Photos: More Scandalous Xiu Xiu Tour Polaroids

So last time, we got a candid look at the wild-n-crazy kids of Xiu Xiu and their hotel room antics as the trio (with documentarian/photographer/tour manager/merch guy David Horvitz in tow) made its way across North America in support of The Air Force. That tour has finally wrapped up, but the insanity lives on in this latest batch of Polaroids from Horvitz, taken on film submitted by fans-- which means they might just wind up in your mailbox in the near future. Hide your mom.

Click to catch your pals Jamie, Caralee, Ches, and David in action, with special guests Deerhoof, BARR, and Vu Vu the stuffed seal, tour mascot extraordinaire. I think it's safe to say the ante has been upped this time. NSFW, unless you work at some fetish shop or something. [MORE...]

Klaxons, Simian Mobile Disco on New Kitsune Comp
Also: The Gossip, the Whitest Boy Alive, the Lovely Feathers, Oh No! Oh My!, Digitalism

The Frenchies at hipster dance label Kitsuné, who also happen to be the owners of the most viscerally ugly website on the internet, will release their third Maison compilation on November 27.

Maison 3 features exclusive tracks from Simian Mobile Disco, Digitalism, Dead Disco, the Whip, Fox N' Wolf, FreeForm Five, Boys Noize, Alex Gopher, the World Domination (produced by Adamsky), and the Valentinos. Though their contributions are not exclusive to the compilation, Klaxons, the Gossip, the Whitest Boy Alive, Oh No! Oh My!, and the Lovely Feathers are also featured. [MORE...]

Report: Morrissey [Chicago, IL; 11/21/06]

Things fans of Morrissey do unabashedly: wear Morrissey t-shirts to Morrissey's show, do their hair up in Morrissey-esque tufts, scream and shriek and squeal like it's the second coming when the man so much as exposes his belly button. These Moz-philes turned out en masse for their savior's lone U.S. appearance this season-- numbers enough to sell out Chicago's Aragon Ballroom, a cavernous space decked out like Atlantis with the heavens painted on the ceiling. In other words, an apt setting for our Pope of Mope and his starstruck congregation.

Opener and fellow Attack Records chum Kristeen Young made an awful lot of racket with just a cheap keyboard, some samples, and a drummer. Recalling Kate Bush at her most rambunctious (think, perhaps, "Sat in Your Lap"), Young's bombastic pop songs effectively filled the enormous space and overpowered the chatterboxes, even if they taxed after a while, sometimes becoming gratingly shrill or bulbous. Quite a shock to learn she's from St. Louis. And turns out she has a song called "Kill the Father"-- one wonders if it's a proactive response to Moz's "The Father Who Must Be Killed", from this year's Ringleader of the Tormentors. At least they're on the same page when it comes to both melodrama and patricide.

We were teased between sets by projected performance videos from pop idols of yore-- Elvis, Jacques Brel, Brigitte Bardot-- and prior to Young's set, the inexplicable blasting of Dvořák's famous cello concerto (perhaps playing off the concertmaster cover image from Tormentors?). So the room was pretty much saturated in drama and theatrics by the time Moz took the stage in a sharp crimson dress shirt to the tune of a thousand banshee wails.



Moz and his nondescript, uniformed five-man band wasted no time, tommy-gunning through Smiths favorite "Panic" and his own "First of the Gang to Die" and "The Youngest Was the Most Loved", setting a trend that would endure through the night: Smiths classic, couple newer songs, diva-like one-liner to audience. Moz began those quips by diva-fying Twain's exaggerated death reports line, and later invited a fan to help him rail on Americans for not being "sufficiently intelligent" enough to pay attention to him. Indeed, I chatted with a security guard prior to the show who'd never heard of this "Morrissey guy".

The band, meanwhile, were at their best when they slipped out of workman mode and breathed atmosphere behind the Moz man's wailings, using a room-rattling symphonic gong and bass drum to conjure up a thunderstorm during "Life Is a Pigsty", which cleared the way for that epochal whirlybird guitar that could only mean "How Soon Is Now" had arrived at last. The night's biggest travesties, however? No "Suedehead", and only a one-song encore (a good one though: "Please, Please, Please Let Me Get What I Want").



All said, Moz is an ace showman and it's not often you witness a man in his late forties, mane graying, tearing off his shirt, flinging it into the audience, and looking ridiculously sexy while doing so. [MORE...]

Silver Jews Cancel Year-End Shows

After their successful transition to touring band this year, we were all ready to name David Berman and his Silver Jews Touring Rookies of the Year. But all good things must come to an end, even if that end was back in early September, when the Jews played their last shows of 2006.

Though we previously reported they would play a December 30 date at New York's Webster Hall and a New Year's Eve date at Pearl Street in Northampton, Massachusetts, David Berman recently posted a note on the Silver Jews' website canceling the shows, chalking the cancellations up to the band's need for "winterization."

Berman also explained that he will begin writing for a new album, which he described as "the first thing I've written where the surface tension is acting at all points of the larger composition simultaneously, much like a soap bubble. Huh."

Since he is the poet, we have copied his entire note (full of such descriptions and questionably true claims, such as the involvement of "the horn players from Cherry Poppin' Daddies AND Big Bad Voodoo Daddy" in the canceled shows) for you to read after the jump. It also contains the second mention of Wim Wenders' Wings of Desire in today's Pitchfork news. Weird. [MORE...]

The Ex Announce Tour

Dutch punks the Ex have scheduled a two-week tour of the U.S. for December, and they've recruited DJ Rupture, Aloha, and new Thrill Jockey signees Arbouretum to support them.

Ex guitarist (but not ex-guitarist) Andy Moor is also the music director and sound designer for Wings of Desire, a play based on the Wim Wenders film of the same name. It's "about the borders, visible and invisible, that divide us," according to the website of the American Repertory Theatre, the Cambridge, Massachusetts location where the Wings will run from November 25 to December 17. [MORE...]

Damon Albarn's Resume Is Better Than Yours

You'd think being in Blur would be enough to prove your musical worth to the world for a long time, but Damon Albarn keeps dipping his hands in whatever he can find.

As previously reported, Albarn's The Good, the Bad and the Queen will release their self-titled debut LP in January, and Gorillaz just released a whole ani-metric ton of Demon Days-related material. But those are just the beginning.

Billboard.com reports that Albarn produced Algerian group El Gusto's forthcoming album, due out in the spring on his Honest Jon's label. He also wrote the score to "Monkey: Journey to the West", a circus opera piece based on a Chinese legend and scheduled to premiere June 28 at the Manchester International Festival of Arts.

Then there is the requisite multimedia collaboration: a feature-length Gorillaz movie, on which Albarn is collaborating with director Terry Gilliam (Monty Python, Brazil, Twelve Monkeys, etc.)

MP3: El-P: "Smithereens (Stop Cryin)"

In preparation for the March 20 release of El-P's I'll Sleep When You're Dead (about which he spilled the beans to Pitchfork here) on Def Jux, the label head/producer/MC has offered up the first MP3 from the album: "Smithereens (Stop Cryin)". And no, it has nothing to do with this band.

Flutes, saxophones, and helicopter noises pass in and out of dense electronic textures in the kind of mix that's been El-P's signature, but from which we thought he had been trying to distance himself. Then again, dude did collaborate with Trent Reznor on this album.

Between this song's title and the references to "Mayor Doomberg," there's probably a manifesto on the modern landscape of New York in here somewhere, but it's a little hard to make it out.

Joanna Newsom to Tour UK With Orchestra

After conquering North America with a small fleet, Joanna Newsom will take on a full-blown army. When she hits the UK early next year, she will be joined by the Northern Sinfonia and the London Symphony Orchestra. As of right now, only four lucky British cities will get the orchestral treatment; we can only hope more will be added.

As previously reported, Newsom will continue to knock off a landslide of North American dates (including a free gig at the Madison Pop Festival), many alongside boytoy Bill Callahan, before the holiday season arrives. [MORE...]

Photos/Videos: Frida Hyvonen [Chicago, IL; 11/19/06]

The quaint, cramped, and normally noisy Beat Kitchen miraculously proved an ideal venue for Frida Hyvönen's Chicago debut, as the tall, charming, and alarmingly frank Swede rolled through town to share selections from her solid Secretly Canadian debut, Until Death Comes.

Frida romped through nearly everything on Death, starting off a bit rusty but gaining confidence as the night wore on-- and as the wine glasses ("Chardonnay!" she joked) atop her compact piano multiplied. The refreshingly attentive audience took kindly to her between-song banter and idle ivory-tickling, the former made all the more endearing in slightly broken, delightfully accented English.

Only "The Modern" came across a mite thin and anticlimactic in the hushed room-- minus the multi-tracked vocals that enliven its finale on record-- but Frida more than made up for it with a handful of new tunes, including a song about touring England, an ace set-closer, and a "Heart and Soul"-esque sampling from her score to the prancing-pooch dance production Püdel.

Watch Frida perform and explain that Püdel tune, as well as Infinite Mixtape selection "I Drive My Friend", by clicking the magic YouTube triangles below.

"I Drive My Friend"

Song from Püdel

[MORE...]

Mates of State Launch Tour With Asobi Seksu

The Gardner-Hammel family has decided to take a break from it all and hit the road. Vacation destination? Nearly two-dozen dark, smoky clubs across Europe and the U.S.-- welcome to paradise, lovebirds!

Mates of State have expanded their previously announced tour with Asobi Seksu. In addition to tacking on a few extra dates with the Brooklyn four-piece, the pair-- who just wrapped up a hefty overseas trek with We Are Scientists-- have announced two New Year's Eve party-gigs going down at NYC's Knitting Factory. [MORE...]

MP3: The Shins: "Phantom Limb"

Remember that Shins track that we told you about when it was streaming on their MySpace page? Well, now you can download it from Sub Pop's website. Just to let you know.

Shins! New shit! Wincing the Night Away! In stores January 23! Cop that shit! (Gunshot noises)

Premiere: Video: The Blow: "Parentheses"
Also, the Blow tour Australia, hit French college radio

Now that the Blow have started to get the recognition they deserve, they've upgraded from a Paper Television to the real thing.

In the pair's latest video, for the Paper Television track "Parentheses", Khaela Maricich and Jona Bechtolt take on some drunken nighttime karaoke while watching TV. Instead of singing, however, they perform a hilarious alcohol-induced hug-happy dance.

[MORE...]

Do you have a news tip for us? Anything crazy happen at a show you attended recently? Do you have inside info on the bands we cover? Is one of your favorite artists (that's not somebody you know personally) releasing a new record you'd like to see covered? You will remain completely anonymous, unless we are given your express permission to reveal your identity. (Please note that publicists, managers, booking agents, and other artist representatives are generally exempt from this rule, but will also be granted anonymity if requested.)