Jonathan Coulton got a lot of buzz (and a link from us) for his great cover of “Baby Got Back”. But he’s got more than a dozen other songs – originals, I mean – on his Songs page.

My favorites are the political mash-up W’s Duty, his ode to Ikea, and the character sketch Skullcrusher Mountain.

(Thanks to Mur for the pointer!)

Steal My Sunshine. Remember this throwaway one-hit wonder from 1999? Yeah, they‘re making it available for free. The song is totally ridiculous (”Does he like butter tarts?” The hell?), but what a great sample.

For those of you who’d like to subscribe to the Sounding Board in iTunes (so that the tracks we link to show up in your iTunes, like any other podcast), but haven’t yet figured out the iTunes interface for adding a URL, well, you’re in luck. On the left-hand side of the page you’ll now see a “Subscribe with iTunes” shortcut that’ll do the hard part for you.

Lifestyle are a modern-day New Wave band. That is, they create music that sounds like the early-80’s New Wave stuff you remember fondly from the early days of MTV, back when the “M” in “MTV” wasn’t vestigial. And if that wasn’t a selling point enough, their lead singer is also one of the three members of Freezepop, another retro band who you can’t help but love unless you are dead inside.

Their Sounds page has about a dozen free tunes. My favorites are the driving Come On, which could have popped right out of 1983 if it weren’t for the lyrical reference to e-mail, and the Ultravoxy The Day and the Night.

Meg and Dia, who I’ve mentioned before, just re-did their site. Their revamped Music page now has two tracks for download, Setting Up Sunday and Monster.

Played Guitar Hero? One of the Boston acts in the game is Honest Bob, a band I’ve been a fan of since, well, since I used to work with two of the guys a dozen years back.

Honest Bob take a great mix of musical influences (Pixies, TMBG and Hüsker Dü being some of the more obvious) and add to that some sharp lyrical wit and quirky subject matter. Songs about Noam Chomsky, Liz Phair, Hale-Bopp, Tatooine, or nature’s harmonic simultaneous 4-day time cube? Yep, they got that.

You can hear sound clips from their albums on their music page, or download a few tracks from their first album: the Pixies homage She’s Gone or the equally rockin’ Organism.

Jill Sobule, who I’ve already mentioned before, has written a dandy little song for the Huffington Post, Dick and Harry, which she had Robin Eaton sing “since I thought it had to be more manly”.

HuffPo has the lyrics as well.

RX – or the Party Party; I’m not sure which is the preferred moniker, and I’m only guessing it’s a plural – take political speech and remix it into tunes, usually to spoof those in power.

Their site has a big ol’ list of tunes, but given recent events, I’m emphasizing Dick Is A Killer.

(Lyrics very NSFW.)

The Marginal Prophets are a hip-hop band consisting of the Noble Def G and Keith Knight, who you may already know as the cartoonist behind the terrific K Chronicles.

I’m most familiar with their first CD, “Twist the Knob”. Their Listen page has two great tracks from that disc, available as downloadable mp3s that are zipped up: Phat In the Whole (Rock Mix) and the live rendition of Gunz ‘n’ Money.

But don’t ignore some of their more recent work, which has taken on a rock edge thanks to a live backing band. Try out The Difficult Song or Yes Pants are some good ones, but there’s more.

In honor of this post over at Bray New World, we present MC Hawking’s What We Need More Of Is Science.

Lyrics very NSFW.