Just for giggles, here's a little sort of post-punk cover of Miike Snow's "Animal". I was mainly just playing around with the notion of changing it from a downbeat/dub track to a straight-up rock track. The results are kind of cool, I think.

If you're curious, here's the original acoustic demo of "Scatterlings + Refugees" I recorded in my parents' living room one night. You can see how the song evolved from this point, and you might just dig it anyway.

Every so often, we like to record a random cover and put it out into the world. This time, we're running a little contest on our Facebook page -- the first person to post the name of the original artist and title of the song will receive a free copy of our album Ghosts In A Burning City...or, if you've already bought that, a free copy of our upcoming EP Indie Rock Is Easy.

So download the song for free, head over to our Facebook page, and shout it out if you know it. Good luck!

So we're going to be releasing a new EP fairly soon (think several weeks rather than several months) entitled Indie Rock Is Easy. This is because indie rock is, in fact, easy.

All of the groundwork for indie rock was laid by like six bands between 1985-1995. Everything else is just variations on a theme. That doesn't mean nobody's putting out amazing work, but there's not a damned bit of it that's particularly groundbreaking or exciting.

So we thought we'd throw our hat into the ring and put out an EP of straight-up indie rock. And it starts with a song called "At Least Sometimes", which you can download for free right here.

Musically, I think it's somewhere between Airborne Toxic Event, Neon Bible-era Arcade Fire, and the Jesus & Mary Chain. But you decide. We hope you enjoy it, and it whets your appetite for the EP, which will appear Real Soon Now.

We're going to be making a video for "Scatterlings + Refugees", and we want you to be in it!

If you've listened to the song (you have listened to the song, right?) you'll know that it's about nomads, people who travel the world in search of...well, whatever. What we want to do is to make a video of people all around the world lip-synching to the song, preferably in a place that's representative of where you live. (For example, if you live in NYC, film yourself on your roof with Manhattan as a backdrop. That sort of thing.)

We want to use the song to show off this big, beautiful blue ball we live on. But we need your help to do it.

Here's how this works: on February 1st, use your camcorder, webcam, smartphone or Flip to film yourself lip-synching to "Scatterlings + Refugees". (You don't have to buy the album -- you can play the song back from the album player on the media page.) You can do the whole song or just a part of it, your choice. The video doesn't have to be broadcast quality, but we'd like it to be at least 640 x 480. Then save/convert the video to MPEG/MP4 format -- you can do this very easily using QuickTime or a similar video tool.

When you're done, send us the video as an attachment to video (at) redstatesoundsystem (dot) com along with your name and homepage/Facebook page/MySpace page.If you haven't bought the album yet, mention that and we'll send you a free copy if we use your footage!

We'll then edit the video together from these clips and release it here and on YouTube, along with a list of contributors and links to their sites.

We think this is a really cool idea (if not an entirely original one) and we really hope you'll be willing to help out!

So think about where and what you'd like to do in your video...and let a thousand flowers bloom.

The act of taking things into one's own hands may be the present and future of so much music-making, and yet "DIY" still seems a limp term for what Red State Soundsystem principle Joshua Ellis has recently taken on. For his late-2009-released full-length, Ghosts in a Burning City, the musician/writer/designer (and former CityLife contributor) has tackled the tasks of composing, lyric-writing, playing, recording, producing, mixing, mastering, graphic designing, marketing, promoting, distributing and accounting in more or less that order. A cash-saving strategy? Absolutely, but even if the DIY-extreme approach weren't cutting his outsourcing costs, he still wouldn't have it any other way.