Wilco have announced their new touring lineup in the wake of Leroy Bach’s departure. This newest incarnation of the band features:

Jeff Tweedy: gtr, vox
John Stirratt: bass gtr, vox
Glenn Kotche: drums, percussion, etc.
Mikael Jorgensen: keys, laptop
Pat Sansone: keys, gtr, vox
Nels Cline: gtr
Everybody: cowbell

Jorgensen had accompanied the band on their last tour, while Sansone plays with John Stirrat in The Autumn Defense and Nels Cline is an avant-garde jazz/experimentalist guitarist of some note whom they probably hooked up with through Sonic Youth. Interesting – They’re going from having mostly just one guitar of the YHF tours to three or four for A Ghost Is Born.

Dan Bejar may have been best known as one of The New Pornographers circa Mass Romantic, but he left the band to pursue his day job in Destroyer. In support of their new album, This Night Your Blues, Destroyer will be conducting a massive North American tour that stops at Lee’s Palace May 6. Support on this tour will be Victoria’s Frog Eyes who will not only be opening, but acting as Bejar’s backing band. Thanks to Tiny Mix Tapes for the 411.

Have I mentioned lately that Motown in its heyday is the greatest music ever? It really is. And if you disagree, you’re just wrong.

np – various artists / Hitsville USA: The Motown Singles Collection 1959-1971

Who says the Germans don’t have a sense of whimsy? Some fellow has recreated Michael Jackson’s “Thriller” video with Lego men (for the vid, go to the bottom of the page where it says “Technische Daten & Download” – and be patient, it’s a big download). Dig the big dance number at the end – that’s just nutty. Zagnut nutty. The saddest part is the Lego Jacko has a more realistic nose than the human one. Link from House of Hotsauce.

Don’t know if I mentioned it, but the two Neko Case/Sadies shows at the start of April are being recorded for a live album. That will kick so much ass, it will have to recruit a second ass to handle the surplus of kicking.

Splendid was feeling pissy, compiling 22 sacred cow albums that must die, and then they felt contrite, compiling 14 sacred cow albums that must be spared. From The GPC.

The Guardian has a piece on “The 50-Quid Bloke”, the new driving force in music sales. He’s the guy buying the Led Zeppelin DVDs and putting Norah Jones straight in at #1.

The security tags in the new US currency gives new meaning to “Money to burn”.

What To Rent.com is a neat website that analyzes your taste in movies and current mood to make recommendations on films to rent. On the plus side – it was very accurate in suggesting movies I’d like. On the negative side, I’d already seen most of them.

Traveler’s Diagram has an interesting round up of what everyone who’s anyone in Hollywood is up to right now.

np – Elvis Costello / My Aim Is True

On this night, when the Oscars honoured the very best in cinema of the past year, I went out and rented The League Of Extraordinary Gentlemen… which certainly does not qualify. Have you ever gone out of your way to rent and watch a film that you know is really going to stink? And when its done, you feel a little gross but know you have no one to blame but yourself? Yeah. I should have known better, but…

It wasn’t insultingly bad. I didn’t feel the rage bubbling down in my stomach the way I did with, oh, Batman & Robin, but it was pretty bad. It lacked the amazing attention to detail and prim Victorian properness that made the source graphic novel so enjoyable, as well as the steampunk London setting. Somehow the premise doesn’t work nearly as well in a more historically accurate 19th century. The plot itself wasn’t fundamentally bad in concept, but it had holes you could drive the Nautilus through (I suspect the editing had a lot to do with that). The characters, however, were disappointingly shallow and one-dimensional. For so-called men of mystery, they gave up their secrets ridiculously easily. Though it wasn’t all bad – some of the effects were well done – the whole was an unqualified mess, and you can’t pin it all on the well-reported conflicts between Sean Connery and director Stephen Norrington. I may yet run it again with the director commentary on to see if he addresses it at all, but that would require me to sit through it again. Ah, there’s not much more I can say. It got panned on release, and deservedly so. A shame, since its a brilliant concept and in the right hands, it could have been something really cool on the screen. At least I still have the comics.

Overheard on the Academy Awards last night: “This is the first Academy Award and third nomination for Canada”. CANADA. Wow. So does this thing get passed around from household to household? I could use a doorstop.

And speaking of the Oscars – Uncle Grambo offers a top-notch play-by-play of the ceremonies. Whatevs.org – your one-stop celeb stalk HQ. I caught the last hour or so of the Oscars and while I wasn’t paying much attention, it seemed like a very sedate affair. Lord Of The Rings cleaning up was of no surprise to anyone, ever since Fellowship they’d been saying that Peter Jackson was going to be rewarded for the trilogy only after the third one came out. I was pleased to see Sofia Coppolla pick one up for Lost In Translation though. She’s so cute.

I took advantage of the warm snap yesterday to dig the bike out of mothballs and go tooling around the Annex. Dang, did that feel good. I’m looking forward to April, which I will formally declare as the start of bike-to-work season. Hope the weather co-operates.

np – The Mountain Goats / We Shall All Be Healed

I’ve always thought that leap years would be much more impressive if there was some cosmic confluence that went along with them, some event that only happened every four years. Like meteor showers, or solar flares, or magical doorways in my closet leading to the land of Narnia. But no, all we get is the coldest, drabbest, dullest month one day longer. Whose idea was this, anyway?

I picked up a Grandaddy DVD-video single gratis this weekend, which features the two videos from Sumday. I’d seen the vid for “Now It’s On” from the enchanced component of the CD, but the clip for “El Caminoes In The West” was new to me and a lot of fun, not least of all because it was mostly shot in Toronto – this is what they were doing at the Rivoli last Spring and after seeing it you’ll understand why while they were shooting live footage for the vid, the band was not there. They had these things for free at the front counter of Rotate This – get em while you can.

Curiously, one of the first things people ask me when they see my CD collection is, “Is this alphabetized?”, as though there were any other logical way to do it. I mean, I’ve got over 1000 items – anything besides alphabetical (by artist, and then by title, if you’re wondering) just doesn’t make any sense – it’d take forever to find anything. Well maybe I should reconsider that line of reasoning – Radishbeet has some other suggestions on how to organize one’s music collection. I think the next time I get really bored, things are going Socratic. Link from Jinners.

Those mash-up remixes have been around for a while, but I’ve never seen one done in video form before. Check out this Missy Elliott vs Joy Division one – pretty impressive editing. A bunch more audio ones available here. Link from Largehearted Boy.

Ryan Adams’ double-EP set Love Is Hell will be getting a re-release as a single album on May 3. Once again, the record companies show they business acumen, tapping into that rich demographic of people who held off on buying two discount-priced EPs so that they could pay more for a single disc half a year later. Savvy savvy!

np – Old 97s / Fight Songs

A great to-do at the Toronto premiere of Bubba Ho-Tep last night. I showed up three hours early to get tickets, and it’s a good thing because twenty minutes before showtime there was a line down the block of people hoping to get in. Besides the packed house, the Royal rolled out raffles, a Hawaiian Elvis impersonator, a 6-year old Elvis impersonator who brought down the house with his karaoke “Suspicious Minds” and an ultra-cool opening set by Atomic 7. A movie with an opening band! How can you not love it?

The film itself had quite a task to live up to both the anticipation of the crowd and the promise of its high-minded concept, and I don’t think it disappointed. It would have been all too easy for the producers to think that the very plot of a geriatric Elvis and John F Kennedy battling a soul-sucking mummy in an East Texas nursing home would be enough to bring them in in droves and to skimp on the finished product. Thankfully, this is a b-movie of the highest calibre. King of Kings Bruce Campbell is excellent as the King of Rock’N’Roll who walked away from fame and fortune to trade places with an Elvis impersonator and Ossie Davis is a fine foil as a President Kennedy convinced that Lyndon B Johnson had him shot, replaced his brain with a bag of sand and dyed his skin black. The plotline is pretty standard comedy/horror fare, but the jokes are clever enough and the expertise and deadpan humour of the cast keeps it a damned entertaining 90 minutes. Bruce Campbell for president.

Exclaim! has a nice long chat with Sarah Harmer about Weeping Tile, life as a solo artist and All Of Our Names. She even graces the cover. Yes, that was just a gratuitous excuse to link a picture of Ms Harmer. What of it? Couple more related links – Silver Road is a fine fan site and www.sarahharmer.net is a minisite erected by her American label.

First it was Batman: Intimidation Game, then just Batman: Intimidation. The new (final?) title for the Christian Bale vs Ken Watanabe film is Batman Begins. Mmm, doesn’t do so much for me but it’ll suffice.

Exclaim! also runs a piece on Dave Sim and Cerebus to commemorate his twenty-five year run on the longest-running independent comic ever, and the final issue 300 due out next month. Under normal circumstances, this would be something to celebrate as it’s a hell of an achievement for someone from my hometown. I certainly thought it would be eleven years ago when I started reading Cerebus. Unfortunately, not long after that, Dave Sim apparently went quite, quite mad. Not only did he become a mysgoginist of the highest order, he used the comic as a soapbox to work out his frustrations against women. While this is odious enough, he also gave up on sort of real narrative in the book. He abandoned the story and everyone’s favorite barbarian aardvark became our guide through Sim’s personal hell – Not a fun trip and certainly not worth the price of admission every month. It’s a damn shame, too, because I loved the character and the earlier storylines of “High Society” and “Church & State” were simply genius works of comedy and satire. It’s unfortunate that Sim had to unravel to thoroughly and spectacularly in public. So, on the occasion of the end of Cerebus, I say to Dave Sim – “Congratulations… and get some help”.

np – Neko Case / Blacklisted