This week’s Slicing Up Eyeballs Music Hour on Strangeways Radio featured music from Johnny Marr, Felt, Paul Weller, Mission of Burma, The Mighty Lemon Drops, Echo & The Bunnymen, The Jesus and Mary Chain, OMD, Joe Strummer, Screaming Blue Messiahs and moer.

Cherry Red Records today offered up a fourth preview track of the label’s upcoming 3CD reissue of the self-titled 1988 debut from The House of Love — this time one of three live tracks included on the set, a cover of The Stooges’ classic “I Wanna Be Your Dog.”

Reunited indie-pop outfit The Ocean Blue is releasing its first new album in 13 years this January, but fans can get an early listen to two of the record’s tracks next week when they appear on a new compilation being released by Korda Records, the new label launched by the band’s David Schelzel and three fellow musicians.

Drew Crumbaugh — aka The Analog Loyalist, whose attempt to restore R.E.M.’s I.R.S. Records catalog was thwarted by Universal Music earlier this year — has taken a second crack at cleaning up the 1980 concert included on the reissue of Joy Division’s ‘Closer,’ and is offering the new version as a free download.

Fans planning to attend The Psychedelic Furs’ New Year’s Day concert in Las Vegas and three early January shows in California will now get a New Wave double bill as The Fixx has signed on to support most of the Furs’ upcoming West Coast dates — plays the band’s got a few year-end shows of its own planned, too.

R.E.M. famously didn’t tour behind its two best-selling albums — 1991’s ‘Out of Time’ and 1992’s ‘Automatic For the People’ — but the band did play a single concert in support of the latter record, a Greenpeace benefit at the 40 Watt Club in Athens, Ga., exactly 20 years ago tonight.

This week’s new releases include a 2CD live set from Simple Minds, an archival live album from Dinosaur Jr on vinyl and MP3, reissues from The Jam and The Blue Nile, a CD/DVD 30th anniversary live set from The Pogues and a collection of Elvis Costello songs used in films.

Welcome to the Week in Rock, where we round up all of the headlines posted on this site over the past week. This edition includes items INXS, James and Echo & The Bunnymen, R.E.M., The Sisters of Mercy, The Pogues, Siouxsie and the Banshees, Mission of Burma, Johnny Marr, Midnight Oil, Sugar, Morrissey and more.

Long-running Manchester act James has enlisted Echo & The Bunnymen for a 10-date tour of the U.K. this spring in support of the band’s ‘The Gathering Sound’ box set, a career-spanning collection that originally was due out in fall 2011 and then this past spring — and is now finally due for release next month in the U.K.

Had a great opportunity this past week to guest-blog on USA Today’s pop-culture hub Pop Candy while Whitney Matheson is out on maternity leave. Below is a collection of those posts if anyone cares to take a gander, spanning such pop-culture goodness as “Star Wars,” Record Store Day, “Doctor Who” and the demise of INXS.

Seemingly out of the, uh, blue, R.E.M. this week debuted a music video for the song “Blue” off swan song ‘Collapse into Now.’ The clip, posted here, is directed by actor James Franco and features a hodge-podge of visual imagery, including shots of Lindsay Lohan.

For this week’s “120 Minutes” Rewind, we present this 1990 appearance by Andrew Eldtritch of The Sisters of Mercy, who chats with host Dave Kendall about the band’s then-new third (and still final) album Vision Thing, in segments sandwiched between a showing of the video for that record’s epic single, “More.”

This Christmas marks the 25th anniversary of the boozy holiday classic “Fairytale of New York” by The Pogues and the late Kirsty MacColl, so, to mark the occasion, the band is reissuing the 1987 single in a variety of digital and vinyl formats with new cover art.