“A Place for Dead Roads” by Other Passengers which clocks in at 8:41.

Tomorrow is Halloween. The time for spooks and ghouls and ghastly tales of the macabre and tricks and treats. In the spirit of the holiday I’d like to share a story with you. It’s my story, it is an entirely true story. In fact, the events that occurred are more accurately retold in this particular story than in many of the other true life tales I’ve told in the 8+ series. This is a true, honest, ghost story. As for the song, well, nothing goes better with a ghost story on Halloween than a bit of the old Other Passengers. The title of the song, as you will see, is a somewhat of an intentional coincidence. Read more

Mastodon unveil details of their new 7-song, 50 minute album Crack The Skye

There’s a punk rock auction going down at Christie’s

RIP Terrin Durfey of Pinback, who passed away after a long battle with cancer

Animal Collective preview Merriweather Post Pavilion at trippy Harlem listening party

Is Joaquin Phoenix’s new band already having commitment issues?

The Hives being sued for alleged plagiarism, tick tick lawsuit

Nick Hornby learns the art of songwriting from Ben Folds

Bloc Party does a Take Away show for La Blogotheque

Is NYC venue Rehab closing November 1st?

LA prosecutor tells jurors that Phil Spector murdered actress Lana Clarkson in a “petulant fit of rage”

AC/DC’s Black Ice easily debuts at number one on the charts

Sonic Youth inspires book of short fiction

Just in time for a nice holiday push, America’s favorite torchbearers of Liberace schmaltz – The Killers – return next month with the brand new studio album Day & Age. I say “brand new” somewhat loosely, however, and not because of all the chatter about how it’s a return to Hot Fuss’s synth-heavy hooks or any of that; nah, I’ll just keep insulating myself from critical interpretation of the Killers’ canon if it’s all the same to you.

You see, even without any prior research into readymade topics like the band’s “mission statement”, “evolution”, or “intent” on this album – all of which I’m sure will be peddled for journalist fodder on imminent magazine covers and such – I can tell you right now that there’s most likely not a hell of a lot about Day & Age that will be new or interesting.

The whole affair just has a worn feel to it, something that’s awfully familiar, and it’s not just in the Eurythmics-aping video for the first single “Human”, which finds Flowers and company in the desert wearing some sort of extinct bird’s plumage and in possession of a few Blue Man Group stage props (watch it HERE).

The real familiarity comes with the album’s tracklisting, a spread of 10 names so bland and hackneyed that you can’t help but feel they’ve already been used many times as song titles or derived from previous sources: Read more

Indianapolis based music blog My Old Kentucky Blog has just recently launched a brand new video site called The LaundroMatinee. They explain…

Last week MOKB finally launched our new video/in-studio session website LaundroMatinee! We began work back in April with the idea to start filming our MOKB/SIRIUS sessions (that’s why you haven’t really seen any on MOKB since then) and now we’re finally ready to show the past few months of work off in this new site designed by our friends at Small Box Web Design.

You can read all about it or you can just watch the sessions we’re currently featuring…

I don’t know about you, but I think I’ll opt for the latter and check out the sessions with EAR FARM favs The Rosebuds.

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  The Rosebuds~Hold Hands and Fight (live in-studio) from LaundroMatinee on Vimeo.
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  The Rosebuds~Get Up Get Out from LaundroMatinee on Vimeo.
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  The Rosebuds~Cemetary Lawn (Live in studio) from LaundroMatinee on Vimeo.

EAR FARM’s Three for Free: three EF approved, free and legal MP3s posted whenever the mood strikes us. Today’s bands have been brought to you by the letter S. Click on the band name to visit their site, click on the song name to listen to the song. Yesssssss. Read more

Stuck on what to wear for Halloween? Idolator has seven affordable costumes culled from seven great music videos….

….of course, Idolator is also embroiled in some beef with WIRED, nothing like a good old-fashioned NERD-WAR!

“Thriller” zombies descend on Hollywood in attempt to hold the world record

Wilco to appear and perform a song on The Colbert Report this Thursday

And in other Wilco news, they’re back in the studio working on a new album, and so is Band of Horses

Jarvis Cocker to incorporate lectures into his upcoming string of gigs

A Beatles-branded iPod will be ready for Christmas consumption, along with a nice $795 price tag (but it is pretty sweet)

Dean and Britta to score an upcoming Warhol DVD

Elvis Presley is ranked the top-earning dead celebrity, raking in $52 million last year

Paste lists the top 5 stadium show lessons learned from Madonna’s recent United Center show

Stereogum lists their top 8 favorite bands from CMJ ‘08

Okay, yet another CMJ recap, this one from The Village Voice

I so badly wanted to see TK Webb at the Kemado Records CMJ Showcase after having enjoyed him so much back in September. Sadly, a Friday night spent working late caused me to arrive just in time for Marissa Nadler, a delicate songstress in the dream pop vein. Her ethereal tunes gave rise to mental images of goth mermaids and did nothing to resign me to missing Webb and his belligerent Southern roots rock. Read more

The National Post is a Canadian newspaper based within a district of Toronto. Within its pages exists “The Ampersand”, which self-professedly covers “everything between Arts & Life”. Now, within those (online) pages resides “Soundcheck”, a web-based series in which the paper’s editors go backstage and off-stage with some of Canada’s finest musicians. Picture a spin on La Blogotheque’s Take Away shows transported to Canada and you get the idea. Below, watch three recent installments, featuring EF faves Plants and Animals (who are playing at the Bell House tonight) performing “Feedback in the fields” acoustically at the Royal Ontario Museum, Constantines doing their thing in Kensington Market, and Eric’s Trip backstage in Toronto. Read more

Listen: “Golden Retriever” by Super Furry Animals from Phantom Power

View: Image search results for Golden Retriever - above image is from the 1st page of results (and was originally from HERE).
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EAR FARM’s Hit-or-miss is a weekly feature (every Tuesday) wherein the EF music library is put on shuffle, the song that plays is then searched (using the song title) on Google images and a resulting photo (plus an MP3 of the song) is posted. You can see all of EAR FARM’s Hit-or-miss posts thus far right HERE.

MTV launches “a Hulu for music videos”

Pitchfork interviews Randy Newman

Kim Gordon and Katy Perry go topless on eBay for the Keep A Breast Foundation

Rock Camps: perfect for anyone seeking a mid-life crisis

Impose spends a debauched evening with the Black Lips and King Khan

John Paul Jones confirms reports that Led Zeppelin are rehearsing with new singers

Good news everybody, Donny and Marie Osmond extend their Las Vegas residency at the Flamingo until 2010!

Amy Winehouse rushed to hospital (again)

Flaming Lips put their spin on the three-note NBC theme and Guitar Hero

Orange Juice get ready to start up again

Consequence of Sound lists their top 10 “stoner albums”

Largehearted Boy give his weekly list of interesting music releases

Of the many enjoyable ancillary activities during CMJ, can anything even touch the time-honored pleasure of people watching?

Uh, yeah, we think so, and we’ve got the transcripts to prove it. You see, people not only look funny, but they say funny things. And whether that entails laughing with them, or, in other cases, laughing AT them, overhearing conversational snippets, impromptu onstage rants, and drunken ramblings has kind of become its own worthwhile pursuit for us during CMJ.

To commemorate an especially vibrant week of pull quotes, we’ve assembled a list of our favorites (in no particular order) but decided to give it a bit of a twist. Below, you’ll find things we overheard last week; 11 of them are absolutely, legitimately true, but four are definitely, patently fabricated. Can you guess which ones we heard and which are just figments of our sleep-deprived minds? The answer key is at the bottom…. Read more