The 5:00 slot at V Fest tomorrow remains vacant and now curiosity is superseding whatever mild anxiety I was feeling on behalf of the organizers. What are they going to do? Maybe Richard Branson will come out and tell some jokes, though I’ve seen nothing to indicate that he’ll even be around like he was last year. Under other circumstances I’d say that Bloc Party – kicking off their North American tour tonight in Chicago with an off day tomorrow before hitting Montreal on Sunday would be a perfect fit.

Yeah, they have their own show at the Ricoh at the end of the month (the 28th) but no one’s going to not go to that and come to this instead – however, the flip side is that probably no one’s going to buy a ticket at the 11th hour if they were added and so the cost of paying the band would basically be recouped via good PR (or the lack of negative PR of having no one play that slot). And anyway, I’m sure that it’d probably be a logistical nightmare to squeeze an extra show at this point, or so I’m assuming – I’ve no idea how that stuff works and I’m just thinking out loud. Most likely M.I.A. will get moved back into that slot and a smaller local band will be added earlier in the day. And many people will complain but life will go on. And yeah, V Fest lineup spotting has become something of a hobby/obsession of mine in the past couple weeks. I’ll be sad when it’s all over.

But with their return to our shores, Bloc Party are making the interview rounds. Chicago Metromix get Kele Okereke to describe his booty as “ample” while Hour.ca talks to him about A Weekend In The City and Matt Tong compliments Paste on America’s generosity when it comes to morphine dosages, and Music Rooms reports that in addition to touring, the band has been hard at work on album number three and will be releasing a stop-gap single in the interim.

And speaking of singles, they recently released a video for Weekend single number three.

Video: Bloc Party – “Hunting For Witches” (YouTube)

The Toronto Star has a full-bore festival preview with guides and interviews with artists playing this weekend, big and small.

Razorlight, who dropped out of last year’s V Fest as well as cancelling their last Toronto show at the last minute will be back to disappoint with a show scheduled at the Phoenix on November 11. Anyone want to lay odds that it’ll actually happen? Maybe they can get Babyshambles to open.

And now we turn our attention from the UK to Texas. Harp profiles Eisley, the family that plays together. Their new one Combinations is pleasantly loud and rocky in all the places that Room Noises wasn’t, but without giving up the sweetness that makes them so endearing. FilterTV has a video interview with the band and you can see the vid for the first single from the new record below.

Video: Eisley – “Invasion” (YouTube)

Okkervil River’s Fall tour has them on the west coast and The Georgia Straight talks to Will Sheff about their degree of fame and The Portland Mercury predicts even more for them. Fame, that is. And The Denver Post has an interview. Okkervil are at Lee’s Palace on September 21, a show that’s damn close to sold out if it isn’t already.

And also out west right now are Spoon – Canada.com talked to drummer Jim Eno in advance of their show in Victoria while The Westender chats with Britt Daniel.

I Heart Music has posted the CBC Radio 3-recorded audio of one of Great Lake Swimmers’ Church Of The Redeemer shows back in April. It’s not the full show and I can’t tell if it’s the early or late show and the audio is recorded a little too hot – the CBCR3 audio is somewhat cleaner (though not downloadable). Great Lake Swimmers play the Phoenix on September 29 and Stereo Subversion has an interview with Tony Dekker.

And a router update for those interested… the Apple Store replaced my unit in under 3 minutes yesterday which was very nice of them, and I got the new one hooked up and running and all seemed well. Then this morning… no router. Thankfully an unplug/replug was enough to get it discoverable again, which is more than its predecessor could say but obviously still troubling. Now the odds of me having two bum units from two different stores are pretty slim, so I’m thinking there’s a problem on my end after all. Only common denominator? My USB drive, which is FAT32 partitioned into two drives and according to the tech specs, the Extreme can only support a single-partition FAT32 drive, never mind the fact that it was able to mount both partitions no problem last night. It must have changed its mind overnight and died? I don’t know. But for now, since I don’t have time to call up Apple support again, I’m going to run the router without the USB drive and see if I ever get more than a few hours of life out of it. If it remains stable, I’ll blame the drive and get a new one, format it in Apple’s file format and transfer all my crap over. If not… well fuck.