When Soundboard first heard the insidious, summery jingle advertising Subway’s new (and recession-friendly!) deal for $5 foot-long subs, we had no choice but to admire its weird pop craftsmanship and go buy a bunch of sandwiches. The weird, muted vocal harmonies, that unexpected Beatles-y shift to a minor modality in the verse; seriously, if Earlimart wrote a similar song about foot-longs as a tribute to Bingo, the mayor of Silver Lake, it’d be the smash single of May. But when we discovered that there is an extended dance remix available for download right now, we were forced to ask some uncomfortable questions about pop music: Are the sandwich-centric lyrics the only thing preventing this from being boilerplate respectable blog-house? Who out there is currently on the fence about Subway sandwiches, but upon hearing this dance remix, will be convinced of their need for a Veggie Delight on honey oat bread? Am I that person? Are commercial jingles the ultimate expression of pop utilitarian bent, or its most insipid? In an age where the sellout stigmas have lost their fangs and even radical leftist indie acts gladly license tunes to Nike, what will become of the professional jingle auteur? Did I really just devote 182 words to blogging about a sandwich-promoting dance remix? Either way, Happy Gilmore is stoked right now.

– August Brown

The Echo can seem like a smarmy place, host to an implausible number of meaningless hookups, unfriendly elevator eyes and worst of all, bands that pass off little that’s genuine and true. But that’s on a bad night.

On a good night, someone like Thao Nguyen, 23, blows in, with her black hair, laidback strumming and a set of charmingly downplayed lyrics that seem lived in, cozy. Don’t miss her opening for Xiu Xiu tonight at the Echo. Tonight will be a good night, a showcase for her mellow, absorbing Kill Rock Stars debut, “We Brave Bee Stings and All.”

I talked with Nguyen last week as she was tucked into a van in the middle of Texas with her band, The Get Down Stay Down.

–Margaret Wappler

So you’re in a van somewhere outside El Paso. Do you enjoy touring?

It’s so fascinating, such an unnatural lifestyle. It can be amazing and it can be awful. At any point, either good or bad, you say to yourself, “I can’t believe this is my life.” You harness it in a good way… when it’s good, it’s the best thing you could think to do. When you’re with a really warm crowd, who know all the lyrics to your songs, it’s totally worth it.

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The local noise-freak quartet HEALTH is one of L.A.’s most volatile and virtuosic live acts, but almost to a fault. They’re so busy sending every song in a thousand different directions (nearly all of which are interesting) that as soon as you hear a sound you like, it’s already over. But beneath all those whiplash twists and turns, there’s a sense of rhythm and haunting repetition that suggests they’d be a great dance band if they’d just sit still for a few minutes.

Turns out, HEALTH thought so too. “HEALTH//DISCO,” out in May,  is a compilation of the many (and pretty ace) remixes of cuts from their self-titled album that have been floating around antagonistic dance-punk circles for a few months. We’re particularly fond of the Missy Elliot-evoking Pictureplane’s remix of “Lost Time” and the NOSAJ THING edit of “Tabloid Sores” that sounds like a sebastiAn track made entirely with a Galaga machine. This is the rare remix album that holds up with (and in many places, surpasses) the original article.

– August Brown

Photo courtesy Fanatic Promotions

You’d be hard-pressed to find anyone who begrudges Death Cab for Cutie their successful pirouette from scruffy indie-pop dudes to platinum-selling major-label rock band with 2005’s “Plans.” They did their time in the indie trenches, buffed up their pop hooks on later albums for Barsuk, took a swing at the majors and somehow made it work when contemporaries the Decemberists sort of flailed as a mainstream rock act (which makes sense, as they’re pretty much Iron Butterfly as fronted by an adenoidal Dave Eggers at this point). Frontman Ben Gibbard is kind of a charisma vacuum, but the band does lots of tricky little things right: unexpectedly melodic bass lines, open spaces between the prickly guitars and a deft touch of atmosphere from producer-guitarist Chris Walla (whose neither-here-nor-there solo album proved he really is the band’s Lindsey Buckingham).

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Last week, Jack White threw down a glove and ushered the music industry onto what duelers call the field of honor. A press release announced that “Consolers of the Lonely,” the new release from the Raconteurs, White’s band with songwriting pal Brendan Benson, would be issued in all formats today.

The quick turnaround was designed “to get this record to fans, the press, radio, etc., all at the EXACT SAME TIME so that no one has an upper hand on anyone else regarding its availability, reception or perception.”

“The Raconteurs would rather this release not be defined by its first weeks sales, pre-release promotion, or by someone defining it FOR YOU before you get to hear it,” the statement continued.

Always a control freak, White seems to view music culture’s current anarchistic drift as both a bane and an opportunity. His enemy, the statement suggests, is anyone who engages in hype: bloggers, radio programmers, directors of Apple commercials, the publicists supposedly at his service and, of course, critics. He can’t stop every leak — “Consolers” was briefly available through iTunes on Friday, and Indie 103.1 played at least one cut Monday —  but he can try to throw the machine.

Some writers (most eloquently, Jason Gross at PopMatters.com) have wondered if good criticism will get lost in the dismantling process. But what if players in the game of promoting and contextualizing music took White at his word? What if critics got off the release-date train and imagined new ways of approaching recorded music?

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There’s a list of usual suspects when it comes to scalping obnoxiously priced concert tickets: Hannah Montana. Radiohead. U2. Vampire Weekend?! Add the Lacoste-loving hipsters to the roster: tickets for the New York act’s sold-out headlining gig at the El Rey tonight have been selling for more than the cost of three days at Coachella. Pairs have gone for as much as $300 on eBay and it’s even worse on Craigslist, where one particularly greedy scalper was asking $400 for his tickets yesterday. Though the band’s next five shows are sold out, the skyrocketing rates seem to be an L.A. phenomenon: A pair for Neumos in Seattle, WA, are going for a reasonable $43 with 14 bids and another seller is only asking $49 for the Portland, OR show at the Doug Fir Lounge.

Which brings up a pair of questions: Is it worth it? And who’s actually paying $400 to see a Paul Simon-aping indie rock band with less than a dozen songs to their name? I can answer the first one: Having seen the band open for Clipse at Columbia University’s free (!) back-to-school blow-out over the summer, I can tell you that their recent SNL performances (embedded below, after the jump) are a solid indicator of the quality of their live show: pretty good. Clipse made them look like Werewolf Tuesday. As for the second? Raise your hands, Vampire bidders.

–David Greenwald

Photo of Vampire Ezra Koenig playing at SXSW by Jack Plunkett / Associated Press

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[The post-South by Southwest tsunami of bands is headed toward Los Angeles, beginning tonight. Here are quick first impressions of albums from two of them — and, really, wouldn’t we all want to celebrate St. Patrick’s Day with a guy named Rocky O’Reilly?]

Neon Neon, “Stainless Style” (Tuesday, Lex Records): Out of the brine of this era’s dancefloor vacuousness comes … an electro concept album? Sleek disco, hip-hop lite, fuzzy guitar pop — this collaboration between Super Furry Animals main man Gruff Rhys and L.A. electronic guru Boom Bip has a little bit of everything, including a story line: The album traces the life of auto magnate and hard-partyer John DeLorean. “Stainless Style” is more than just a vehicle for a single or two. Nice.

Oppenheimer, “Take the Whole Midrange and Boost It” (June 3, Bar/None Records): The sophomore release from Belfast, Northern Ireland, duo Shaun Robinson and Rocky O’Reilly walks a tightrope — to one side bone-rattling squalor, to the other primary-colored pop. Subtract the fuzz, and the twee-pop nation would have another happy citizen. With it (and with guest touches like vocals by Matt Caughtran of L.A. punks the Bronx on “The Never Never”), the album has bite to go along with its catchy title.

||| Live: Neon Neon and Oppenheimer (along with Jim Noir and others) play tonight at the Viper Room. Neon Neon also makes a 6 p.m. appearance at Amoeba Music.

More highlights for Monday, March 17

Explosions in the Sky rock the Wiltern tonight. … Joe Lean and the Jing Jang Jong join the bill for Voxhaul Broadcast’s Spaceland residency. … Jason Collett, who has another winner with his new album, “Here’s to Being Here,” headlines the Troubadour. … At the Roxy, it’s the tongue-twisting Dan Le Sac Vs. Scroobius Pip, but far more interesting are the Fall-channeling supporting band These New Puritans. … The Chapin Sisters‘ residency at the Echo features the album-release show for local quintet the Billionaires, whose “Really Real for Forever” (out April 1) offers nifty slices of boy-girl pop.

– Kevin Bronson

Here’s the video for These New Puritans’ single, “Elvis” (album out Tuesday on Domino):

Everybody who knows me even a little knows I just love Steve Earle. The first time I saw him was in his Nashville outlaw days, when he dressed like a Hells Angel in black leather with a red bandana around his wrist, and sang songs about pot-growing moonshiner boys. I sought him out in concert countless times after that — making the girls in denim cut-offs dance at Midwestern festivals, spinning endless story songs in clubs along the California coast, even when he got pretty rough and rambling in the throes of drug addiction in the late 1980s. What started as a crush turned into deep respect, and that feeling I have with only a few artists: sympatico.

I was in the packed crowd at Steve’s comeback show at New York’s Bottom Line at the end of the 1990s, and watched every eye in that room get damp. Since then, he’s become more clear-headed, though no less fiery, as he’s settled into the role of “hard-core troubadour” — a Renaissance man who has a book of short stories, a play and years of impassioned anti-death penalty activism under his silver-black beard.

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Los Angeles was home to one grumpy pop critic last week. Nick Cave & the Bad Seeds headlined the annual Plug Awards in New York on March 8, and though the ceremony itself was reportedly a yawn, the band’s 50-minute foray saved the evening — even the scribe from Pitchfork had to admit that the awesome Australian and his brothers in noise were totally fierce (though he couldn’t resist a swipe at Cave’s middle-aged fans — just you wait, Matt Le May, you’ll have a bald spot of your own one day!)

I’ve been listening to the new Bad Seeds album nonstop for weeks now, and I can’t imaging anything besting it for title of Best Rock Album of 2008. “Dig!!! Lazarus Dig!!!” comes out on Anti- Records on April 8. Once you hear it, you’ll be dying to feel those Herculean new songs emanate from the throat of the master too.

Oh, I know there’s a ton of stuff up on the Web to create a virtual Bad Seeds experience. I could have watched the Plug Awards performance on the Dell Lounge webcast, or taken my pick from this page of grainy clips on YouTube. But nothing substitutes for being in the room while cruel Saint Nick does his preacherly, noirish thing. I’d already missed Grinderman, the grimy-gorgeous Bad Seeds blues project, when Cave brought it to San Francisco last year. And I was worried — Cave takes a little swipe at L.A. in the lyrics of the new album’s title track. (For now, you can sample the whole set on the Bad Seeds MySpace page.) Would his SoCal fans never hear that beautiful bellow live again?

Well, I’m delighted to announce that Cave and the Bad Seeds will make their Hollywood Bowl debut performance on Sept. 17.

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Her name is Katie White. Not Stacey, not Jane, not “her” or any of that other stuff she rap-sings in the wonderfully addictive single “That’s Not My Name.” White is blond, stylish, and when she’s not rockin the mic, she straps on a guitar and fronts the Ting Tings, the critically acclaimed duo straight outta Salford, U.K.

Her dashing drummer, Jules De Martino, supplies backing vocals. Together, the Ting Tings have created a dynamic, fresh sound evoking ’80s hooks at the right moments, all of which earned them a rightful place on year-end Top 10 critics’ lists all over England in 2007.

Only problem is, unless you live in the U.K., you won’t (for now) be able to buy any Ting Tings off iTunes, including “That’s Not My Name.” (But if you make it after the jump, there might be something special awaiting you.)

Speaking of names, in a recent interview with NME — which recently praised the duo as being “by far the best pop band the UK has produced in years” — White explained that the band name comes from an actual person. “I used to work for a girl called Ting Ting. We didn’t really decide to be a band but everybody said they liked us so we decided to pick a name and Ting Ting was it. Then we Googled it and found out that it meant ‘the sound of innovation on an open mind’, so we just thought screw it let’s call us that!”

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