Photos: She & Him [San Francisco, CA; 03/02/08]

Photos by Natalie Kardos

Their pronouns may not quite align, but their musical stars sure do. She & Him, the new vehicle for closet singer-songwriter Zooey Deschanel and veteran sound-maker M. Ward, graced the stage at San Francisco's Great American Music Hall this past weekend as part of the Noise Pop festival.

Ward and Deschanel play one more gig-- a March 14 SXSW happening at the Parish in Austin-- before unleashing their debut, Volume One, upon the world via Merge on March 18. Catch more photos of She & Him doing her & he's thing below.

SHE & HIM





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Pitchfork Drafts Music for Major League Baseball 2K8
First round picks: LCD Soundsystem, Hold Steady, Battles, Blitzen Trapper, Dinosaur Jr., Jay Reatard, Cool Kids

The approaching Major League Baseball season wouldn't be complete without a cutting-edge video game companion piece, and thus we have Major League Baseball 2K8, the latest such offering from those gaming wizards at 2K Sports.

In addition to graphics that make reality seem second-rate, as well as limitless playability, past 2K Sports offerings have featured bangin' in-game soundtracks, compiled in collaboration with folks like Sub Pop and Matador. This time around, Pitchfork was given the opportunity to select some of the music for Major League Baseball 2K8.

We put our thinking New Era caps on and came up with a pretty tight squad of Pitchfork all-stars, if we do say so ourselves: league leaders LCD Soundsystem, the Hold Steady, and Dinosaur Jr. rock right alongside rated rookies Battles, Jay Reatard, the Cool Kids, and Blitzen Trapper.

2K Sports rounded up a pretty formidable crew of tunes as well, from the likes of Modest Mouse, the Strokes, Peter Bjorn and John, the Cure, and the Flaming Lips, among others.

Check out the complete song list below, read more about "Pitchfork's Picks" here, and take home Major League Baseball 2K8 for your XBox 360, Playstation 2, Playstation 3, PSP, and/or Wii home entertainment system on March 4. [MORE...]

Yes, Radiohead Are Headlining That San Francisco Fest

The rumors were true. Radiohead will indeed be one of the three headliners for San Francisco's Outside Lands Music and Arts Festival. It will take place August 22-24 at Golden Gate Park.

The other headliners? Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers and Radiohead BFFs Jack Johnson.

Thanks to Michael Greenwald for the tip.

New Nine Inch Nails Album Available NOW

"Nine Inch Nails presents Ghosts I - IV, a brand new 36 track instrumental collection available right now. Almost two hours of new music composed and recorded over an intense ten week period last fall, Ghosts I - IV sprawls Nine Inch Nails across a variety of new terrain.

"Trent Reznor explains, "I've been considering and wanting to make this kind of record for years, but by its very nature it wouldn't have made sense until this point. This collection of music is the result of working from a very visual perspective - dressing imagined locations and scenarios with sound and texture; a soundtrack for daydreams. I'm very pleased with the result and the ability to present it directly to you without interference. I hope you enjoy the first four volumes of Ghosts." [MORE...]

Arcade Fire to Rock Ohio for Obama

Win Butler can talk the talk, and now he and several of his Arcade Fire bandmates are prepared to walk the walk in support of Barack Obama's bid for the Democratic Party's presidential nomination.

With several major primaries going down this coming Tuesday (March 4) that could decide the contest once and for all, Butler, Regine Chassagne, Jeremy Gara, and Sarah Neufeld will hit Ohio on Sunday and Monday to drum up support for Obama.

On Sunday March 2, they will play a show at Stuart's Opera House in Nelsonville. Then on Monday, March 3, they'll play at the Beachland Ballroom in Cleveland. Start lining up now, because the shows are free and first come, first serve. Colin Stetson will open.

BUT WAIT! Aren't Arcade Fire Canadian? Why are they meddling with our political process?

NOT SO FAST. A press release clarifies: "Though the Arcade Fire is known as a Canadian band, Win and Will were born and raised in the U.S. (and spent their formative years in Texas), Regine is a dual citizen whose dad served in Vietnam, and Jeremy Gara is just a really nice Canadian who likes playing music and is sick of explaining to Americans what universal health care means."

GOBAMA!

Most Serene Republic, Miracle Fortress, Liam Finn Tour

Most Serene Republic photo by Ben Telford

Fans of complex, comely Canadian indie pop with a dash of New Zealand singer/songwriter, the tour of 2008 has arrived... almost. Think About Life's Graham Van Pelt and his Miracle Fortress project will join up with the Most Serene Republic and Liam Finn for a week of U.S. shows in late March.

All three acts have new and new-ish releases to promote: MSR's Population, which dropped in October on Arts & Crafts, Miracle Fortress' Five Roses got a Secret City release in May, and Finn's I'll Be Lightning, out last month on Yep Roc.

Everybody also has dates of their own surrounding their time together.

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Kelley Polar Claims Sky Is Falling on New Album

It's been just over a year since our initial mention of I Need You to Hold on While the Sky Is Falling, ethereal disco artist Kelley Polar's follow-up to 2005's Love Songs of the Hanging Gardens. Way back when, the disc had no name, no release date, hardly anything but the ability to cause strong pangs of anticipation in its potential listeners. It still has that, of course, but now it has all those fun details too.

Polar's I Need You to Hold On is due March 4 on Environ, the label owned by frequent Polar collaborator and Falling mixer Morgan Geist. Rhapsody and iTunes users can scoop it up right now, though.

Meanwhile, a tour featuring Polar's new live band is expected to follow sometime this year, and Polar himself will be at Brooklyn's Studio B tomorrow night (March 1) for an Environ label "Bar Mitzvah", along with DJ sets from Metro Area, Dan Selzer, and Junior Boy Jeremy Greenspan.

In other Kelley Polar news, he got his hands on Caribou's "She's the One", remixing the track for a recent single. [MORE...]

Ellen Allien Preps Boogy Bytes Mix, New Album

Bpitch Control label head Ellen Allien will add herself to the company of Sascha Funke, Modeselektor, and Kiki as the curator of the newest volume of her label's Boogy Bytes mix series. Boogy Bytes Vol.04 will feature tracks from Funke, Ricardo Villalobos & Patrick Ense, and German sound-manipulator AGF, among others.

Bpitch will release the mix in Europe on March 31 and in the U.S. on April 15 March 31. The U.S. release will feature the Martin Buttrich remix of Friendly People's "Music Is Improper", as opposed to the Damien Schwartz remix on the European version.

UPDATE: The Damien Schwartz remix is on the U.S. version as well.

Ellen Allien also teamed up with AGF to produce SOOL, Allien's new album, which comes out via Bpitch at the end of May. She has a ton of tour dates around the world to keep her busy until then. [MORE...]

Photos: Wilco [Washington, DC; 02/27/08]

Photos by Will Marsh

En route to tickling our funny bones tomorrow night on "Saturday Night Live", perennial favorites Wilco rolled through Washington, DC's 9:30 Club for the second consecutive night on Wednesday.

Jeff Tweedy and his merry band of music-makers will continue making said music in a merry fashion following Saturday's "SNL" performance. The Sky Blue Sky-gazers resume in Nashville on March 2, and keep pushing along on a steady clip through the end of the month. An August 8 make-up date in Charleston awaits as well, and a new tune from the crew will turn up on that there "Heroes" thinger.

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Black Dice Line Up European Tour

Photo by Akmal Naim

Clickety clack, Europe! Clear a little corner, warm up your tossin' arm and get ready for a rousing round of Black Dice. The New York noisemakers have big plans to bring a Load of their electroid madness over much of the continent, as the band embark on a tour sure to beguile and bewilder in equal measure. It kicks off tomorrow night in Düsseldorf, Germany.

In other Black Dice news, they've got a track on the Living Bridge compilation, and No Age singer/drummer Dean Spunt's PPM label recently issued Eric Copeland's 2007 solo joint Hermaphrodite on vinyl. [MORE...]

Original Killing Joke Lineup Reunites for Album, Tour

30 years after forming and 26 since they last played live together, the original lineup of influential post-punk band Killing Joke has reformed for a new album and a tour. (Via Paper Thin Walls.)

The album will come out this summer, but details remain scarce. The tour, however, is a carefully planned affair. It currently consists of a month of dates across the world this fall, with a fair number of two-night residencies. On the first night of each residency, vocalist/keyboardist Jaz Coleman, guitarist Geordie Walker, drummer Paul Ferguson, and bassist Martin "Youth" Glover (who you might know from his production work for the Verge and the Orb) will tear through their first two albums-- 1980's Killing Joke and 1981's What's This For?-- in their entirety. The second night will feature the foursome doing the same for 1994's Pandemonium and their singles released on Island Records in 1979 and 1980.

Finally, Let Them Eat Vinyl is in the midst of reissuing Killing Joke's catalog on LP. The campaign continues over the next few months with reissues of Revelations, Fire Dances, Night Time, Outside the Gate, and Brighter Than a Thousand Suns. [MORE...]

Annuals Release Split EP With Themselves

Photo by Autumn de Wilde

On Wet Zoo, the first release we've heard from this North Carolinian lot for quite some time, Annuals will be splitting the EP with... Annuals?! How in the heck does that work?

Easier than you'd think. The Wet Zoo EP features a trio of all-new contributions from Annuals and a pair from a band called Sunfold. Thing is, Sunfold is Annuals, with one fairly major difference: instead of Annuals main man Adam Baker taking the reigns, the Sunfold recordings are spearheaded by Annuals lead guitarist Kenny Florence. Apart from that distinction, it's the very same band, with a very different name, with what we're told is a "very different, more guitar-heavy" sound, on the very same split EP.

Got that? It took three of us all afternoon to write that paragraph.

Wet Zoo, with its five frolicsome tunes of frontman-switcheroo, is due April 1 on Ace Fu and Sony imprint Canvasback Music. The band, meanwhile, are due in Raleigh tonight for a gig, to be followed a month later by another North Carolina gig, and followed a month after that by Coachella. An Annuals full-length is in the works for 2008, and more dates are on the way from both bands. Though, for their sake, hopefully not at the same time. [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.)