The new label Propeller Sound Recordings next month will release a 23-song compilation of rare and obscure early material from jangle-pop progenitors The dB’s.

Fire Records has just reissued The Chills’ second and third albums — 1990’s major-label debut Submarine Bells and its follow-up, 1992’s Soft Bomb — on vinyl with newly remastered sound, pressings that are available now via the label but not until November in record stores. Full details right here.

R.E.M. famously didn’t tour behind 1991’s breakthrough Out of Time, but the band did play a handful of largely professional shows that year, among the best-known of them being a pair of concerts in London under the nom-de-rock of Bingo Hand Job. See the full details and tracklist right here.

For this week’s installment of Vintage Video, we present what is believed to be the earliest pro-shot video footage of R.E.M. in concert: a 50-minute live set filmed on Oct. 10, 1982, for broadcast on TV by a South Carolina station about six months before the release of the band’s debut, Murmur. Watch it here.

The dB’s today announced a June 12 release date for Falling Off the Sky, the jangle-pop heroes’ first album in 25 years and first to feature the band’s original lineup — Peter Holsapple, Gene Holder, Will Rigby and Chris Stamey — in 30 years. Plus, the band’s playing six separate shows at South By Southwest this month.

The dB’s this week released a new song as a free MP3 download — the rocker ‘Revolution of the Mind,’ featuring Yo La Tengo’s Ira Kaplan on guitar — and announced plans to issue ‘Falling Off the Sky,’ the band’s first new studio album in 25 years, sometime in the spring of 2012.

  Eighteen years after their first album together, Peter Holsapple and Chris Stamey — the heart of ’80 jangle-pop outfit The dB’s — have just […]