Archive for February, 2009

Seminal Creation Records act The House of Love issues a new archival release next week: Live at the BBC, due out Monday in the U.K.
The 19-track disc features previously unreleased live cuts culled from four different BBC concert performances recorded in the early ’90s, following founding guitarist Terry Bickers’ departure.
The band’s principals — Guy Chadwick [...]

With its 12th album, Sounds of the Universe, due April 21, Depeche Mode continued with its pre-release build-up this week, debuting a seriously creepy video for lead-off single “Wrong” (see below) and announcing details of the group’s iTunes Pass promotion.
DM is the first band to participate in the iTunes Pass program, sort of the online [...]

Nearly overlooked amid the buzz surrounding Sonic Youth’s forthcoming, back-to-the-indies album is the band’s hefty new book, which is due to be published next week.
“Sensational Fix” — not to be confused with last year’s excellent “Goodbye 20th Century: A Biography of Sonic Youth,” by David Browne — is a 784-page companion volume to Sonic Youth’s [...]

This week saw the passing of Randy Bewley, guitarist for Pylon, early-’80s Athens, Ga., post-punk contemporaries of R.E.M. and the B-52’s.
Bewley, 53, suffered a heart attack Monday while driving in Athens, and was taken to Athens Regional Medical Center, where, according to the Atlanta Journal Constitution, Pylon lead singer Vanessa Briscoe Hay coincidentally works as [...]

Despite the frosty history between seemingly catatonic guitar god J Mascis and the decidedly more emo Lou Barlow, the reunion of Dinosaur Jr’s classic ’80s lineup not only continues, but will produce a second post-comeback album, as well.
The band, also featuring drummer Murph, this week announced it has signed to Jagjaguwar, and will go out [...]

For those of you who’d rather see The Cure in a (relatively) intimate club rather than standing in a field with 50,000 other people, here’s your chance:
Robert Smith and Co. will warm up for their headlining slot at Coachella by playing the 2,500-capacity Pearl Concert Theater at the Palms Casino Resort in Las Vegas on [...]

Aussie rockers Midnight Oil never were known to shy away from important causes, and that’s exactly what it’s taken to get the band back together ever since frontman Peter Garrett quit in 2002 to relaunch his political career.
For the second time since the Oils’ split, Garrett — now Australia’s Minister for Environment, Heritage and Arts [...]

That didn’t take long.
Just days after word emerged that the (fully) reunited Jane’s Addiction would tour this summer with Nine Inch Nails, the purported itinerary has leaked onto the Web.
(And while this trek most certainly will be perceived as a ’90s alt-rock/Lollapalooza flashback, let’s not forget Jane’s made its initial breakthrough in the late ’80s.)
According [...]

The EP and album that XTC’s Andy Partridge, Colin Moulding and Dave Gregory released under the guise of their psychedelic-pop side project The Dukes of Stratosphear in the mid-’80s will receive the expanded reissue treatment on March 24.
And while XTC played coy at the time and tried to distance itself from the pseudonymous side project [...]

Details are still a bit sketchy, but Sirius XM’s 1st Wave channel — for longtime XM listeners, that’s the watered-down replacement for the late, lamented Fred — will dedicate a full week to The Cure in April.
A Chain of Flowers, the definitive source for Cure news, reported last month that the satellite-radio network was rumored [...]

The Godfathers — one of the best, if not most underrated, U.K. rock bands of the 1980s — triumphantly reformed in 2008, and capped the year off by announcing a short, eight-date U.S. tour that was to have taken place this month.
Thanks to the current global economic crisis, however, the band said it was forced [...]

Despite word last fall that The Replacements’ Paul Westerberg and Tommy Stinson spent a few days jamming in Minneapolis, Stinson tells Billboard.com that it’s unlikely the ‘Mats are getting back together.
“You know what? I just don’t know if we have it in us,” he told Billboard this week. “We’ve played together and we have things [...]