MP3]

For a rock band, there’s only one real way to channel the spirits of Steppenwolf, Deep Purple, and, well, the Eagles without sounding grossly ironic: have one of your dads be a member of Aerosmith. By this criterion, Duxbury’s finest, TAB the Band, should have double the success in their adoption of the arena-rock mantle: brothers Tony (guitar) and Ben (bass) are offspring of Joe Perry.

Deadly Sins

DOWNLOAD: ASHERS, “DESTITUTION” [MP3]

DOWNLOAD: DEADLY SINS, “GREY SKIES TURN” [MP3]

Not that they’re strangers or anything, but it’s nice to know that there’s now a single degree of separation between Boston’s two biggest punk-rock franchises: members of Dropkick Murphys and the Unseen have fired up two new bands who share former Crash and Burn guitarist Bill Brown.

Mylene: Queen of Pop

This week in the fishwrap, Charles Taylor makes the case for French pop, through the lens of the latest Mrs. Johnny Depp album. Below, longtime Phoenix critic Michael Freedberg, whom we consider our resident expert on the topic, provides his own master-class in variete francaise -- one that is necessarily weighted towards Mylene Farmer, who is the Reed to his Bangs, the Kixx to his Eddy.

Township, "Sandy" (Flophouse Sessions, Feb 2008)

Jen and Andy, the betrothed Somerville duo behind the fantastic Band in Boston Podcast, have recorded many of our favorite local indie bands for their "Flophouse Sessions" -- a series taped live in the pair's living room, on stripped-down gear, and given away free on teh internets.

DOWNLOAD: Mobius Band, Friends Like These [mp3]

Lots of wistful indie bands underwent hipster-mandated retraining in the early naughts and emerged, after a quick stop in laptop voc tech, as certified dealers of . . . wistful, indie-ish compu-pop. Boston (and now Brooklyn’s) Mobius Band were among the least likely applicants for the job, and yet we can’t think of anyone, save perhaps the Postal Service, who do it better.

1. Sure, there's lots of people playing Brazilian shit nowadays. You can get it from people like this, or you can get is straight from the tap. Lemon-Red's new mix is by none other than Bonde Do Role's DJ Gorky. This is the guy who thinks up shit like Alice in Chains as a baile funk song. He does stuff like that for breakfast.

So, how've you been?

We've been trying to work our way out from under the avalanche of site-clogging traffic generated by our blogging bretheren over at Slop Culture, who just had the internet version of a runaway, chart-topping, Beatle-mania-type hit single. A ridiculous little idea they had called "The 100 Unsexiest Men in America" -- a parody of lad-mag "100 sexiest women" features -- became a bona-fide internet meme.

OTD is heading south for the week -- and no, we're not going where everyone else is going. We're off for some R&R and even a little M&M, because as we've said before, OTD is for the children. Don't sleep, though, because Cami and a cadre of Phoenix guest bloggers are gonna keep you up to your eyeballs in exclusives until we return.

Since paper doesn't grow on trees and all, every little thing that we ever write in the fishwrap ends up being shorter than we want it to be. Take, for instance, Will Spitz's interview with Animal Collective's Avey Tare. There just wasn't space to include dude's musings about lazy-assed critics who lump AC in with freak-folk, or for a graf on how he spent his childhood listening to Cats and Wings.