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

Another week, another “man, this band I saw at SxSW” post. Today – Brooklyn’s Dirty On Purpose. I’ve mentioned how they impressed me at their showcase despite being plagued with dodgy sound and having picked up their EP Sleep Late For A Better Tomorrow, I was completely won over.

They manage to sound like almost every indie band you’ve ever loved, and yet completely new. There’s bits of shoegaze, twee, noise, electronica and rock all just mashed together, sugar sweet vocal harmonies (there’s at least three lead singers, maybe four?) paired with guitars that jangle and churn – it’s dream-pop with teeth. Every song on the five-track EP sounds different, from the slow, atmospheric boy-girl duet of “Cheat Death” to the record-closing freak-out of “Spider Eyes”, but all very definitely the same band. If what I heard live is any indication, however, the newer material is even better, pulling their wide range of influences into a more cohesive whole.

The EP is actually frustrating in its brevity, clocking in at just 20 minutes you immediately want to hit repeat several times, then drive down to New York to force the band to record a new album immediately. They’re hoping to put a full-length together this year, and it won’t be a minute too soon. There’s also some tenative plans to tour up Canada way at some point this Summer, but I don’t want to jinx that so I’ll say no more.

Wanna know more? Read interviews with the band in by The Deli, Gothamist and Crashin’ In. And since I didn’t get any pics of them at SxSW, check out Jinners’ – she’s the band’s manager, btw. For aural enjoyment, here’s a track from the EP:

MP3: Dirty On Purpose – “Mind Blindness”

And also a video of the band performing Gary Numan’s “Down In The Park” live:

MPG: Dirty On Purpose – “Down In The Park” (video)

Near as I can tell, the only place to get the EP online is from North Street Recrods. Get it, it’s worth it. Also check out Au Revoir Simone, a side project of keyboardist Erika Forster, and drummer Doug Marvin contributed a cover of Unrest’s “Imperial” to 517’s Teenbeat tribute album under the moniker of Pursesnatchers.

And I’m not nearly the first one to blog these guys – props to Torr, Mishie, TTIKTDA and Mystery & Misery (and probably countless others) for getting there before I did. But better late than never, right?

Crazy Talk has a podcast interview with Wilco’s Glenn Kotche.

Junkmedia catches up with Stars.

I’ve spent much of the weekend (finally) plugging away at my site redesign. I warn you, if you’re expecting a huge overhaul, you’re going to be disappointed. I’ve got a brand to protect now! What I’ve been doing is rearranging things, cleaning up horribly inefficient code that’s been bugging me for years, expanding to a 1024 resolution (those of you with tiny monitors now have an excuse to go out and buy new ones!), etc etc. I’m also eliminating popups (huzzah) and basically giving myself a much better foundation from which to expand things. I made much better progress than I expected, so I may roll things out in the next fortnight or so. Before my birthday, at any rate.

So I get up this morning and for whatever reason, my computer’s clock has decided to set itself forward another hour, making it an hour faster than my alarm clock, which I had adjusted yesterday, and two hours faster than my watch, which I hadn’t adjusted at all. It’s quite disconcerting to realize that you have no reliable timepieces at all.

np – The Delgados / Universal Audio

So Sin City. The first thing that needs to be said, and everyone is saying it, is that it is absolutely true to the comic. Moreso than any other comic-to-film adaptation of recent years, which usually at best can say that they capture the spirit of the source material, Sin City can say it IS the source material, just brought to life onscreen. This will certainly appease the purists, who are usually the most vocal critics of any adaptation, but does it necessarily make for a good film? I say yes – but with a caveat.

First and foremost, it’s important to remember that Sin City is genre fiction. It’s pulp. Film noir. Hard-boiled, gritty, violent, etc. It is definitely NOT campy. The women are femme fatales, the men either debased or in need of redemption. Sin City is not necessarily great literature, but it is great at what it is. To appreciate it, you have to be standing on the right side of the fourth wall – if you’re outside, you coud well think it’s depraved and hokey and you wouldn’t necessarily be wrong. But if you’re on the inside, it’s a helluva ride. It’s almost a shame that the film is being hyped to the degree that it is, because it’s really not a film for everyone.

Many of the highly-stylized visuals are almost shot-for-shot recreations of the comics (Filmrot has drawn up some exhibits using footage from the trailers) and the use of black-and-white with splashes of strategically placed super-saturated colur, like the comics, is even more striking on screen. But everyone and their mother-in-law has gone on about the technical wonder of the film, so I’ll just say that it looks freakin’ amazing and leave it at that.

Story-wise, it draws on the original Sin City story (aka “The Hard Goodbye”), “The Big Fat Kill” and “That Yellow Bastard” as well as a short story I’ve not read for the prologue (and epilogue?). Much of the dialogue and narration is also taken verbatim from the source material – the device does work better in print, but if, as I’ve said, you buy in, you don’t really mind. Rather than keep the three stories completely discrete, the film takes a half-hearted attempt to combine them and linear-ize the intersecting storylines. It doesn’t really work. Cutting up “That Yellow Bastard” might make sense chronologically, but it doesn’t really help the story any and timeline consistency isn’t maintained throughout anyway.

The three stories are sequenced in declining quality – “The Hard Goodbye” is far and away the best of the three. Mickey Rourke is amazing as Marv and it has the most energy, action and humour. “The Big Fat Kill” is pretty good though without the backstory of “A Dame To Kill For”, the relationship between Clive Owen’s Dwight and Rosario Dawson’s Gail looks hokier than it is. You also don’t appreciate the full menace of Michael Clarke Duncan’s Manute. Ending with “That Yellow Bastard” makes the most sense, seeing as how it’s got the most star power with Bruce Willis and Jessica Alba, but it doesn’t quite click. Maybe it’s due to audience exhaustion from the first two segments or maybe it’s just not that strong, but the pacing seemed rushed and Willis’ Hartigan just didn’t connect for me. He seemed too much like Bruce Willis.

I just read most of the Sin City comics last weekend so I didn’t necessarily need to follow the narrative to know what was going to happen next, I could just sit back and enjoy the execution and finished product. And enjoy it I did – some of the violence did make me cringe, but that was really the point. Hard boiled, man. Hard boiled.

For more Sin City, check out the last couple posts over at Achtung Baby. The plans for the DVD release are particularly interesting.

More comics to film – Empire gets an exclusive guided tour of the pre-production of Watchmen, courtesy of director Paul Greengrass. Still no hints on casting, though.

Being There eulogizes The Jayhawks, prompting Gary Louris to pipe up, “we’re not dead yet!”, not that anyone is listening.

The Chicago Tribune has an interesting piece on the growing influence of online music sites like Pitchfork and Fluxblog. Via Largehearted Boy.

So my little MySpace recruiting drive yesterday was quite successful, thank you, though I apologize that I really have no idea who most of you people are. But that’s okay. I will also admit that it was sort of a little demographics experiment on my part – I was wondering who was actually reading my site. Answer? Dudes. Lots of dudes. Many with bands. That’s okay, I guess, but geez. Sausage fest. It’s like university all over again.

“Spring forward” my ass.

np – Mojave 3 / Excuses For Travelers

Postsecret is a fascinating blog/project that solicits strangers to send in an anonymous, personal secret to be posted on the website. Some are funny, some are sad (most, actually), some are just plain weird. I’m more amazed at the time and energy people put into the visual presentation of some of their submissions than the fact that they were willing to participate. It’s fascinating to look through, though. Man, some people are freaks.

But it’s inspired me to post a secret of my own, just for you. Don’t tell no one. Highlight: I once shot a man in Reno just to watch him die. Pffft, what, you think I’m really going to post a secret here? Hardly anonymous, folks. Go on, get outta here ya little bastards.

But okay, here’s a not-so-secret anymore. I have a MySpace account and while I really don’t know what to do with it yet, I am soliciting “friends”. Hit me up, yo.

Holy shit – Neil Young will miss this Sunday’s Juno awards in Winnipeg as he underwent surgery to remove a brain aneurysm on Tuesday. Good news is that he will make a full recovery… So wait a minute, does this mean that Neil’s bald right now? Update: Thrasher’s Blog is doing a fine job of rounding up all the up-to-the-minute information on Neil’s condition.

And some bits from Neil devotees – Playlouder talks to J Mascis about the Dinosaur Jr reissues, reunion and what lays ahead.

Built To Spill are touring North America, but they still inexplicably maintain their hate on for Toronto, bypassing us once again. Sigh. At least the much-delayed new album is progressing and should be out in the Fall.

The Omaha Reader talks to John Darnielle of The Mountain Goats about The Sunset Tree, due out April 26. BTS should take a hint from the Goats, who are finally making their Toronto debut on May 11 at Lee’s Palace. Via LHB.

Crooked Fingers photos from Thursday night up here. Not my best work by a long shot – the light was really bad and while I can sometimes get reasonable shots on ISO 400, this time the noise was quite bad. Ah well, win some, lose some.

np – Guided By Voices / Half Smiles Of The Decomposed

I’ve been hearing people complain lately that Crooked Fingers sounds too much like Neil Diamond. I don’t really know what Neil Diamond sounds like. And going into last night’s show at the Horseshoe, I had just about as much history with Crooked Fingers. I saw Eric Bachmann perform solo whilst opening for The Delgados last year and quite enjoyed him, but that’s it. Never heard any of the albums (well, heard some of the new one, Dignity & Shame), never listened to Archers Of Loaf… It’s not often I go to a show with pretty much a blank slate, so I was curious to see what it’d be like.

And it was good. They opened with a sparse and lovely reading of “You Must Build A Fire” off of the new record, which is quite probably one of the most beautiful songs I’ve heard in recent years (it’s streaming on their website right now, go listen) – certainly a good start. From there, however, things got a lot more raucous. Crooked Fingers as a six-piece band and as a solo outfit are quite different propositions. Whereas Bachmann solo played up the folksinger angle, the full band was considerably more revved up. I don’t know about Neil Diamond, but I was certainly hearing some Springsteen parallels. I enjoy a good high-energy rock show as much as anyone, but I think I would have preferred a more subdued performance akin to the solo show or even the recorded material, which has a more delicate feel. I fear something worthwhile is getting lost in the translation. If any AoL/CF fans are reading this, can they perhaps tell me if they played and Archers Of Loaf material? Some of the songs seemed a lot heavier than I ever would have imagined appearing on a Crooked Fingers record.

Opening things up was Tony Dekker of Great Lake Swimmers performing solo and doing quite a good job of it. He’s another performer whose material and delivery lend themselves quite well to the one man-one guitar format – it really lets his voice, which is quite stunning, shine through. It’s a shame that the crowd at the ‘Shoe couldn’t be persuaded to quite down for Dekker’s quietly heart-rending songs. I am going to have to pick up one of his/their records one of these days.

Photos tomorrow. In the meantime, read this interview with Eric Bachmann at 20/40. And many thanks to sound guy Jeff for getting me on the guest list. I’ve never actually been put on a list before – at least not successfully.

Aversion interviews The Decemberists. Via For The Records.

“The following takes place between season 2 and season 3″… (Username: preview / Password: C3%qt24) Oh you bastards. SOMEONE GET ME A PLAYSTATION. I’ll only need it for, uh, twenty-four hours or so. There better be a PC port for this somewhere down the line. It’s nice to see that digi-Kim is still stupid and annoying.

In an effort to reduce the amount of comment spam I’m getting, I’ve turned off comments in all posts more than two months old. So if you’ve had some chestnut or zinger you’ve been sitting on since last December, you’re outta luck, sorry.

Hooray for Sping – April means I’m off transit and back on my bike. Yes, the time for hibernation is over, it’s time to get some exercise again.

np – Mogwai / Government Commissions: BBC Sessions 1996-2004