It's no mystery, actually  - just depends on which country you live in.

By Blurt Staff

Eagle-eyed, ever-alert journalists that we are, we couldn't help doing a doubletake when the new album from Regina, Saskatchewan, based combo Library Voices dropped through the office mailchute. Titled Summer Of Lust and issued October 18th on Dine Alone Records, the album's stuffed with the band's trademark upbeat, all-over-the-map indie rock and will be preceded by an extensive Canadian tour - and before that, this week in fact, the group - which can number as many as ten people onstage at any given time - will be doing a string of west coast US dates. See itinerary, below, and check out a track from the album.

Library Voices - Generation Handclap by Nevado

About that doubletake: the copy we have features a pair of attractive young hipsters posing in the nude, and while it's not quite John & Yoko territory - they are depicted from their waists up, and the gal has her long hair discreetly draped over her breasts - it's guaranteed to draw a few extra eyes when the art turns up on the front page of websites and blogs or on the walls of record shops. Upon gazing at the press info accompanying the CD, however, we did a second doubletake: the sleeve art, also reproduced on the press sheet, showed an entirely different female, this one blonde in the exact same pose as the redhead. Compare the 2 photos:

The blonde-laden image also appears on the band's official page at the Dine Alone websit and has already been published on a handful of blogs and websites, including AltSounds.com and FluorescentNoise.com. But for the most part, it's the redhead iteration that has surfaced thus far on the web, which left us scratching our heads. Is the band releasing alternate covers simultaneously (you know, like, uh, Led Zeppelin did back in the day), or was one sleeve manufactured and then withdrawn due to some unspecified legal situation (shades of the Vampire Weekend Contra dust-up), or...?

Probably unrelatedly, the wags at the band's hometown arts/lifestyle publication in Regina, Prairie Dog, decided to tamper with the redhead sleeve by creating an animated GIF:

Settle down, conspiracy theorists. A quick message over to the group's handlers cleared things up. We were advised, succinctly, "The red hair girl was for the Canadian release, the blonde girl cover for US release. Album is out on Nevado in Canada and Dine Alone in US."

So that clears things up - sorta. One lingering question remains, however: does this suggest that Canadians prefer their gals thin, tattooed  and redheaded; and Americans, busty and blonde?

Tour Dates:

Aug 30            Portland, OR   Rotture

Sep 01             Los Angeles , CA       Hotel Cafe

Sep 04             San Francisco, CA      Rickshaw Stop

Sep 06             Salt Lake City, UT      Kilby Court

Sep 16             Saskatoon, SK            Amigos Cantina

Sep 17             Edmonton, AB           Pawn Shop

Sep 19             Jasper, AB       Horseshoe Club

Sep 20             Kelowna, BC The Habitat

Sep 22             Vancouver, BC           Biltmore Cabaret (Presented by The Peak 100.5FM)

Sep 23             Victoria, BC    Rifflandia Festival

Sep 24             Victoria, BC    Rifflandia Festival

Sep 25             Robert's Creek, BC     The Gumboot

Sep 27             Penticton, BC             The Barking Parrot

Sep 28             Nelson, BC     Spirit Bar

Sep 29             Canmore, AB Canmore Hotel

Sep 30             Calgary, AB    The Gateway (Presented by X92.9FM)

Oct 01             Regina, SK      The Exchange

Oct 04             Chicago, IL     Beat Kitchen

Oct 07             Brooklyn, NY             Spike Hill

Oct 13             Hamilton, ON             Casbah

Oct 14             Kingston, ON             Mansion

Oct 15             Wakefield, ON           Black Sheep Inn

Oct 18             Charlottetown, PEI     Baba's

Oct 19             Moncton, NB Plan B

Oct 20             Fredericton, NB          Capital

Oct 21             Halifax, NS     Halifax Pop Explosion - Seahorse Tavern

Oct 25             Quebec City, PQ         Le Cercle

Oct 26             Montreal, PQ Casa De Popolo

Oct 27             Peterborough, ON       Trash

Oct 28             Toronto, ON   Horseshoe Tavern

Oct 29             Guelph, ON    E Bar

Oct 30             Windsor, ON Phog Lounge

Bluesman was a peer of Robert Johnson and a celebrated performer in his own right.

By Fred Mills

Chicago-based Delta bluesman David "Honeyboy" Edwards passed away yesterday, Aug. 29, at the age of 96, from congestive heart failure. Media reports indicate that he had a weak heart and he'd recently suffered a series of health issues that, in May, led him to cancel all his concerts for the remainder of the year.

Edwards was born in 1915 I Mississippi and by the age of 14 was living the life of a traveling musician, performing with Big Joe Williams, Charley Patton, Tommy Johnson, Johnny Shines - and Robert Johnson. He's said to have been on hand when Johnson died from drinking poisoned whiskey, and he told some of his stories about Johnson in the '91 documentary The Search for Robert Johnson.

He recorded a number of albums over the years, including tracks for Alan Lomax's Library of Congress collection, was inducted into the Blues Hall of Fame in '96, and he also wrote a memoir in 1997 titled You Don't Owe Me Nothing. His label, Earwig Music, issued an album of the same name, and the book and CD helped raise Edwards' profile once again, leading him to be profiled in numerous music publications and notch a series of music awards over the course of the next decade. In 2007, he also appeared in the music mockumentary Walk Hard: The Dewey Cox Story.

[Photo from 2008 by Bengt Nyman, via Wikimedia Commons]

Make that, the quintessential American bar band...

By Blurt Staff

The legendary Del-Lords will be playing a surprise show at the Lakeside Lounge (162 Ave B, in NYC) tonight, Aug. 30, under the name "Elvis Club". The show will be a warm-up for their Turbo-Rock Festival gig in Spain this weekend.

It's a rare US performance for the band, who formed in '82 and lasted for about a decade for splitting up and going on to their own projects. But then, out of the blue, Eric "Roscoe" Ambel, Scott Kempner, and Frank Funaro reunited last year to record and release a limited edition ep, Under Construction, which was produced by Ambel.

Under Construction can be heard here: http://del-lords.com/music/

They will be in the studio next week finishing up recording their first full-length in two decades. As pretty much any fan can tell you, the Lords were - and still are - one of the greatest American groups, period, classy avatars of roots music and proto-Americana. Most of their albums have been reissued over the years, and the 1999 compilation Get Tough remains essential listening for mix tape fiends and iPod hounds alike.

 That shark - wearing a Britney Spears mask, no doubt - has done been jumped, y'all. Can you spell "Zzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz..."?

By Fred Mills

It's really something when you can say with a straight face that the Grammys have become far more relevant that the annual MTV Video Music Awards. The former, remember, was once the repository of the ossified remains of all the Paul Simons, James Taylors and Elton Johns of the world, not to mention having the singular distinction of once awarding prog-folk legends Jethro Tull "Best Heavy Metal Album" honors. No more, as this year's big win by Arcade Fire and several other indie-centric heroes at the Grammys testified.

Meanwhile, last night over at the VMAs, it was clear that with precious few exceptions, the MTV monolith has redefined "musician" as "multi-platform entertainer." Which means that if you can hoof it like a motherfucker, sing (term used loosely) using a headset and without ever having to physically grip a microphone, get your record label to pony up for the best videographer and director money can buy, and work with a battery of equally overpaid song doctors and dubiously-christened "producers," you are destined to be, as Katy Perry might put it, a music industry firework regardless of any extant talent in manipulating a "D," "G" or "A minor" chord on a guitar, piano or sousaphone.

The main winners' names (see list below) tell the story: Perry, Lady Gaga, Britney Spears Justin Bieber, Kanye West, Nicki Minaj (who, admittedly, had a full reserve of credibility at the outset of her ascent but quickly drained it dry with a succession of red-carpet appearances and silly pink wigs apparently on loan from Perry). As best as we can tell, the only artists who could remotely be termed "musicians" in the classic sense of the term would be rockers the Foo Fighters and hip-hop vocalist Tyler, the Creator (who himself seems destined to follow the usual badboy/superstar arc of rappers, so watch for him making the TMZ and OK! Rounds before too long, and... waitaminnit, are we talking about that avowedly homophobic Tyler?... but he's Pitchfork-approved, so he MUST be cool at the moment, right).

Worth noting, of course, is that the B-list awards (also known as "the ones that don't translate all that well to on-stage choreography for TV") included deserving folks like Adele and the Beastie Boys. And if you scan through the whole list of nominees, you'll come across some serious artists, among them Black Keys, Mumford & Sons, Cee Lo, Rise Against and Taylor Swift. (Foster the People was also in there, but jeez, those clowns - without a doubt the worst band I saw at this year's SXSW in Austin - are just plain awful.) But they all got shut out, blinded by the fireworks-bright lights of the multiplatinum-selling superstars, foregone conclusions, all.

And sure, you can flap your gums all day long about the televised event's sundry "WTF? Moment" performance surprises, left-field cameos and gender-bending antics. (On my personal list of terms to be banned when 2012 dawns: "WTF Moments," "gender-bending.") Everybody loves seeing some top-shelf rappers dancing with a posse of over-the-hill white comedians (that would be, respectively, Odd Future and Will Ferrell, Seth Rogen and Jack Black), not to mention Lady Gaga performing, shockingly, dressed not as a sirloin steak but as - gasp! - a man in a "bold move" to affirm... something, no matter that it's a bold move that kd lang perfected nearly a quarter-century ago. But let's face it, any show that is still handing out awards to Britney Spears in this day and age can't reasonably call itself "cutting edge" any longer. That's the equivalent of another generation giving Paul Simon or James Taylor awards. And the bottom line is, if it don't rock, you can stuff it in a sock. Big production values notwithstanding, the VMAs haven't rocked in a long, long time, with spectacle having firmly replaced serendipity.

That's not even an opinion; it's what they have shot for all along. So one supposes you can't blame anyone for being true unto themselves. It's still bizarre, though, that a stodgy, arthritic institution like the Grammys was able to pick up that serendipity baton and run with it this year while the VMAs' current trajectory seems to be in the direction of the blue-hairs and slot machines of Vegas. Don't take my word for any of this, of course; head over to the MTV website for all the details, clips, original videos and more.

Meanwhile, give me the Country Music Association Awards or any number of Nashville-centric ceremonies that crop up during the year. At least on those you can see some real music being performed by real people instead of processed cheese being sliced and diced by cartoon characters.

Main Awards:

VIDEO OF THE YEAR
Katy Perry, "Firework" 

BEST FEMALE VIDEO
Lady Gaga, "Born This Way" 

BEST NEW ARTIST
Tyler, the Creator 

VIDEO VANGUARD
Britney Spears

BEST MALE VIDEO
Justin Bieber, "U Smile" 

BEST COLLABORATION
Katy Perry/Kanye West, "E.T."

BEST HIP HOP VIDEO
Nicki Minaj, "Super Bass" 

BEST ROCK VIDEO
Foo Fighters, "Walk" 

BEST POP VIDEO
Britney Spears, "Till the World Ends" 

BEST VIDEO WITH A MESSAGE
Lady Gaga, "Born This Way" 

BEST CHOREOGRAPHY

Beyonce, "Run the World (Girls)"

No, we're not pulling your leg.

By Fred Mills

There are tons of Taylor Swift hates out there, but we're not among them. While we don't wake up in the morning and put her on the stereo first thing, over the past few years we've come to respect the gal and what she represents - genuine original songcraft and apparent sincerity while working within the confines of the oftentimes plastic country music industry.

On her current tour she's been pulling some musical surprises out of her hat, typically during her midconcert sit-down solo acoustic interlude, in which she serves up choice covers, Taylor-style. Earlier this month she was doing Eminem's "Lose Yourself," if you can believe that (it segues into Uncle Kracker's "Smile"), while more recently, Aug. 23 at the Staples Center, it was the Beach Boys' "God Only Knows" (which was followed by Gwen Stefani's "The Sweet Escape." Say what you will about her versions, not to mention the fact that her adoring audience apparently has a need to scream throughout even the softest portions of her performances; anybody that can work both Eminem and Brian Wilson into their repertoire deserves some kind of props.

Below you can check out a couple of audience-shot clips; the songs are all over YouTube, so you may be able to find slightly different or better ones. It's pretty entertaining to read the viewer comments - pro AND con -  below the videos at YouTube, by the way.

Fifty years into an amazing career, Brian Wilson and his crack backing band dig deep into the head Beach Boy's back catalog, come up with nothing but fun, fun, fun at the Mountain Winery on August 24.

By Jud Cost

Brian Wilson never looks really comfortable when he plops down in front of a keyboard placed at center-stage and makes sure the teleprompter with all his lyrics loaded-in is functioning. You would think tonight would be duck soup for the man who's survived 50 years in the music biz and is now looked upon as a musical deity, someone to take the kids to see as the Bach or Beethoven of his day.

Wilson toured his beloved Beach Boys albums Pet Sounds and Smile "for the last time" a few years ago. That now leaves the parameters of a Brian Wilson show fully open to deep excavation of his huge back catalog. The crack nine-man outfit that surrounds Wilson, led by guitarist Jeff Foskett and Darian Sahanaja on keyboards and vibraphone, exudes nothing but confidence-and they're ready to dig.

In the awkward fashion of most of his between-songs patter, Brian tells the three-fourths full house at Saratoga's Mountain Winery to "sit back and relax while we play some music for you." Wilson must have run through "California Girls" thousands of times by now, but surrounded by what he calls "the best band in the country" it sounds as fresh as the day it appeared on the Beach Boys' 1965 album Summer Days (And Summer Nights!!). As always with this backing band, the vintage arrangements are recreated so faithfully it's almost as though you're eavesdropping on the original recording sessions. From tubular bells to glockenspiel to exotic rhythm instruments, it's all about attention to detail. "Are you glad you came?" asks Wilson.

Brian dedicates "Wendy" to one of his kids, "the little girl with the Dutch haircut." He describes touching ballad "Surfer Girl" as "the first song I ever wrote" and follows it up with its musical twin, "In My Room." The gorgeous harmonies and lush melody of "Please Let Me Wonder" from the Beach Boys Today album speak for themselves. When Wilson comes to the part where he sings "I've built all my dreams around you/That some day my love would surround you," he extends his arms in a bear-like embrace.

One memorable teenage anthem follows another. "Drive In" which urges kids to see enough of the movie "so you're prepared to tell" and "Salt Lake City" whose girls are extolled as "the cutest of the western states" are followed by the harpsichord-laced beauty of "When I Grow Up (To Be A Man)": ("Will my kids be proud or think their old man's really a square?")

A surprising choice by Wilson as "one of my favorites from the 400 songs I've written" is "You're So Good To Me," again from Summer Days. The old Bobby Freeman chestnut "Do You Wanna Dance" sounds just as exciting as Wilson's stomping original "Dance, Dance, Dance." Wild Honey album standout "Darlin'," sounds every bit the soulful offering to Stevie Wonder it may have once been. The opening hour-long segment ends with "Do It Again," a late-'60s paean to the formative days of the Beach Boys: ("Well I've been thinking 'bout/All the places we've surfed and danced/And all the faces we've missed/So let's get back together and do it again").

The second hour kicks off with a five-song medley of George Gershwin songs from Brian's recent tribute to the famed composer Brian Wilson Reimagines Gershwin (Disney Pearl). "Summertime" and "They Can't Take That Away From Me, as well as a smattering of "Rhapsody In Blue" are effortlessly reworked into the Wilson instrumental scheme."It took the band a month to learn this stuff," says Brian.

"Add Some Music" is a perfect little slice from the overlooked Beach Boys' Warner Bros. debut album, Sunflower. ("You're sitting in the dentist's chair/And they've got music for you there/There must be nine million ways/To add some music to your day"). "Let's Go Away For Awhile," an instrumental gem from Pet Sounds, is extended by the band to epic proportions, employing every Tiki-bar nuance imaginable, and ends with a fine Charles Lloyd-like tenor sax solo by the wonderfully versatile Paul Mertens who doubles on baritone sax, flute and clarinet. "

The one-two knockout blow from Pet Sounds, "Wouldn't It Be Nice," followed by "God Only Knows" ("Paul McCartney's favorite song," says Brian) can only mean the dazzling fireworks of the finale are fast approaching. The Van Dyke Parks era as Brian's lyricist flashes by in a purple haze with "Heroes And Villains" and "Good Vibrations." The glorious refrain from "Help Me Rhonda" has the entire crowd jumping up and down in place.

The sublime "She's Not The Little Girl I Once Knew" was one of the few Wilson-penned flop singles for the Beach Boys in the winter of '65. The reason was obvious to AM radio programmers terrified of dead air. It has a charming two-bar air-hole right before the bridge. Capitol pulled the single from distribution and rush-released "Barbara Ann" off the Beach Boys' Party! album, yet another chart-topper.

The obvious closer is "Fun, Fun, Fun" ("Well, she got her daddy's car and she cruise to the hamburger stand now/Seems she forgot all about the library like she told her old man now/And with the radio blastin' goes cruisin' just as fast as she can now/And she'll have fun, fun, fun til her daddy takes the T-Bird away"). But who could argue with what comes next, the real finale, "All Summer Long. ("Sittin' in my car outside your house/Remember when you spilled Coke all over your blouse/Miniature golf and Hondas in the hills/When we road on horse we got some thrills"). It was the perfect music for the credits to American Graffiti, and it works just as well tonight, encapsulating what Brian Wilson's music has always been about: having fun.

As Foskett introduces each member of this fine band for an individual curtain call, he slyly refers to Brian as "the man who wrote every one of these great songs you've heard tonight, even the ones by Gershwin."  With Brian Wilson's brilliant trunkful of original material, he takes a back seat these days to no one. Not even George Gershwin.

[Photo via Wilson's Facebook page]

Also readying 8-LP vinyl box set for release this fall.

By Fred Mills

Tucson's Calexico continues its foray into the world of cinema with a new soundtrack - it's for indie film The Guard. The 23-track album comes on the heels' of last year's acclaimed soundtrack to Circo and is currently available in digital format at iTunes. Love those songtitles: "Bourbon in the Jar," "Boot Full of Guns," "Beautiful Fucking Day," etc. View the official trailer, which features some of the band's music, below.

The Guard - which hit selected cinemas late last month - was directed by John Michael McDonagh and stars Brendan Gleeson and Don Cheadle and is described thusly:

Sergeant Gerry Boyle is a small-town Irish cop with a confrontational personality, a subversive sense of humour, a dying mother, a fondness for prostitutes and absolutely no interest whatsoever in the international drug-smuggling ring that has brought FBI agent Wendell Everett to his door. Boyle drifts through life, not much concerned about anything, not even the mysterious murder of a man in one of the town's holiday cottages. But when Everett shows Boyle the mugshots of four drug traffickers, he recognises one of them as the dead man. And so the two cases converge, with a bemused Everett finding himself adrift in the decidedly original and sometimes surreal world of Sergeant Gerry Boyle, the last of the independents!

Tracklisting:

1: Boyle Gets Dressed
2: Boyle and McBride Discuss Motives
3: Eugene Wheels Past
4: Bourbon In the Jar
5: Black Car, Black Night
6: Tap At Cornell's Window
7: Into the West
8: Boyle Swims Ashore
9: All In a Day's Work
10: McBride's Car Abandoned

11: Malice Aforethought
12: Hanley's Bar
13: Meeting By the Sea
14: From Beyond
15: I Like Sharks
16: Boot Full of Guns
17: Good to Go
18: Everett's Goodbye
19: Boyle Ready for Action
20: Leaving Gabriela
21: Down to Two
22: Firestorm of Impossible Odds
23: Beautiful Fucking Day

Three disc set arrives next month.

By Fred Mills

Among Bruce Springsteen fans, the '78 Darkness On the Edge Of Town tour has earned genuine godhead status, and there are plenty of live bootleg albums, both audience-sourced and taken from FM broadcasts, to back that up. On Sept. 30 of that year the E Street Band rolled into Atlanta's Fox Theatre and proceeded to blow the roof off, starting with an opening salvo of "Good Rocking Tonight"/"Badlands"/"Spirit In The Night" and proceeding through the bulk of Darkness plus selected other goodies, including the only known performance of the old R&B instrumental "Night Train."

The show has long been prized by collectors because it was originally broadcast live over 20 FM stations throughout the Southeast and subsequently was bootlegged a number of times over the years. Those bootlegs, however, such as Same Old Played Out Scenes, Here's To Ya and Fox Theatre Presents The Boss, typically bore significant flaws in the audio, and as a result a number of other '78 broadcasts, also booted, wound up being more desirable and of course better known, including concerts recorded in San Francisco, Cleveland and Passaic. (As the story, possibly apocryphal goes, there was bad weather in the region at the time of the Atlanta show, which affected the quality of the radio broadcast, and it's also been reported that a lot of potential tapers that night simply failed to switch their decks on.)

(No video appears to exist from the Atlanta show, but here's a clip from Passaic, featuring so-so vidoe but stunning audio, a version of "Prove It All Night" that typifies the '78 tour. Watch for Clarence Clemons to come in at about the 5 1/2 minute mark. RIP.)

Recently, though, a new version of the Fox tape surface, reportedly sourced directly from a first generation recording, and it quickly began making the rounds of the torrent download sites. According to SpringsteenCorner.com:

"Earlier this year [the JEMS Archive] acquired several tapes from a kind and generous soul who, while not a collector, had a number of interesting recordings land in his lap back in the day. The tapes had not been played in more than three decades. In the box were two cassettes of the Atlanta show. As luck would have it, they weren't merely an upgrade of the broadcast but a pre-FM recording of the show dubbed from 15 IPS reels. The sound quality of the pre-FM source is truly first rate, lacking the heavy compression of the over-the-air broadcast and boasting much wider stereo separation than any extant FM source. The pre-FM also corrects most of the speed issues with the previous bootlegs. And we do pick up some previously missing audio bits. These includes a few sentences spoken by Bruce before "Santa Claus" and, more significantly, the 40 or so seconds that were missing from the start of "Backstreets" plus some band member intros after that song. That being said, the cassettes were in less-than-ideal condition and required re-shelling and baking for playback. Experienced ears might pick up on very minor fluctuations (e.g. on the tape flips) that couldn't be corrected.

"In short, what we do have sounds awesome. However, because it is Atlanta, we're still snake bit. The pre-FM source is missing the entire encore (presumably a lost third cassette, and yes, we've asked if it might be hiding behind dresser or something), needs a long patch (6+ minutes) from halfway through "Prove It All Night" through the start of "Racing in the Street" (we had hoped tape baking would fix this damaged part but it didn't), plus a tiny patch at the very end of "Because the Night." But even that bad news has a silver lining, as JEMS also found--gathering dust in its own archive--a 7-1/2 IPS reel to reel of the full broadcast from WINZ-FM Miami that we feel is superior to what's found on Same Old Played Out Scenes, having a more natural, less processed and compressed sound. This new reel was used to patch the longer missing bits (e.g. the "Prove It" to "Racing" chunk noted above) in the pre-FM and provide the encore.

"The only material flaw in the WINZ source are a few short (one second or less) dropouts in "Raise Your Hand" that, while unfortunate, aren't particularly annoying, they're just there. After experimenting with using SOPOS to patch the dropouts, we decided that the "repaired" version sounded worse than the original as the gaps are so short, the change in sources is jarring. So we've left "Raise Your Hand" from the WINZ tape intact, with dropouts, but also included an extra file of "Raise Your Hand" with no dropouts from Same Old Played Out Scenes. The end result is not perfect, but it is 100% complete, for the first time ever, and it is the best-sounding Fox Theater recording by a wide margin, especially the 85% of the show that's now pre-FM."

Now stepping into the mix is venerable Italian label Anubis with another one of its custom-designed, limited edition CDR releases. Titled Night Train, appropriately enough, it's taken from this newly discovered master. Our source at Anubis confirms that they used that pre-FM version and that the results are "incredible - one of the best Bruce boots from the best Bruce era."

Anubis, per tradition, did its own audio tweaking of the tape but didn't find it necessary to do a wholesale overhauled. Says our source, "We cleaned the tape, made a very light equalization and a final master to extract the full potential of the tape, but without saturating it."

Night Train will be available as a three-disc set next month. It will come with full artwork and an extensive booklet. See the track listing, below:

1 Good Rockin' Tonight
2 Badlands
3 Spirit in the Night
4 Darkness on the Edge of Town
5 Independence Day
6 The Promised Land
7 Prove It All Night
8 Racing in the Street
9 Thunder Road
10 Jungleland
11 Santa Claus Is Comin' To Town
12 Night Train
13 Fire
14 Candy's Room
15 Because the Night
16 Point Blank
17 Not Fade Away > Gloria > She's the One
18 Backstreets > Sad Eyes
19 Rosalita
20 Born to Run
21 Tenth Avenue Freeze-Out
22 Detroit Medley
23 Raise Your Hand

Fans are in the Mangum and over the moon!

By Blurt Staff

Fancy some unreleased Neutral Milk Hotel, fanboys? You've gotten your wish: head over to band mainman Jeff Mangum's NMH website, WalkingWallOfWords.com, and in addition to assorted ephemera, Mangum solo tour dates, etc., there's "Oh Sister" and "Ferris Wheel," from 1995 and 1993, respectively, posted for your listening pleasure. And it's not an exercise in randomness, either. On Nov. 22 Mangum plans to issue a vinyl box (it will also be available digitally) featuring all of the band's albums plus a brace of 15 unreleased cuts:

*1996's On Avery Island LP

*1998's In the Aeroplane Over the Sea LP

*Everything Is EP 10"

 *unreleased Ferris Wheel on Fire EP 10"

*"Holland, 1945" 7-inch pic disc

*"Little Birds" 7-inch

*"You've Passed" 7-inch

*two 24" by 24" posters.

A portion of the proceeds of the box sales will go to the Children of the Blue Sky chaity, as will portions of ticket sales for to Mangum's upcoming tour.

Some events postponed until later, others cancelled outright.

By Fred Mills

From as far south as Wilmington, NC, to as far north (and possibly farther) as Cohasset, MA, outdoor music concerts, festivals and related events have been dropping like flies in the anticipated wake of Hurricane Irene, which as of this writing (Sat. 10 am) continues to track up the east coast and prompt millions of people to evacuate. Some of the cancellations were due to concert promoters' preemptive decisions, due in no small part to the recent spate of outdoor concert tragedies. Others were dictated from on high: on Friday New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg revoked all outdoor-event permits in the city for the weekend.

Among the cancellations:

*Gillian Welch was to play the Winoca Festival in Wilmington tonight; with that event cancelled, she moved her show a couple hundred miles inland to Saxapahaw, also tonight. (One imagines most ticketholders were already on the move westward from the NC coast so it might not be such a burden after all.)

*Mary Chapin Carpenter postponed her show at the Sandler Center in Virginia Beach until Oct. 6.

*The Afro-Punk Festival in Brooklyn this weekend - possibly one of the most hotly anticipated shows as it featured Cee-Lo Green, Santigold, Janelle Monáe, Das Racist, Toro Y Moi, Ninjasonik, Gordon Voidwell, Reggie Watts and others - is cancelled. No replacement date has been set. Scores of other NYC area shows, including indoor club events, have also been cancelled or postponed.

*The Silopanna Music Festival in Crownsville, MD, is cancelled and has not been rescheduled. Slated to appear were Matt & Kim, Sharon Jones & the Dap Kings, Fitz & the Tantrums and more.

*Styx (yep, Styx...) had a show at the South Shore Music Circus in Cohasset, MA, that is cancelled.

Here are some links that will list more cancellations and postponements. While we are also advised that much of Brooklyn, in particular the music mecca enclave of Williamsburg, is being evacuated, there is no truth to the rumors that hipster-aspiring squatters have been descending upon the area en masse...

Billboard.com

RollingStone.com

Pitchfork