Anxiously Awaiting New Album from Mew

According to a new blog post from Mew, the Copenhagen-based prog giants will be back in NYC putting the finishing touches on their record soon. I’m delighted to hear this news, as And the Glass Handed Kites was far and away my favorite thing to come out of 2006. If you’re unfamiliar, I highly recommend “Circuitry of the Wolf” and “The Zookeeper’s Boy” (YouTubes!) to begin. Though you can get a good idea of what they’re about that way, I highly recommend just listening to the record through – loudly.

While on their MySpace page I noticed that they’ve been posting the occasional video diary from the recording. Filmed in France, Copenhagen and New York, the series is an incredibly artful, interesting and all together fascinating glimpse into the process for them. They’ve taken the trite Bon Jovi / Metallica “here we are in the studio, look, we make toast just like everyone else” footage and made creepy little pastiche pieces, vignettes and fake news programs to bolster excitement. Perhaps most interesting is the fact that you never actually hear them playing any music. The videos are embedded from YouTube but you can’t click through to get URLs (and searching for them yielded nothing), so you’ll have to watch them on the MySpace page. Or follow links to variously located Quicktimes (much better quality, obviously) from the same place. My favorite is here, it’s Episode 5.