If you're in London, re-energised political rockers Manic Street Preachers are doing a free show at Rough Trade East.

If you're in Leicester, rowdy thrash-punks Trash Talk hijack the O2.

If you're In Sheffield, mellow folk-rockers Midlake waft into the City Hall.

If you're in Glasgow, Hall & Oates can't go for that, no can do at the Royal Concert Hall.

And if you're in Darlington, the Comedy Festival opens with a charity gala featuring Rob Rouse, Rob Deering and The Boy With Tape On His Face.

Otherwise, the TV schedules offer Shopgirls, Beauty Queens, Real Housewives and Kirstie Allsop. Oh, and some football.

Everyone's understandably lost interest in my Brazil v Germany pop World Cup play-off, so I'm giving it to the Germans on penalties. That's it from me – Gwilym and Lanre will be here tomorrow, make it a date.

Funk revivalists Jungle have just released a new video for Time, and in keeping with their previous efforts (children dancing, formation dancing, people on roller skates dancing) it features two old guys dancing.

It's another undoubted earworm from the Shepherd's Bush boys, although when it comes to jungle records on XL, I have to say this one's still my favourite.

(Rejected headlines for this segment: Canuck You Dig It?, Saskatchewan Of The Day, Do What Toronto Do)

Canada aren't in our pop World Cup because they're rubbish at football. But if they were, they might be winning it. We started off the day with a storming new tune from Death From Above 1979, linked to an article by White Lung, and now a couple more choice Canadian cuts have dropped into our inbox.

This is Lunice – AKA the half of TNGHT that's not Hudson Mohawke – with his newie, Can't Wait To:

And here's a rousing little strum from The Rural Alberta Advantage, from their forthcoming album Mended With Gold:

It's all square going into the break with Tom Ze opening the scoring for Brazil but the ever-dependable Kraftwerk equalising for Germany. Keep your Brazilian or German musical nominations coming in via #brazilrocks, #germanyrocks or the comments below.

Guide Daily's man with a plan Huw Oliver has been scouring the web for interesting new reads, if you need to look busy.

On the Talkhouse, Mish Way from Vancouver punks White Lung tackles Lana Del Rey's Ultraviolence in probably the most pertinent take on the album (and the celebrity) yet.

Meanwhile, over at McSweeney's, a man wants to reform his band. Problem is, they've lost their master tapes and they only ever sold one copy of their album. As a further complication, they can't recall their name at that point: it was either Gargantua, David Levine And The Cossacks or The Pet Rocks. Were you that lucky owner? He wants the record back. Only then can he and "the guys" relearn the hits.

While you digest those, Huw suggests you listen to The Bagel Town Diaries by Pregnant Woman: the best bootleg pop star remix compilation with comical titles the internet has to offer us this afternoon.

It's Brazil against Germany in the football tonight, so we're going to attempt to predict the result using pop music. Both countries have given us numerous belters down the years, but which is best? Tweet either #brazilrocks or #germanyrocks to @guideguardian depending on your allegiance, along with some YouTube evidence. Based on your votes, we can then decide once and for all which country is best at music and therefore will win the match tonight.

It's looking pretty even so far. Repping for Brazil, we've got Os Mutantes, Milton Nascimento & Lô Borges and Edu K.

Repping for Germany, we've got Can, DAF and MANDY v Booka Shade.

Well, this has got to be the weirdest film trailer we've seen this week. Reach Me is an upcoming ensemble drama starring – together at last! – Sly Stallone, Kelsey Grammar, Nelly and Tom Sizemore, about a group of people whose lives have all been transformed by a self-help book written by a mysterious author with a murky past. Its backers pulled out halfway through filming – not typically a good sign – and director John Herzfeld, with help from Stallone, crowdfunded the rest via Indiegogo.

The result is a trailer that looks like a jokey supercut. It's a hitman thriller! No, it's a gritty prison drama! A knockabout urban comedy! A touching romance! A epic mystery with Stallone in a nice hat! And, finally, disappointingly, it's a load of 'uplifting' guff about how we can all find the hero within ourselves. Worth watching the trailer for Sly's garbled outburst, though.

My esteemed colleague Lanre Bakare points me in the direction of a couple of interesting new rap collabs.

First, listen to self-styled trap lord A$AP Ferg jumping on a remix of Haim's My Song 5.

Less surprising but equally welcome, here's masked raider MF Doom teaming up with young disciple Bishop Nehru as NehruvianDOOM.

Few people thought that the famously warring egos of original supergroup Crosby, Stills & Nash would ever reform. Fewer still thought that they would go on national television to perform a cover of Iggy Azalea's Fancy with Jimmy Fallon as Neil Young. But last night, that's exactly what happened:

Now we just need Iggy to respond with her cover of Suite: Judy Blue Eyes. OK, perhaps not.

Yesterday, Taylor Swift penned a column for the Wall Street Journal about the future of the music industry. On the one hand, she reckons people will continue to pay for albums as long as the artists has bled the requisite amount of heart of soul:

There are many (many) people who predict the downfall of music sales and the irrelevancy of the album as an economic entity. I am not one of them. In my opinion, the value of an album is, and will continue to be, based on the amount of heart and soul an artist has bled into a body of work, and the financial value that artists (and their labels) place on their music when it goes out into the marketplace.

On the other hand, she thinks that artists might have to rely on gimmicks in order to keep their audiences interested.

In the YouTube generation we live in, I walked out onstage every night of my stadium tour last year knowing almost every fan had already seen the show online. To continue to show them something they had never seen before, I brought out dozens of special guest performers to sing their hits with me.

Her article is sweet, optimistic and well-presented but ultimately a little bland – in fact, just like Tay… oh, you saw that one coming.

You can read some proper analysis here, but our eyes were drawn to Taylor's sign-off, where she talks briefly about her hopes for the future:

I'd also like a nice garden.

And if anything tells you about the sorry state of the music industry in 2014 vis-a-vis the escalating property market, it's that one of the world's biggest-selling stars still can't afford a place with enough room to plant her hibiscus.

The mutual love-in between Miley Cyrus and The Flaming Lips continues to bear weird fruit. First there was the cover of Lucy In The Sky With Diamonds:

Then they got matching tattoos of Miley's dead dog:

And now they've made a freaky short film with Moby as an evil cult leader who enlists a "blonde superfreak" to steal Miley's brain because it contains the original formula for LSD (of course!):

All good fun. But what we need now is for Coyne and Cyrus to lay off the lysergics, put their heads together and come up with a genuinely mindblowing psychedelic pop tune. For all their crazy collabs, dancing bears and jelly skulls, it's been well over a decade since The Flaming Lips have written anything you can whistle, whereas Miley's own bangerz are still of the decidedly airbrushed variety.

Morning all. Tons of pop culture gold to mine this morning, so let's get straight down to business with the pounding new single from extravagantly moustachioed Canadian sleaze-rock duo Death From Above 1979 – their first since reforming in 2011.

I'd certainly like to these guys have a riff-off with Royal Blood.