(The illustration for this post is from The Cranberries fan club.)

Sadly, the tour will not visit our town—a town, by the way, that Macklemore describes in such loving terms in a track, "The Town," on The Unplanned Mixtape.

Buy a ticket [online], and they'll send you a download code for six songs—three new ones from their upcoming album "Embryonic" (nice album cover!) and three B sides from old singles. After the show, they'll send you another link to download a recording of the show you attended.

Embryonic

They're only giving away three tracks from the album, which will surely flood the P2P networks in the near future anyway, but die-hard fans and album purists won't likely be any more dissuaded from buying the whole thing, and hit seekers would likely rip the few tracks they want anyway. Now they can do it legally, and it's all factored into the ticket price. Sounds like a solid model to me.

Read the Flaming Lips' words about it here.

Via Cnet.com

And Seattle gets to set it off, too.

Take that, Little Boots/Kylie/The Streets trend!

This will be our first Manic Street Preachers happy live show fun-time.

Looks like the Richey Edwards-bolstered Journal For Plague Lovers, previously covered here, is also getting a Stateside issue on September 15th.

Voilà.

Mon -21 Seattle, WA @ Neumo's
Tue- 22 Vancouver, Canada @ The Commodore Ballroom
Thu-24 San Francisco, CA @ The Fillmore
Fri- 25 Los Angeles, CA @ The Avalon
Mon-Sep-28 Denver, CO @ The Bluebird Theatre
Wed-Sep-30 Minneapolis, MN @ The Varsity Theatre
Thu-01 Chicago, IL @ The Metro
Fri- 02 Detroit, MI @ The Majestic Theatre
Sun- 04 Toronto, Canada @ The Phoenix Concert Theatre
Tue- 06 Philadelphia, PA @ World Café Live
Wed- 07 New York City, NY @ Webster Hall
Thu- 08 Boston, MA @ Paradise Rock Club
Full Press-Release

On Twitter, Mike Skinner writes:

Pomona? Sacramento?

But not Seattle.

I see.

These are the dates that have shown up so far.

Wed 10/14/09 Pomona, CA Glass House
Thu 10/15/09 Los Angeles, CA Club Nokia
Sat 10/17/09 San Francisco, CA Treasure Island Music Festival

Damn you.

More tour news!

Thanks, Chris B., for alerting us to what we should've already known for a long time.

Kylie Minogue has announced a short series of U.S. shows. The first ones ever, apparently.

Nice-sized venues, too.

Except, Kylie?

Ms. Working On A Follow-Up To The Best Album Of Your Career.

What's wrong with Seattle?

Wed 09/30/09 Oakland, CA Fox Theater
Thu 10/01/09 Oakland, CA Fox Theater
Sat 10/03/09 Las Vegas, NV Pearl Concert Theater
Sun 10/04/09 Los Angeles, CA Hollywood Bowl
Wed 10/07/09 Chicago, IL Congress Theater
Fri 10/09/09 Toronto, ON Air Canada Centre
Sun 10/11/09 New York, NY Hammerstein Ballroom
Mon 10/12/09 New York, NY Hammerstein Ballroom
Tue 10/13/09 New York, NY Hammerstein Ballroom

Is it our hair?

Hot on the glamorous space-unicorn future overload disco synth-pop heels of Hands — the 2009 debut to beat — a couple of duets with Philip Oakey, and helicoptering back to Glastonbury just to see Blur, Little Boots is doing an Eddie Murphy and coming to America.

San Francisco?

It's on.

Wait.

It's on.

Mon 09/14/09 Toronto, ON Wrongbar
Wed 09/16/09 New York, NY Bowery Ballroom
Thu 09/17/09 Chicago, IL Empty Bottle
Fri 09/18/09 West Hollywood, CA The Roxy Theatre
Sat 09/19/09 San Francisco, CA The Independent

Didn't see this mentioned before.

A bit of history, a bit of PTSD, and probably something sort of sad, but Happy Mondays are going on a North American tour, promoting, we assume, 2007's Uncle Dysfunktional, and they're doing it with The Psychedelic Furs.

What.

Still, hurrah! Never caught them at their height.

Bez better have a visa. The more of a shambles the better.

Shaun Ryder says, "This is the first time I've ever been out in this business -- and I've been in this business since I was 18 -- that I've done it straight, not using crack or heroin or whatever. It's fucking terrifying."

When was the last time Happy Mondays played a proper bunch of U.S. shows?

According to here, at least, the last time in Seattle was at the Moore on April Fool's Day in 1991.

Nineteen. Ninety. One.

09/08/09 Chicago, IL House Of Blues
09/09/09 Milwaukee, WI Pabst Theater
09/11/09 Boulder, CO Boulder Theater
09/12/09 Salt Lake City, UT In The Venue
09/14/09 Seattle, WA Moore Theatre
09/15/09 Portland, OR McMenamins Crystal Ballroom
09/17/09 San Francisco, CA The Regency Ballroom
09/18/09 Los Angeles, CA Club Nokia
09/19/09 Anaheim, CA House Of Blues
09/20/09 San Diego, CA House Of Blues
09/22/09 Las Vegas, NV House Of Blues
09/24/09 Austin, TX Stubb's Bar-B-Q / Waller Creek Amph.
09/25/09 Dallas, TX House Of Blues
09/26/09 Houston, TX House Of Blues
09/28/09 Tampa, FL The Ritz
09/29/09 Fort Lauderdale, FL Revolution
09/30/09 Lake Buena Vista, FL House Of Blues
10/02/09 Atlanta, GA The Masquerade
10/03/09 Charlotte, NC Amos' SouthEnd
10/04/09 Norfolk, VA NorVa
10/06/09 Washington, DC 9:30 Club
10/07/09 Philadelphia, PA Trocadero Theatre
10/09/09 New York, NY Roseland Ballroom
10/10/09 Boston, MA House Of Blues
10/12/09 Columbus, OH Newport Music Hall
10/13/09 Royal Oak, MI Royal Oak Music Theatre

Here he is in healthier times:

If the last week is anything to go by, Blur have come back with a bit of class.

Remember? Months ago? When the original band announced they'd be reuniting for the first time in over a decade, and putting on a summer show in London's Hyde Park?

Tip! Iceberg!

Nothing's more foul than a reunion, but all the band's moves since then have been smart and refreshingly personal. In the last few days, Blur did a show on a microscopic stage at the East Anglian Railway Museum, the spot where Blur first played, twenty years ago, for a birthday. Then, a couple of nights later, they showed up for a surprise gig at the legendary Rough Trade Records, setting in motion a whole planned series of sold-out shows that include a Glastonbury headline, a dwarfish student-union date where members of the band first met, and their now double-day-sized Hyde Park celebration.

And the songs! While singles like 1992's "Popscene," 1997's "Beetlebum," and 1994's "Girls & Boys" have been in the sets — and should be there, fucking classics — so are relatively obscure and hardly fan-favored ones like "Colin Zeal," "Trimm Trabb," "Essex Dogs," and the timeless (and wonderful!) "Badhead".

Oh, yeah. The new best-of? Crazy pants.

Unlike the one in 2000, Midlife: A Beginner's Guide To Blur — a nice self-dig and a reference to their biggest album — is all over the place. "Bugman"? Into "He Thought Of Cars"? "Blue Jeans"? Into "Song 2"? And "Death Of A Party"? Into "The Universal"? Madness. The whole thing's an odd confetti splash of big and small songs, a mass-market brew of hits and what-has-to-be personal favorites.

Boom! Sold.

Blur have also started some web-widget thing. Inside, they've been adding live and rehearsal footage here and there, which is nice.

See if it works.

We like the use of The Sex Pistols' "Pretty Vacant" before "Bank Holiday." We like hearing the criminally undervalued "Out Of Time" unspool itself into the waters again. We really like the skronked out new touches to the head-on blitzkrieg-sunshine bit of "Sunday Sunday".

About the comeback gig, bassist Alex James wrote, "The sound of music I never thought I'd hear again."

And, "Not a dry eye in the house."

Maybe they do know what they're doing.

Tinkly!

But even better, thanks to a friend, here's an ignore-the-Lindsay-Lohan-bit bootleg of Lily's more electro-spastic and stupid-fun live version she did in Los Angeles last week.

(Spoiler!)

It may be tonight's finale.

Better be.

Hat tip: Cole.

There’s always the unrealistic hope that once a band signs on to a major label they’ll use their newfound money and power to make better art than they could have before. It hardly ever happens, but when it does, knowing that a band you believed in didn’t screw you over even though they had all the chances in the world is a great feeling. After seeing Mastodon at the Rockstar Mayhem tour last summer with Slipknot and Disturbed, even though they were an oasis of awesome in a barren desert of bullshit, I feared my days of praising the band were doomed to an end. Thankfully I couldn’t have been more wrong. Finagling a copy of their upcoming record has firmly planted an “I Still Love Mastodon” bumper sticker on my brain, and it’s going to be there for a while still. Crack the Skye is totally tits.

It’s hard classifying the new record in terms of genre. Everything the band has done before has been metal first and foremost, but their new record is a much more prog album than a metal one. It’s still quite heavy, but the heavy doesn’t seem to be the emphasis anymore. There are several vocal sections you can — and want to — sing (not scream) along to, and the album is packed with guitar melodies that triumphantly noodle into outer space. Then there’s the actual concept of the record. Drummer Brann Dailor explains it in this Billboard interview:

It's about a crippled young man who experiments with astral travel. He goes up into outer space, goes too close to the sun, gets his golden umbilical cord burned off, flies into a wormhole, is thrust into the spirit realm, has conversations with spirits about the fact that he's not really dead, and they decide to help him. They put him into a divination that's being performed by an early-20th-century Russian Orthodox sect called the Klisti, which Rasputin is part of. Knowing Rasputin is about to be murdered, they put the young boy's spirit inside of Rasputin. Rasputin goes to usurp the throne of the czar and is murdered by the Yusupovs, and the boy and Rasputin fly out of Rasputin's body up through the crack in the sky and head back. Rasputin gets him safely back into his body.

Ugh…drugs. On their upcoming tour the band will be playing Crack the Skye in it’s entirety. Seattle will get the pleasure April 22nd at Neumos, with Kylesa and Intronaut opening. Mastodon also hope to make a short film to accompany the record, a la The Wall.

Go to their Myspace to hear the single, “Divinations.” It’s one of the few instances where my favorite track off a record, especially a record full of long, indulgent prog tunes, is the three and a half minute radio single. But what can I say? This song has everything you could possibly want out of single: it’s catchy, it’s memorable, and it totally shreds. I hope mainstream rock radio plays the crap out of it, because it’s probably going to be the best major label rock single to be released all year. Crack the Skye will available in stores on March 24th.

Britney's opening act for the Circus tour?

Fuckin' K-Fed.

Word up.

Thanks, Hickey.

Baffling, but good for them:

NATALIE PORTMAN’S SHAVED HEAD LANDS OPENING SLOT ON LILY ALLEN U.S. TOUR DATES BEGIN ON APRIL 1

Band Makes SXSW Debut in 2009

New York, NY — Seattle’s own Natalie Portman’s Shaved Head (NPSH) will hit the road as special guests on the upcoming Lily Allen US tour this spring. The party caravan starts April 1 in San Diego, CA and includes stops in Los Angeles, the band’s hometown of Seattle, and NYC. (complete
tour itinerary below). NPSH will also hit up select cities along the Lily Allen tour with headlining solo dates.

[...]

NPSH Tour Itinerary:
March 19 Austin, TX SXSW Music Festival
March 20 Austin, TX SXSW Music Festival
March 21 Austin, TX SXSW Music Festival
March 22 Austin, TX SXSW Music Festival
April 1 San Diego, CA House of Blues
April 2 Los Angeles, CA Wiltern
April 4 San Francisco, CA Warfield
April 6 Seattle, WA Showbox SoDo
April 8 Salt Lake City, UT In the Venue
April 9 Denver, CO Ogden Theatre
April 11 Minneapolis, MN First Avenue
April 12 Chicago, IL Vic Theatre
April 13 Detroit, MI St. Andrews Hall
April 14 Cincinnati, OH Mad Hatter*
April 15 Atlanta, GA Variety Playhouse
April 16 Chapel Hill, NC Local 506*
April 17 Washington, DC 9:30 Club
April 18 Philadelphia, PA TLA
April 19 Boston, MA House of Blues
April 20 New York, NY Roseland Ballroom
April 22 Toronto, ON Phoenix Concert
Theatre

*Marks NPSH Headlining Dates. All Other Dates Outside of Austin Are Opening Slot Dates For Lily Allen

April 13, 2009
Sebastian Tellier, Chairlift
@ Chop Suey
$12adv/$14dos
8pm Doors /21+

Advance tickets now available online and at both Sonic Boom Records locations.

Dates are posted after the jump for those of you in the 20 cities the tour does hit.

According to Seattle’s King5 News, Ne-Yo was a no-show at a much-anticipated New Year’s bash and has yet to issue refunds.

Billed as the biggest New Year’s Eve bash in the Bellevue area, featuring the “Year of the Gentleman” star, the Meydenbauer Center charged concertgoers $75 - $1,200 for tickets and exclusive VIP access - unfortunately for them there would be no Ne-Yo, no “Miss Independent” and definitely no performance of “Closer”.

Party-goer Michael Brandt told King5: “At 11:30 they had a pre-recorded message from Ne-Yo. He was on a plane from Nigeria and not able to come. They probably knew a day in advance. They could have cancelled or given a refund.”

Promoted for weeks, the Meydenbauer concert sold nearly 300 tickets but the promoters have yet to refund ticket holders who attended the bash with the hope of seeing Ne-Yo.

If you’re searching for a refund King5 says good luck. the sponsor Wet Entertainment can’t be found on the web and the local marketing manager’s phone no longer works.

I will file this incident under The Globalization of Black Entertainment.

The concert industry has so far bucked the recession, according to year-end data from trade magazine Pollstar, but promoters are bracing for a bumpy 2009.

Box-office receipts from North American concerts through December were $4.2 billion, up 7.8% from 2007. But the total number of tickets sold for the 100 top-grossing shows fell 3%, to 35.6 million, the second consecutive year of declines. The growth in revenue was the result of rising ticket prices. The average ticket to one of the 100 top-grossing shows cost $66.90, up $4.83, or 8%, from 2007 and more than double the average price in 1998.

That could spell trouble in 2009.

"At some point, this rampant unemployment is going to hit the concert industry," said Randy Phillips, chief executive of Anschutz Corp.'s AEG Live, the world's second-largest concert promoter by revenue, behind Live Nation Inc.

i don’t wanna get all deep like it was an omen but those that know me (look at my twit/facebook/myspace/okayplayer/blip history) know that when not onstage i am glued to my computer, doing some sort of activity like converting music or tv shows. but this was a rare occurrence in which i actually went to sleep.
next thing i knew was the most surreal feeling ever….
was i upside down?
why am i covered in cereal?
oh shit….that coffee pot is coming for my face!!!
in reality the crash was all of about 7 seconds….but to do a 360 on the highway and end up ramped up (the van that crashed into ours was UNDER our double decker bus) in the air….is….well…
a frigging miracle.

And then whip out his cellphone: "Just wanna be the first celeb to twit... from an ambulance."

"Why am I covered in cereal?" That, my friends is the eternal question.

^{Photos by Tyler/Rabid Child Images}

So tonight in San Diego, Ben got stung by a SCORPION. Twice. I couldn’t make this stuff up if I tried, file this under “things that really happen on rock tours.” Ben’s okay, if not a little shaken, but we were worried for awhile because the scorpion was a little guy and when it comes to the wonderful world of scorpions, the smaller the deadlier.

Read more about the incident (and see a picture of the lil' bugger) here.

(Thanks to Matt for the tip.)