With his North American tour now about halfway done, ex-Smiths guitar hero Johnny Marr this week released the second music video off his recently released solo LP Playland, a performance clip (directed by Ben Thornley & Mat Bancroft) that you can watch here.

The members of New Order have been talking up new music since reuniting a few years ago, and the prospect of a new album became that much more real this past September when the band signed to the legendary Mute label and it was announced the group soon would return to the studio to work on new music.

By all appearances, XTC’s 1989 album Oranges and Lemons is next up in the band’s current series of audiophile reissues, as bandleader Andy Partridge has been tweeting in recent weeks about work on the 5.1 Surround mix, including an attempt to transfer the baked album tapes that were “in a very bad way.”

This week’s new releases include expanded reissues of the Pixies’ “Doolittle” and Yo La Tengo’s “Painful,” a box set of Red Lorry Yellow Lorry recordings from 1982 to 1987, a vinyl reissue of MInistry’s “Twelve Inch Singles,” a collection of Boris Blank’s output and a Blondie vinyl box set.

Exploring the legacy of ’80s college rock, the Slicing Up Eyeballs Music Hour airs Tuesdays at 10 p.m. Eastern/7 p.m. Pacific on Strangeways Radio. If you caught this week’s episode, pop over to the Strangeways message board to leave requests for future shows.

The Church will follow February’s U.S. release of its new album Further/Deeper with a 19-date North American tour that will find the Aussie rockers performing both at San Francisco’s Noise Pop Festival and the South By Southwest Music Conference in Austin, Texas.

This week’s new releases include a 6DVD set of MTV footage from R.E.M., plus new live albums from Echo & The Bunnymen and The House of Love, as well a new rarities collection from Soundgarden that was compiled by guitarist Kim Thayill and is available in single and three-disc sets.

This week’s new releases include a new live album and DVD from Depeche Mode, a Paul McCartney cover by The Cure, a new best-of from David Bowie, Nick Cave’s “20,000 Days on Earth” film, new albums from Bryan Ferry and Einstürzende Neubauten, and a collection of 1988 demos from Fugazi.

Turns out Front Line Assembly mastermind Bill Leeb’s “Monsters of Industrial” tour is happening after all — although with a less monstrous name — after Skinny Puppy tapped FLA to replace the departed VNV Nation on the bands’ 17-date North American tour that’s slated to kick off in Toronto in late November.

This week’s new release include a multi-format reissue of Tears For Fears’ smash second album, ‘Songs From the Big Chair,’ including a six-disc Super Deluxe Edition, plus a live album from former Yazoo frontwoman Alison Moyet in which she spotlights her recent solo album ‘The Minutes’ as well as earlier material.

The Cure today announced a pair of Christmas concerts at London’s Hammersmith Eventim Apollo next month, promising two-and-a-half-hour shows that will find the band “playing songs drawn from their entire 37 year old catalogue including deep cuts, pop songs, fan favourites and surprises galore.”

This week’s new releases include a brand-new studio album from Simple Minds, plus a collection of BBC recordings by The Chills, a reissue of A Certain Ratio’s second album, a box set collecting studio albums from Ian Dury with and without the Blockheads, and a new Alphaville best-of.

The just-released reissue of Siouxsie and the Banshees’ 1988 album Peepshow is being repressed following the discovery of a “minor mastering error” at the end of “Rawhead and Bloody Bones,” the band’s bassist, Steven Severin, announced today via the Banshees’ Facebook page.