The latest music video from Depeche Mode’s Songs of the Universe was just uploaded to YouTube, and the band have gone from a somewhat NSFW video of a guy with a freakishly long tongue cleaning out his girlfriend’s pores to a trippy show that’s a psychedelic treat at best and a dated screensaver at worst.

Watch below or here, as Dave Gahan, Martin Gore, and Andrew Fletcher flop around outer space in the form of bits of light or fireworks or stars or something. There’s also a human-shaped fire being that would have fit in well in the scariest movie of all time, The Last Unicorn.

Even if you don’t dig the video, “Fragile Tension” is a pretty cool song and Gahan’s voice even has flashes of a young Robert Smith during the hook.

While producers for Green Day’s American Idiot musical are busy plotting the transition from Berkeley to Broadway, frontman Billie Joe Armstrong has joined the cast as a producer in the studio to record a new version of 21st Century Breakdown single “21 Guns.”

As TheaterMania reports, not only will the cast release the single digitally later this month “through all digital retailers,” but cast members, including star John Gallagher, Jr., Matt Caplan, Michael Esper, Mary Faber, and more are set to appear in a music video for Green Day’s original version of the same song.

No specific release date for the single has been announced, but in the meantime, check out the cast in action in the trailer here or have a look at Rolling Stone’s list of the actors’ resumes and sample YouTube performances here.

Forgetting Sarah Marshall was a pretty funny movie and all, but it was actor Jason Segel’s hilarious original song “Dracula’s Lament” that truly brought the house down, IMO. Thankfully, that Segel-penned piece was only the beginning of what’s looking to be a long and fruitful musical comedy career because his “Wonkey Eyed Girl” performance also brought the lulz on Craig Ferguson and now he’s collaborated with Oscar-winning duo the Swell Season.

Segel joined Glen Hansard, Markéta Irglová, and company on the Wiltern Theater stage in LA last night, singing a tune he wrote during a drink-fueled meeting between Segel, actor Paul Rudd, and Hansard prior to the show. Watch here or below as Segel serenades the audience about his desire to “use [his] celebrity status to make love to a Swell Season fan tonight.”

The “Best Original Song” portion at the Academy Awards is one of the annual Hollywood award show’s weirder categories. Most years I have no idea who is even nominated until the live broadcast when the host introduces Sting, Randy Newman, or whoever’s pretending to have written a song inspired by a film they likely haven’t seen in full that year. But then Three Six Mafia wins a gold statue, indie singer/songwriters Glen Hansard and Markéta Irglová upset three nods for Enchanted, or Elliott Smith shows up to play “Miss Misery” dressed all in white, and they’ve grabbed my attention again.

In order to stir up some hope that next year’s broadcast will include a similar event, we’ll be posting from time to time on a few interesting possible nominees that come across the radar, starting with U2:

Truth be told, I’ve been hunting for news like this for weeks now, scouring the Interwebs for new signs of life from Interpol—aside from Paul Banks’ slightly underwhelming pseudo solo album and Carlos D’s film career, of course. And just when the most that I could hope for was a speculative “?” post (Arcade Fire one was a hit, right?), drummer Sam Fogarino dropped the “new record” bomb on Paste (via CoS). Boom:

“The new record falls back towards the first,” Fogarino told Justin Jacobs. “In trying to move forward, there was an unspoken realization that you can’t let go of your sonic-defining tag.”

The good news: Interpol’s upcoming 4th LP is due out in early 2010 and it’s a throwback to their breakthrough Turn On the Bright Lights. There is one unsettling new bit about Courtney Love showing up in the studio, but no worries! She simply yelled, “And he was a fucking shrimp farmer!” and walked out. No credit cards were exchanged or anything.

For more deets go thataway.

This isn’t too surprising, but it is a disappointment for those of us hoping to watch Steve “Lips” Kudlow crash the Oscars red carpet. Anvil! The Story of Anvil and It Might Get Loud, Jack White, the Edge, and Jimmy Page’s jam session-turned-film, have both been left off the Oscar short list for Best Documentary, /Film reports.

Even though director Davis Guggenheim won an Academy Award for Al Gore’s An Inconvenient Truth and It Might Get Loud will likely be joining the canon of great music documentaries, it never really screamed “Oscar” to me. I did honestly think Anvil had a shot for a nomination at least, but, as /Film’s Peter Sciretta notes, “the Academy obviously doesn’t like Rock music.”

Yusuf Islam, formerly Cat Stevens, kicked off his first tour in 33 years on Sunday and numerous sources are reporting that the gig did not go smoothly. As the Irish Times notes, Islam’s first set of new and old songs at Dublin’s O2 arena went well, but the second act, which consisted of an abridged version of his new musical Moonshadow where actors performed and sang a number of his most beloved songs (“Wild World, “Father and Son,” etc.) had to be cut short.

“[A]ngry sections of the audience walked out, shouted out, booed, whistled, slow-handclapped,” writes Tony Clayton-Lea, while some sites are claiming an audience member shouted, “we are bored.”