Joel Plaskett's New Single Is Suitably Scrappy, Happy

What do you do when you're faced with the challenge of following up the most ambitious album of your career?  If you're Joel Plaskett, who released the mammoth 27-song triple album Three in 2009, you strip it down to the bare bones.  Scrappy Happiness, his first album with backing band the Emergency since 2007's excellent Ashtray Rock, boasts a mere ten songs, one of which he's revealing every week leading up to the album's release on March 27.

Filled to the brim with old footage from Plaskett's personal collection, the video for (presumably first single) Somewhere Else hit the YouTube on Monday.  The song is a blunt 2 1/2 minutes in length, but its scope is huge, incorporating mandolin and a hypnotic, reverb-soaked Plaskett vocal, like an Out of Time-era R.E.M. vacationing in Amsterdam.

Check out the clip below, and join me at the record store on March 27 (which is filling up fast with awesome releases).