Dark Horizons reports that director Sam Raimi wants to go back to the well one more time for Evil Dead 4, once again starring the inimitable Bruce Campbell as Ash. They also get some information on the remake of the first Evil Dead movie which will not be made by Raimi, not star Campbell and not have a main character named Ash. Instead, it will tell the tale of a plucky young English boy in a depressed mining town who grows up to be a ballet dancer.

And speaking of going back to the well – perhaps once too often – American Dad? Meh. It’s strange world we live in where a cartoon about a CIA agent and his family, an East German skier whose brain has been transferred into a goldfish and an alien escapee from Area 51 can seem so formulaic. Maybe it’ll get better when the series starts proper on May 1, but I’m not holding my breath. Cause that’s a long way off and I need the oxygen.

The new Batman Begins commercial that debuted during the Super Bowl last night. And for more Super Bowl advertising without all the annoying program interruptions, go to iFilm.

Pitchfork is first out of the gates with info on The Mountain Goats’ new record, The Sunset Tree, out April 26.

Whatevs points us at this thread from The Velvet Rope which latches onto a single line from a Merge press release that seems to imply that there’s a Dinosaur Jr reunion is in the works. I take this with an enormous grain of salt. While a promo show or two to go along with the re-release of the first three Dinosaur Jr albums this Spring featuring both J Mascis and Lou Barlow wouldn’t be outside the realm of possibility – they supposedly no longer hate each other – but I couldn’t imagine them working together again in any real capacity.

Acthung Baby has a nice live Rachael Yamagata mp3 in celebration of her recent appearance on The OC. Is she making meowing noises at the end of the song? Looking at that pic on his site, I can officially say that Mischa Barton creeps me the fuck out. And not just because she was the vomiting dead girl in The Sixth Sense, and I think that alone is plenty of reason to find someone creepy.

No time to go through that SxSW list yet. This week, I hope.

This past weekend has left me a wee bit discombobulated – besides going out Friday night, I went out to St Catherines on Saturday to celebrate by friend Chris’ 30th birthday. His is the first domino of birthdays that sees all my friends at my age stepping gingerly into their thirties. Ironically, we celebrated by carrying on pretty much as we did about a decade ago in undergrad. I’m talking drinking to excess and beyond, wandering about in the cold going to awful clubs, going home and deciding to watch Old School at three in the morning, sleeping on a horribly uncomfortable hardwood floor… Yes, I am far too old for this shit but it’s fun to forget that every once in a while. Oh, and on the drive home the next morning, the radio was carrying on with some awful retro “1994 weekend” theme which was basically the soundtrack of first-year university. Old old old.

np – Six By Seven / :04

Much has been made of Low’s bold new sound on their latest album, The Great Destroyer, their first for Subpop. Formerly the patron saints of all things slow and quiet, they’ve apparently decided to amp up and rock out, at least in a relative sense. I say “apparently” because I haven’t actually gotten the new record yet, I’m just going by the reviews and online scuttlebutt. As you could expect, the general opinion seems split – some find the new direction revitalizing, others have sworn the band off in disgust. Me, I expect to find myself in the former camp. The two sample tracks that Subpop has available online are pretty damn good songs.

MP3: Low – “California”

MP3: Low – “Monkey”

Their current tour doesn’t bring them to the 416, but I hope they’ll be promoting this one for a while and I’ll get to see them eventually. In the meantime, if I can’t see them, I can at least read about them! Yeah, I know. Lame. Anyway, The Washington Square News talks to the band about life on Subpop and the new record (via LHB) while Boston’s Weekly Dig also considers their new direction.

Ooh, cover artwork for the new Ivy record. In The Clear is out March 1.

JAM! seems to think that Oasis will be stopping by at the Molson Amphitheatre in mid-June.

Anyone dismayed to find that the Anti-Hit List was absent from this week’s issue of eye, repoint your bookmarks to The Toronto Star, the AHL’s new home. Yeah, you’ll need a login to read the thing – that’s why God created bugmenot.com. However, boo to The Star for not making the links in the copy live. Boo, I say.

Bought myself a 200GB hard drive yesterday. Holy hannah that’s a lot of storage.

On this weekend’s agenda is making a preliminary list of acts I want to see at SxSW next month. Surprisingly, there’s not really that many acts that have me willing to camp out to guarantee admission. I mean, the lineup is fantastic, but most of the bands that I’m interested in, I’ve already seen live before or will no doubt see in the next year or so when they do proper tours. With only a cursory look at the list and without doing some research to identify the bands I’ve never heard of but might be interesting, I’m most excited to see Trespassers William on the list.

I’ve gone on before about how much I love their last album Different Stars, with its perfect mix of sad songs, shoegazey atmospherics and country twang, but have been disappointed in the fact that they haven’t done any sort of North American touring of consequence in the last while, concentrating instead on Europe and their former home base of California (they’ve recently relocated to Seattle). I was hoping that they’d rectify the touring situation this year after the release of their third album on Nettwerk this Spring, but if I can see them at Sx (as the locals say), then even better.

Till now, Trespassers William has been best known for their lovely cover of Ride’s “Vapour Trail”, but recently the band has been getting some well-deserved exposure through appearances on the soundtracks for A Love Song for Bobby Long (movie) and One Tree Hill (TV show), and singer Anna-Lynne Williams provides vocals on one of the tracks on the new Chemical Brothers album.

After signing to Nettwerk last Fall, the band re-released Different Stars for the third time since 2002, though this time with a few different and bonus tracks. I don’t have a copy yet, but you can grab one of the best tracks on all three versions off their website:

MP3: Trespassers William – “Lie In The Sound”

And there’s also a number of archived radio sessions with the band for your streaming enjoyment – KEXP, KCRW and XFM, for example. You can also hear samples of both Different Stars and their first record, Anchor, though I think the debut is now officially out of print.

Went out last night to one of those indie music DJ nights that have gotten so ubiquitous around town these days. This one was Miasma at SpaHa, which boasts a more shoegaze-centric playlist, but isn’t strictly drone and delay. Despite the absurd drink prices I had a good time – they even played my request for some Radio Dept. YAY. I’d forgotten how nice it is to just sit around and listen to music. Miasma takes place on the first Friday of every month and I could see it becoming a habit for me. Getting out of the house is a good thing, especially after a whiffle bat-assault of a week like this one.

np – The House Of Love / 1986:88: The Creation Recordings

When most people talk about “dream pop” as a style of music, they’re usually talking about big washes of reverb, wispy vocals, chorus-y guitars… New York City’s On! Air! Library! deal in dream pop that sounds more like the dreams normal people have. Dense and cryptic, stuttering and hypnotic, confusing at times, unsettling at others, but always cinematic and utterly compelling. Or at least, I assume that’s what most peoples’ dreams are like. Mine tend to be depressingly mundane. For example – the last one I remember involved me sitting on a bus, getting off the bus, realizing I had gotten off at the wrong stop and then waiting for another bus. I wouldn’t have thought it possible for my id to be duller than my ego, but there you go. End digression.

On! Air! Library! (named for an radio show wherein an old man read books over the air which they saw in an African documentary) combine elements of experimental, noise, pop and shoegaze into something quite new and unique. There’s no overt wearing of influences on their sleeves, but if you can imagine what the Cocteau Twins might have sounded like filtered through the New York gloom of the first Interpol record. Perhaps the presence of Interpol’s Sam Fogarino on drums on several tracks has something to do with it? And any punnery inferred from the Cocteau Twins reference and the fact that O!A!L! is fronted by two twin sisters is purely unintentional.

They released their debut full-length self-titled album in April of last year, though I just got it last week. It’s taken a number of spins for this record to really sink in – it’s not the most immediately accessible album – but it does pay dividends. Check out the closing track from the record, “Feb”. I won’t say it’s necessarily representative of the album as a whole, but no one track really is. It’s one of the poppier numbers and is mesmerizing, before ending far too soon – kind of like a good dream.

MP3: On! Air! Library! – “Feb.”

They also toured through town last Fall supporting Solex but are planning on doing another North American tour in the second half of March and most of April. Here’s an interview with the band that Free Williamsburg conducted last year.

The Experience Music Project has a tutorial on how to write a song with Built To Spill. They must have left out the chapter on “How To Take Fucking Forever To Release A New Album” and the appendix, “How To Never Tour Through Canada”. Built To Spill’s new record is due out when Hell freezes over.

Urbanjetset talks to Fontaine Toups about her new band (The Fontaine Toups) and what the future might hold for Versus, who have reconvened to play the Teenbeat 20th anniversary celebration in DC at the end of the month. And of course, Five Seventeen won’t let me hear the end of it if I don’t plug his Teenbeat MP3 of the Week. From For The Records.

Torr has made some picks from the SxSW artists list and gone to the trouble of hyperlinking them all. What a nice guy. I am going to spend this weekend making a preliminary “to see” list. Meanwhile, Chart has compiled a list of all the Canadian acts venturing down to Texas this March. Goddamn, that’s a lotta Canucks.

Autechre are (is?) at the Opera House on May 11, $23.00. This would be the best birthday present ever… if I liked Autechre. I mean, I don’t dislike them, IDM isn’t really my thing, but it’s not like “ohmigod this makes it the best birthday ever” sort of news. I’ll shut up now.

The Lucinda Williams double-live album, Live At The Fillmore West, has a new release date of May 10. It had originally been scheduled to come out last Fall, but was quietly pulled from the calendar for whatever reason.

JAM! reports that Jack Nicholson has been added to the cast of The Departed, Martin Scorcese’s remake of Infernal Affairs in the role of the gang leader (Sam in the original, played by Eric Tsang). He joins Matt Damon (in the Andy Lau role), Leonardo DiCaprio (in the Tony Leung role) and Mark Wahlberg as some other dude.

np – Primal Scream / Vanishing Point

Woot! My guesswork has been proven correct, as The Wedding Present is confirmed at Lee’s Palace on April 26! It will have been almost four years since the patron saint of romantic losers has been through town, and it’s not a minute too soon, thank you very much. Their last time through was as Cinerama and they drew only a modest crowd at Lee’s. I wonder if touring under the more familiar name and maybe with some “reunion” press will draw a larger audience, despite it being essentially the same band?

I personally don’t draw any real distinction between the Wedding Present and Cinerama. I only discovered the Wedding Present after it had morphed into Cinerama and while their debut Va Va Voom was a bit of a stylistic departure from the Weddoes material, their sound became more and more like the Wedding Present as time went by – if you graph out the evolution of Wedderama’s sound from George Best through Torino, I think you’ll find that the name change was almost wholly cosmetic. I like the Cinerama material as much as anything that came out under the Weddoes moniker and am a little sad that there will probably be far less Cinerama material played on the upcoming tour, if any at all. But of course, that’s tempered by the fact that I’ll get to hear more classic Wedding Present material – the five Weddoes tunes they played in 2001 weren’t nearly enough.

The new Wedding Present album is Take Fountain and you can hear the first two singles on their MySpace page. While the record isn’t due out until February 15 (new music from Dave Gedge on Valentine’s Day – how perfect is that?), I’ve been told that it’s already available on iTunes.

As promised last year while opening for The Delgados, Crooked Fingers will be back in town March 31 at the Horseshoe (tickets $10) to push Dignity And Shame, out February 22. They/he was quite good performing solo last time, this time he promised to bring a band. Also returining are Oakland’s Gris Gris, who by all accounts kicked serious ass the last time they played, will be back on April 5 and/or 6 (details unclear) at the Silver Dollar.

Brendan Benson’s new one, The Alternative To Love, is out March 22 and he’s at Lee’s Palace April 11 to promote. The Stands support. Get it? “The Stands support?!?” Oh fuck, I kill me. Seriously, I need to go sit down for a minute.

The lineup for this year’s edition of the Exclaim cross-Canada tour will feature Stars, The Organ, Wooden Stars, and Montag at the Phoenix on April 14. The lineup will shift a bit as the tour crosses the country, full details here.

Caribou, who used to be Manitoba, is at the Horseshoe April 28. His new album, The Milk of Human Kindness, is also out in April. And finally, the British Sea Power show that had been scheduled for April 21 at Lee’s Palace apppears to have been rescheduled for May 17, same venue. Their new one, Open Season, is out March 21 in the UK.

Check out the first official list of acts at SxSW. MADNESS. There’s over 1000 acts on this list and it isn’t even all of them… Donewaiting has done the good deed of expanding the listing into a list format, and I’ve made a nice little spreadsheet of the info, for easy access to info. I was going to start putting in confirmed show data, but that just sounded like work. But if anyone wants to download the spreadsheet for their own scheduling purposes, you can grab it here, with my compliments. And if you want to plan out what I’m going to see while I’m there, feel free. Hell, if anyone wants to assume full control of all aspects of my life, I’d be grateful. I’m not doing a bang-up job on my own.

NOW profiles the Chromewaves-approved Frontier Index, playing tomorrow night at the El Mocambo with Beneath Augusta and League Champs. I just realized I referred to myself in the third person. That’s not a good sign.

Zoilus reports on how Arcade Fire (and Final Fantasy) are conquering New York City. He has a link to an .avi of their performance on Conan O’Brien the other night and Brooklynvegan has a rough but perfectly listenable recording of David Byrne joining the band onstage last night to sing on their cover of Talking Heads’ “Naive Melody”. Also in attendance was David Bowie – I dunno, anytime I think about David Bowie in the audience for something, it just turns into the walk-off scene from Zoolander.

I was watching this Girls Guitar Club short film that someone sent me and it wasn’t until about 2/3 of the way through that I realized, “Holy shit – that’s Chloe!!!” Yes, no other than Mary Lynn Rajskub, Five Seventeen’s secret girlfriend. I’ve never understood that guy…

np – Heavenly / Heavenly Vs Satan