Rapture, Bloc Party on Black Strobe Remix Comp
Stream: Black Strobe: "Shining Bright Star (Phones industrial version radio edit)"

Parisian dark dance duo Black Strobe will preface the spring release of their debut full-length with the UK release of a selection of their remixes on the aptly titled 10-track A Remix Selection, out December 4 on Playlouderecordings.

The label released A Remix Selection's first track-- "Shining Bright Star (Phones industrial version)"-- today as a 12" single, and it is also available online at the site of the duo's series of podcasts, www.remixblackstrobe.com. The other two current podcast installments are mixes created by both members of Black Strobe, beatmaker Ivan Smagghe and vocalist Arnaud Rebotini.

"Shining Bright Star" is a preview of the upcoming full-length, which is being recorded with Rapture/Bloc Party/Futureheads producer Paul Epworth (aka Phones -- hence the remix name) and My Bloody Valentine/Smashing Pumpkins/Nine Inch Nails engineer/producer Alan Moulder. Seemingly out of character, a press release claims that Black Strobe plan on covering a Muddy Waters song on the currently untitled album.

Black Strobe also have a series of live dates scheduled, most of which are DJ sets of some sort. The shows in Stuttgart, Germany and Rome, however, will feature a live trio, which consists of Rebotini, Benjamin Beaulieu, and a guy named Siskid. Smagghe chooses not to perform at these shows because "being on stage brings general unease... There is a 'show' element that I love in others but cannot imagine for myself." Siskid and Beaulieu are both involved in the recording of the full-length as well. [MORE...]

Futureheads, El Perro, Field Music Rock Xmas Comp
Futureheads + Field Music + Golden Virgins + Kathryn Williams = The Joseph and Mary Chain

It wouldn't be the ho-ho-holidays without some frosty, red-nosed, little seasonal releases, and here's one that should get your Yule log sizzling. On December 11, East Sussex vinyl imprint Izumi Records will toss It's Not Like Christmas down chimneys far and wide, featuring classic covers and wassailing originals by a bunch of UK up'n'comers, a few assorted Swedes, and one bona fide Xmas supergroup. If you haven't a chimney, score it now through iTunes.

The Joseph and Mary Chain, no joke, is the name the Futureheads, Field Music, and the Golden Virgins-- all from Sunderland-- and Newcastle singer-songwriter Kathryn Williams have adopted to serve up a rousing collaborative rendition of "The Twelve Days of Christmas". The festive tune appears alongside jingles from El Perro Del Mar, Envelopes, NME favs Duels, emo-gazers Amusement Parks on Fire (featuring Duke Spirit frontlady Leila Moss), the Electric Soft Parade, Izumi's own Swimming, Duke Special, the Late Greats, and several more.

In the spirit of the season, all album sale profits go directly to Shelter, a UK organization whose mission is to "help people find and keep a home" and to "campaign for decent housing for all."

Stream four jams from It's Not Like Christmas' very own MySpace page, and preorder the album now by clicking here. [MORE...]

Stream: Of Montreal: Hissing Fauna, Are You the Destroyer?

Kids! Get your AIM profiles, MySpace pages, and Facebook fields ready for a serious overhaul, because the new Of Montreal has nearly arrived, and it's percolating with enough Kevin Barnes potent quotables to reinvent your online persona a dozen times over. It's also quite awesome, fun, profound, melodic, disco-danceable, and available to stream in its entirety right now through Polyvinyl Records.

As previously reported, Hissing Fauna, Are You the Destroyer? lands January 23. Just think how rad you-- yes, you, WeezrDude285-- will seem with your profile decked out in lines like "We just want to emote till we're dead" and "Sometimes I wonder if you're mythologizing me/ Like I do you". And toss that SAT prep book out the window, Bl0cPrtyGrl69, as Barnes manages to weave both "emasculate" and "emaciate" into the opening lines of the very first track. Sick!

Truly though, Barnes is on fire here, serving up food for thought, melodies for humming, and grooves for bumpin' in equal measure. "Gronlandic Edit", with trippy vocals swooping in from odd altitudes, should offer solace to anyone questioning religion of late, while "Heimdalsgate Like a Promethean Curse" takes a fanciful look at the wily ways of our own wack minds. "She's a Rejector", meanwhile, has Kevin talking about (and deciding against, thankfully) hitting girls, and "The Past Is a Grotesque Animal" is just an insane, never-ending disco mega-jam. Shit! I'm excited.

New Pornos, Cat Power, Hold Steady to Play Langerado
Also My Morning Jacket, Cut Chemist, but we couldn't fit their names in the headline

The fifth annual Langerado festival has got to be fucking with us at this point. Is it a coincidence that while the staff at Pitchfork HQ Chicago is dreading an oncoming 25-degree temperature drop, a press release rolls in for the fest (which is located in-- I kid you not-- Sunrise, Florida) hyping all its cool new bands and not-so-cool (literally) weather? Nope. It's damn fine marketing, and it's working.

As previously reported, Langerado 2007 will run from March 9-11 at Sunrise's Markham Park. Lineup additions since last time include My Morning Jacket, the New Pornographers, Cat Power, the Hold Steady, and Cut Chemist.

As a reminder, Stephen Malkmus & the Jicks, Girl Talk, Band of Horses, Four Tet and Steve Reid, Blackalicious, Toots and the Maytals, Explosions in the Sky, Sharon Jones & the Dap-Kings, Rodrigo y Gabriela, Apollo Sunshine, and a boatload of jam bands/acts (Widespread Panic, Trey Anastasio, moe., Béla Fleck & the Flecktones, O.A.R., the Disco Biscuits...) will also be present. View the full roster here.

Tickets are on sale this Friday, December 1.

Simply Saucer Reunite for December Show

Canadian proto-punks Simply Saucer will play their first show together in over 27 years on December 28. The show will take place at the Casbah in the band's hometown of Hamilton, Ontario.

In commemoration of the event, Sonic Unyon-- the label responsible for reissuing Simply Saucer's only album, Cyborgs Revisited-- has uploaded two videos to YouTube. The first is a music video for Cyborgs Revisited track "Bullet Proof Nothing", taken from band footage shot by Paul Breau (guitarist Edgar Breau's bro) and compiled by Halifax director Colin MacKenzie. The second is a 2003 feature on the band from the CBC Newsworld show "Play".

DeVotchKa Launch Tour With My Brightest Diamond

DeVotchKa, meet My Brightest Diamond. My Brightest Diamond, DeVotchKa. Now get familiar, because for the next two weeks, you're stuck together with the high-power adhesive known as the North American tour.

Tonight, DeVotchKa start things off sans MBD at Omaha, NE's Sokol Underground. The Brooklyn chanteuse known as Shara Worden and her two-man touring band will come into the picture tomorrow and hang around through December 11.

After the split, Devotchka will play their way across the West Coast with Eric Bachmann and two Denver, Colorodo hometown stints with support from Andrew Bird on New Year's Eve and New Year's Eve Eve.

My Brightest Diamond, on the other hand, will rest up until early February, at which point she'll take her live show to Europe.

As previously reported, on December 5, MBD will release an iTunes-only EP featuring four versions of the Bring Me the Workhorse number "Disappear" and previously unreleased B-side "The Lace Handkerchief". [MORE...]

Andrew Bird Schedules Scattered Shows

Four months ahead of his Fat Possum debut, Armchair Apocrypha (due March 20), and our little go-getter Andrew Bird's already preparing to work a tri-continental tour circuit.

The whistlin' Chicagoan has scheduled shows from December 2006 through April 2007. He'll tote his violin across the U.S. (including two New Year-celebrating gigs with DeVotchKa and Martin Dosh), Europe, and, for the first time ever, Australia.

Bird will kick things off on the first of next month with a stint at Middlebury College's Sepomania Festival. [MORE...]

MP3: Field Music: "Give It Lose It Take It"/"Sit Tight"
Stream: Field Music: "A House Is Not a Home"/"Working to Work"/"Place Yourself"

The sophomore album from taut Sunderland trio Field Music doesn't drop until February 20 in the U.S. and January 22 in the UK, as previously reported, but thanks to the magic of interweb, you can already hear 60% of it from the comfort of your own tiny apartment!

That's right, six of Tones of Town's ten tracks have gone web-ways-- and quite legally, I might add-- in various forms at various cyber-locales. It's like a treasure hunt! For people who hate sunlight! Can you find them all? Here, let us help you cheat:

1. To start, click below for mp3 downloads of Tones' first two tracks, courtesy of the fabulous label delivering the affair, Memphis Industries. You get opener "Give It Lose It Take It" and follow-up "Sit Tight", and like their titles, these jams are sonically quick, clipped, and sharp. Unlike the titles, they're harmonious, and we even get a little strings action. Nicely done.

2. Next, bound on over to MySpace to stream three-- yes, three-- additional Tones tunes: "A House Is Not a Home", "Working to Work", and "Place Yourself". Treat your ears to more string action, some delightful vocal harmonies and interplay, and touches of psychedelia. Now we're cooking.

3. Finally, it wouldn't be a journey down the information superhighway in 2006 without a pit stop at YouTube. Fuel up with a viewing of the video for the sixth Tones offering, single "In Context". The clip's been around for a while, but it's still ace.

4. Bonus! Totally O.D. on Field Music by revisiting non-album favorites "You're Not Supposed To" and "Off and On", in video and mp3 formats, respectively.

5. Get the hell away from the computer and see the band live, for crissakes:

12-20 Newcastle, England - Academy *
01-26 London, England - Tapestry Club at St. Aloysius Church

* with the Futureheads

Babyshambles to Release Capitol Debut EP

Well whaddaya know? A Babyshambles story free of arrests, heroin, and Kate Moss: On December 5, the Pete Doherty-fronted group will make its Capitol Records debut with The Blinding EP, a five-song disc recorded at London's Turnmills Studios this summer. It will first land in the UK on December 4 via Regal.

Director Julien Temple (the Sex Pistols' Great Rock 'n' Roll Swindle and The Filth and the Fury) has already created a video for the disc's title track, and "The Blinding" is right-- this crowded creation is packed with blinking white lights loud enough to bring out the epileptic in all of us. If you're into stabbings, paintings, skulls, and headaches, this one's for you.

The Babyshambles-produced EP will be supported by the band on a European tour that's already underway and scheduled to run through early January. [MORE...]

New Order Tease About Breakup, Diss Curtis Biopic
Also: Peter Hooks talks new bassist supergroup Freebass (ugh)

If recent comments from New Order's rhythm section-- bassist Peter Hook and drummer Stephen Morris-- are to be believed, the legendary quartet might be hanging it up for good.

In an interview published in the November 20 edition of Buenos Aires newspaper Página/12-- and posted the following day in rough translation on New Order fansite NewOrderOnline.com-- Hook told reporters that a November 18 festival gig in Buenos Aires "might be our last show ever."

Hook also shrugged off the band's impending 30-year anniversary, saying "We've been together for 29 years, [and] I don't believe another year would be of importance, truthfully." When asked how the band was getting along, he joked, "We still hate each other. It's a question of love-hate."

Continued Hook, "Sometimes when you're lucky enough to have it all, you don't appreciate it as you should. So you need a reminder of how things were when you didn't have it all. In this moment we do have it all, so perhaps it's time that we lose it, perhaps to begin anew. That's how I feel."

Hook, however, seems generally playful throughout the interview, so it's unclear how much weight these remarks carry.

Morris had plenty to say as well: "This is a strange time to be New Order...It was good a couple of years ago when everyone was saying we were "Godlike Geniuses" [in reference to the NME distinction of that name] and the fans recognized the band. In a certain sense there are now many New Orders around and we're the old guys in the neighborhood..."

The drummer skirted the question about the band's future, however. "I could say there won't be New Order for a couple of years, but...we're bad at planning things, so let's see what happens." [MORE...]

Merge Auctions Autographed CDs for Charity
Robert Pollard, Spoon, Destroyer, Camera Obscura, M. Ward, Lambchop included

The giving people at Merge Records have launched their annual holiday charity auctions by putting what they call a "Merge Mega-Bundle" up for bidding on eBay. The bundle is "one CD copy of every 2006 release signed by the respective artist," which means the winner of the auction will receive signed copies of releases by Spoon, Destroyer, Camera Obscura, Robert Pollard, M. Ward, Portastatic, and Lambchop, among others.

There are plenty more auctions planned to take place soon, and all of their proceeds will go to two charities: Oxfam and Durham, NC substance abuse recovery program TROSA.

All of the releases in the bundle are listed after the jump. [MORE...]

Mission of Burma Announce January Dates

With a second critically acclaimed reunion record, the release of a DVD, plenty of touring (including a stop at the Pitchfork Music Festival), and a NSFW tour diary featured on Pitchfork, Mission of Burma have had a pretty busy year. And if this early announcement of four January shows is any indication, they're in for more of the same next year.

Dates:

01-12 Chicago, IL - Double Door
01-13 Atlanta, GA - The Earl
01-19 New York, NY - Irving Plaza
01-20 Boston, MA - Paradise Theatre

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.)