Jarred Gastreich

Show Me Shows is a video series documenting bands living in and traveling to St. Louis.

The Lumineers just released a self-titled full-length full of dusty dramatics and rising passion. The three-piece -- Wesley Schultz, Jeremiah Fraites and Neyla Pekarek -- caught a spark in 2011 that led them to Dualtone Records and a spate of national press for The Lumineers. "People showing up today know the lyrics," says Fraites. "It's been a crazy year - a lot's happened. It's hard to describe it all."

He's understating things just a touch. When he says "people," he means (at least in St. Louis) enough people to sell out Blueberry Hill in advance and when he says "know the lyrics" he means know all the lyrics. But let's take a second here and talk about the weather.

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Kentucky Knife Fight was not kidding around with its new video for "Love the Lonely." The band launched a Kickstarter and premiered it at a show last weekend at Off Broadway. For the fanfare we have the clip you see above, produced by First Punch Film and starring KKF front man Jason Holler as the steady driver of a cab on an eventful night in St. Louis. It's well conceived and better executed.

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Celebrity drummer Travis Barker sat in with the Muppets' Dr. Teeth and the Electric Mayhem last night on Jimmy Kimmel Live. Barker posted on his Facebook page: "G00D M0RNING! Blessed to play drums with my childhood hero ANIMAL last night!...Good Times." We agree. Incidentally, the last six posts on that page comprise evidence of Barker's collaborations with the Muppets, The-Game, Lil' Wanye and Steve Aoki. Tough life.

The video from last night, which you can view below, gets particularly awesome at the 1:31 mark, where Animal screams, "DRUM WAR!!!" and they spend the next minute and a half trading solos before the muppet ends it by putting Barker's head through a floor tom. Good times, indeed.

Update: Thanks to Mabel for pointing out that this is a direct homage -- right down to the ending -- of Animal's drum battle with the legendary Buddy Rich.

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St. Louis rapper Thi'sl recently released a new video for his song "Hold On."

When St. Louis rapper Thi'sl wants to know how his fans are reacting to his music, all he has to do is look at a computer screen.

For instance, Thi'sl released a video last week for his uplifting anthem "Hold On." He says he knew the tune was getting a positive response from monitoring social media conduits such as Facebook and Twitter.

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Mario did more than just stomp on turtles or race in go-karts. He also indirectly revolutionized video game composing.

Mario is a versatile video game character. In his long career in the digital world, Mario raced go-karts, fought adversaries in hand-to-hand combat and even got kidnapped to teach kids about geography.

Yet Nintendo's plumber extraordinaire may have inadvertently been a trailblazer in the realm of video game music-making.

When Nintendo released Mario Paint back in the early 1990s, it was effectively a way for kids to draw Nintendo characters. It was also a way for the company to disseminate a mouse created for the Super Nintendo system. Mario Paint also included what seemed to be a rudimentary composing mechanism, which swapped musical notes for images of Nintendo characters. At the time the game was released, the composer was aimed at providing a soundtrack to animated shorts.

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Pretty Little Empire gives one of the best gut-punches in the city. And "All I Know" is one of its most powerful songs. Captured in it are the band's rough-hewn guitar melody, driving rhythm and, most importantly, devastating lyrical turns. Observe:

"And if that's what you want/to always be alone/then we'll probably get along/'cuz I know I know/what it's like to feel alone."

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Missouri native White Rabbits has an enviable track record: Two fantastic albums of twitchy paranoia, the latter a fully realized rock record that stands up to indefinite repeat. The band will release its third effort, Milk Famous, in March. Lead single "Heavy Metal" now has a music video, directed by Andrew Droz Palermo. It follows a suburban trio of willfully unspecified relationship through tiny loops and reverse film stutters to match the similar effect on the song's piano. But you don't need to get the nuts and bolts to feel the match -- watch below.

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Jarred Gastreich

This, right now, is your opportune moment to hop on the Pretty Little Empire bandwagon. Not that you'll be alone, but the next several months are shaping up to be big ones for the emerging band -- a professionally done music video is slated for next month and a third album is working its way through the recording process as we speak.

The Show Me Shows series, which has offered thoughtful ruminations on St. Louis bands through photos, videos and text, continues here, with PLE performing in Forest Park's World's Fair Pavilion. You can read Steven Colbert's thoughts on what makes the band so effortlessly good and watch the clip for "Give it Time" on the KDHX (88.1 FM) blog. And below, you can see the quartet talk a bit about the dynamic of the band before it starts into "The One."

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Just in case you weren't watching the BBC on Saturday in the middle of the afternoon, here's hometown heroes Pokey LaFarge & the South City Three on Jools Holland's annual Hootenanny. You can see clips of the quartet playing "Drinkin' Whiskey Tonight" and the always fantastic "La La Blues," below.

The band will be playing at Blues City Deli on January 26th. The show's free and starts at 6 p.m. and we strongly, strongly recommend getting there early if you want to see anything. In March the boys embark on another European tour.

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Grab your glocks when you see this frog riding this turtle like he's an itty bitty car.

Here's the great and terrible thing about YouTube: If you have an intensely specific desire to see something, like, say, animals riding very slow turtles with an overdubbed hip hop soundtrack, YouTube's seedy underbelly has probably already turned it into a genre of videos with its own playlist.

Here's the terrible thing about YouTube: Now I have to figure out whether I'm a racist. Again! And I just finished watching that Alonzo "Hamburger" Jones supercut!

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