One of the most highly anticipated releases of the year has got to be Gimme Fiction, the fifth album from Austin, Texas’ Spoon, in stores May 10. Paste talks to Spoon-man Britt Daniel about the making of the new album, wherein he describes the reasoning for picking “I Turn My Camera On” as the first single.

“If you want to appeal to people who haven’t heard Spoon before, I think that’s the song. People really fall for a falsetto. It’s kind of the ‘Emotional Rescue’ of the record.”

Okay, that’s an interesting rationale. Judge for yourself (down a bit).

To further whet your appetite for the new record, I direct you to this treasure trove of audio and video goodness at 12XU, who put out a number of Spoon releases in Europe (from Largehearted Boy). Also, the band contributed a new/old/non-album track, “Revenge!”, to a Wired compilation released on the Creative Commons website last December.

MP3: Spoon – “I Turn My Camera On”

MP3: Spoon – “Revenge!”

Spoon are in Toronto at Lee’s Palace on June 5 with The Clientele.

For those of us who have been bypassed by the Slint reunion tour – namely CANADA (Dave Pajo hates us, remember?) – Bradley’s Almanac offers some solace with this live concert recording from a show in France last month.

Zoilus reports that Toronto will soon host a show by Robyn Hitchcock and His Sadies. May 28 at Lee’s Palace, tickets $26. That’s not cheap but you can be sure it’ll be a good one. Hitchcock provided guest vocals on “Why Would Anybody Live Here?” from the Sadies’ last album Favourite Colours. Update: Ticketmaster says that tickets for this show are a far more reasonable $17.50, on sale tomorrow.

The UK’s band of the moment The Kaiser Chiefs return to Toronto for a show at the Mod Club on May 29. The band gives Pitchfork a list of their favourite records and it’s so predictable, it’s a little frightening. For the record, I don’t mind the Kaiser Chiefs. I don’t especially like them and certainly don’t bet on them having anything that resembles a career, but they’re not offensive.

An unnamed Fountains Of Wayne has had its release date moved from April 5 to June 28. I’m assuming this is the b-sides compilation which was announced last year and has been pushed back so many times that I didn’t even know it was supposed to come out today.

I’m not even sure why I’m bothering to report this, she’s pretty much dead to me, but Liz Phair’s new untitled record has been given a September 27 release date.

Comic Book Resources asks Keith Giffen how he feels about DC using characters he ressuscitated during his run on Justice League International as cannon fodder for their Identity Crisis and Countdown mega-events. He is… polite.

Hooray for the Blue Jays winning their season opener yesterday against Tampa Bay. I like baseball, always have, even though it’s horribly unfashionable in this town and utterly futile as long as the Jays are in the same division as the Red Sox and Yankees. Back in 92/93, they gave me my first taste of what it was like to actually win – of course, they followed it up with a solid 11 years of losing after that, but still, it’s a better championship record than the Leafs or Raptors have put up in the past decade and a half.

24: So… the dude is in a billion-dollar stealth fighter, undetectable by any radar, and Marwan can call him on a cellphone? Hrmm. And hot-but-no-Mandy assasssin chick is certainly efficient with cleaning up a corpse. Surely some of the blood from a gaping chest wound would have soaked into the hardwood floor? But as good at Molly Maid as she was, she seemed to have forgotten that drywall is not bulletproof. As for the main event – fine dramatic execution, but I’m sorry, I’ve seen Air Force One. That thing’s got mad evasive skills. The notion that the President’s plane could be so easily hit is absurd. And escape pods? Hello?

np – Nada Surf / Let Go

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