We are sorry to report that songwriter/frontman Alex Chilton, of Big Star and other bands, passed away yesterday in New Orleans at the age of 59. He began his career when he was just 16 years old as the lead singer of the Box Tops. They had a No. 1 hit with “The Letter” in [...]
The 3rd Annual Record Store Day is looming around the corner (April 17th!) and wouldn’t you know the list of participants and goodies is beginning to unfurl. Factory 25 will be releasing the first two LPs from its History of Chicago Punk series featuring DA and Tutu & The Pirates.
Throw a 12-inch single from [...]
Canadian indie pop group Stars will release The Five Ghosts, their fifth full-length studio album, on June 22nd, adding to the already impressive list of upcoming releases. This is their first since 2007’s In Our Bedroom After the War, and will be the first release on the band’s own new label, Soft Revolution.
Mark Linkous, better known to the musical world as Sparklehorse, took his own life over the weekend. Linkous had a previous brush with death after a near-lethal mix of meds in 1996. He leaves behind a strong if small canon of fantastically dark music, including last year’s Dark Night of the Soul, a collaboration with [...]
Hall & Oates’ longtime bassist Tom “T-Bone” Wolk died Saturday of an apparent heart attack. Wolk played on Kurtis Blow’s “These Are the Breaks” and with the Saturday Night Live house band from 1986 to 1992. “T-Bone was my musical brother and losing him is like losing my right hand,” Daryl Hall said in a [...]
Hip Hop pioneer Guru suffered a heart attack yesterday and remains comatose and in critical condition. According to DJ Premier, Guru’s former partner in the legendary Gang Starr, the 43-year-old rapper, whose real name is Keith Elam, will undergo surgery today. Our thoughts are with him and his family
White Stripes: Under Great White Northern Lights [of which the trailer is above] is being hailed as one of the best rock documentaries in the history of the genre. It follows Jack and Meg White’s 2007 Canadian tour where the band played remote towns and provinces, while finding time at each tour stop to make [...]
I’m sure the greasy haired indie masses are squealing with delight at the prospect of the new Broken Social Scene album, Forgiveness Rock Record, due May 4th via the collective’s old Arts & Crafts stomping grounds. It reckons those squeals are about to become deafening when you make your way over to Pitchfork to listen [...]
The 2010 Sasquatch! Music Festival lineup has been announced and features a million bands you probably want to see, including KEXP artists Pavement, Vampire Weekend, Band of Horses, The National, Passion Pit, Nada Surf, The New Pornographers, The Hold Steady, The xx, Dirty Projectors, The Long Winters, The Mountain Goats, Brother Ali, Mayer Hawthorne, Why?, [...]
Sadly, Doug Fieger, frontman of New Wave trailblazers The Knack died yesterday after battling several years with cancer at age 57. Perhaps most famously, Fielder co-wrote and sang the 1979 hit “My Sharona” (revived in 1994 thanks to its inclusion on the Reality Bites soundtrack), but over the last few decades The Knack continued to [...]
