MyspaceThough I suspect they fall just on the wrong side of the bands reuniting vs profitability equation for them to ever get back together – if Radiohead couldn’t convince them to do it a few years back and open for them in their mutual hometown of Oxford, no one can – there’s still just enough going on with shoegaze godheads Ride that I can justify leading a post with this website’s namesake once in a while.

And in this case, it’s that Under The Radar reports their debut album Nowhere will be getting (another) reissue on December 21 via Rhino in commemoration of the record’s 20th anniversary. In addition to the eight tracks that appeared on the original LP, the three tracks from the Fall EP that were appended onto the original CD version and the four tracks from the brilliant Today Forever EP that were added to the 2001 reissue, in order to encourage those who already own one or more of the previous editions, this version will come with a second five-track CD featuring a 1991-vintage live show in Los Angeles. Can’t say as that I’ll be rushing out to pick this up, but it pleases me that there’s still enough interest and respect in the band and their music to justify packages like this. Update: Blurt has more details on the set, including the fact that the live disc will be a full 12 tracks and a heavyweight vinyl edition of the original eight-song Nowhere will also be released. Sweet.

MP3: Ride – “Vapour Trail”
Video: Ride – “Vapour Trail”

Some good, Ride-related news is that Andy Bell is again playing guitar. Bad news is that it’s in Beady Eye, Liam Gallagher’s new band with the bits of Oasis he’s not related to. They just made their first single available for download from their website and… well, it’s not going to make anyone forget that Noel was the songwriting talent of the band. Not even a little. The full-length is due next year Tangentially, Alan McGee tells BBC6 that he expects the Gallagher brothers to make up and re-form Oasis within a few years. I believe him.

Band Of Horses have announced Mojave 3 as support on their upcoming UK tour – this is exciting not because I will be attending any of those shows, but because it confirms Mojave 3 as an ongoing concern for Neil Halstead and hopefully Rachel Goswell. The band’s status post-Puzzles Of You has not been very clear, what with Goswell’s health concerns and Halstead’s solo career, but they’re still here! Huzzah.

MP3: Mojave 3 – “Some Kinda Angel” (live @ KCRW)

The Guardian and Vanity Fair look at the just-announced Pulp reunion and why it feels a little different/better than most other reunions despite it almost certainly just being done for the money. Elsewhere, 33revolutionsperminute dissects “Common People”.

Clash sends Kele to interview Gary Numan

Under The Radar reports that the recordings Laura Marling and Mumford & Sons made with The Dharohar Project while on tour in India earlier this year will be getting digitally released as an EP on December 7 entitled Laura Marling & Mumford & Sons & The Dharohar Project. Pitchfork is also streaming both sides of Marling’s just-released 7″ featuring Jackson C Frank and Neil Young covers. Mumford & Sons play a sold-out show at the Sound Academy on Saturday.

English post-punk godfathers Gang Of Four have slated a North American tour in support of their new album Content, due January 25. The tour begins on February 4 at the Phoenix in Toronto; tickets $30 in advance.

MP3: Gang Of Four – “Never Pay For The Farm”

Both Spin and Rolling Stone wonder, “where have you gone, David Bowie?” and come up with no answers that imply a return to music anytime soon, if ever. Coincidentally, The AV Club has assembled a primer on the works and phases of the Thin White Duke.

Frank YangI’ve not milked many show reviews more than I have the Johnny Flynn/Laura Marling/Mumford & Sons one at The Rivoli circa October 2008 – as recently as yesterday – and here I go again. But only for a photo and context.

When artists are on the road together and guesting in each others sets, it’s only natural that you’d know each others’ songs almost as well as you know your own, so for Laura Marling to be able to knock off one of Johnny Flynn’s songs like it was her own should surprise no one. I’m not certain when this recording dates from, but I suspect it’s around the same time as this one wherein she did one of Mumford & Sons’ tunes for NPR.

Marling continues her cover-friendly ways this week with the release of a limited-edition 7″ for Jack White’s Third Man Records featuring redos of tunes by Jackson C Frank and Neil Young. She recently announced she wouldn’t be releasing a follow-up to I Speak Because I Can in 2010 after all, instead shelving said record in favour of a new one that would be out next year. Johnny Flynn’s second album Been Listening came out in North America last month and he’s conducting a North American tour to promote – look for him next Sunday at Lee’s Palace in Toronto.

Laura Marling’s year is summed up in the just-released video, Laura Marling: A Short Film.

MP3: Laura Marling – “The Wrote & The Writ”
Video: Laura Marling – “The Wrote & The Writ”
Video: Johnny Flynn – “The Wrote & The Writ” (live on Le Blogotheque)

Frank YangThe easy thing to do would be to go back to early May and just copy and paste my review of The Joy Formidable’s Toronto debut. After all, that show was just six months ago (almost to the day) at the same venue and even with the same supporting band in New York’s The Dig, and they haven’t released any new material in the interim, their full-length debut The Big Roar not due out until the new year. But considering that at the start of the year, I didn’t expect I’d get the chance to see The Joy Formidable live without hopping on a plane (which I almost did), already taking their visits for granted would simply be untoward.

I had mixed feelings about The Dig the first time around, finding half of their material sonically interesting and moderately adventuresome pop and the other half kind of rote, leaden garage rock. This outing made a more favourable impression, their set for whatever reason coming across catchier and punchier and with some standout material introduced as new numbers that were some of the best stuff they had to offer. They still felt the need to close with the more leaden, rawk material but even those were delivered with more verve than last time. The Dig might not be doing anything particularly fresh, but at least they’re getting better at it.

The Joy Formidable were already an impressively seasoned live act when the were here in the Spring, but still seemed to find room to improve over the past half year. For starters, drummer Matt Thomas was set up at the side of the stage rather than the back, opening up a lot more stage space for guitarist Ritzy Bryan and bassist Rhydian Dafydd to roam, lurch and dance, which they did with gusto (and the mid-song kiss whilst tearing it up was particularly sweet – they’re a couple, it’s cool). Their delivery seemed to be a bit less manic, but heavier-sounding and more dramatic in delivery – Bryan was still all wide-eyed smiles on stage between guitar freak-outs, but there was a crazed edge to her stage presence that wasn’t evident before and reflected the extra snarl in their attack.

I was surprised that with a new album in the can, though apparently without a firm track list, there was hardly any new material in the mix. Lead single “I Don’t Want To See You Like This” and the pulverizing “Magnifying Glass”, which had been present in set lists all year, represented The Big Roar but the bulk of the set came from the A Balloon Called Moaning mini-album. Not that this is in any way a complaint; that debut remains as dizzyingly great as it did when I first heard it in February, I just thought that they’d be eager to road test more new material by this point.

Consequently, the set was shorter than I’d have liked – barely an hour including encore – but executed with more energy and intensity than a lot of bands could muster if they played all night. Plus they ended it with the sort of extended gear-abusing, feedback-inducing cathartic antics you might expect at the end of an extensive stint on the road and not the very start of a two-week North American jaunt. Assuming their equipment survives the experience, it’s going to be a hell of a trip. This is how you start a tour.

The Smith College Sophian has an interview with Ritzy Bryan.

Photos: The Joy Formidable, The Dig @ The Horseshoe – November 3, 2010
MP3: The Joy Formidable – “Whirring”
MP3: The Joy Formidable – “Austere”
MP3: The Joy Formidable – “Greyhounds In The Slips”
MP3: The Dig – “You’re Already Gone”
Video: The Joy Formidable – “I Don’t Want To See You Like This”
Video: The Joy Formidable – “Popinjay”
Video: The Joy Formidable – “Whirring”
Video: The Joy Formidable – “Austere”
Video: The Joy Formidable – “Cradle”
MySpace: The Joy Formidable

Manic Street Preachers have released a video for the second single from Postcards From A Young Man, and both song and clip feature Ian McCulloch from Echo & The Bunnymen, in case you couldn’t quite place the croak or the shades. The Sydney Morning Herald has a conversation with James Dean Bradfield.

Video: Manic Street Preachers – “Some Kind Of Nothingness”

Drowned In Sound meets Let’s Wrestle. Wrestling ensues.

I don’t know what a “lyric video” is, but Patrick Wolf has cobbled one together for the first single from his next album and it sounds great. The record was once called The Conqueror but is no longer and will be out in May.

Video: Patrick Wolf – “Time Of My Life”

The Fly has a feature on Foals.

Pitchfork is streaming a new song from Ladytron, who’ve not announced specifics on a follow-up to 2008’s Velocifero but are certainly due for one. A decade-spanning best-of is due in the Spring.

Under The Radar reports that the 7″ single Laura Marling recorded for/at Jack White’s Third Man Records will be out on November 9 – it features two covers, Jackson C. Frank’s “Blues Run the Game” and Neil Young’s “The Needle and the Damage Done”.

Oh, and if you’re the sort who likes free concert tickets and the like, I’d humbly suggest following me on Twitter at @fyang because while I’ll still be keeping Saturday the day of free stuff, short turnaround giveaways will now be happening via the Twitter. Starting today.

Frank YangOne of the perks of being my own boss, as it were, is that no one can tell me what I have to cover when I’m out and about, particularly at a festival like Halifax Pop Explosion. And since I’ve already had and taken the opportunity to see many of the big names playing the festival, I went into this week with the mandate of seeing stuff I hadn’t seen before, be it on recommendations from others, positive MySpace first impressions or just because it’s located nearby and I’m lazy.

The Wednesday night festival programme was bit lighter than the rest of the week, basically offering one show per genre of interest. There was the pop show, the metal show, the electro-dance show, the punk show, the GWAR show. Having seen The New Pornographers not three weeks ago, I skipped the pop-friendly bill at The Forum and headed to the Paragon Theatre – conveniently located around the corner from the hotel – for some synth-driven action, kicked off by Halifax’s The Modern Men. Their online samples implied an ’80s-indebted New Wave/New Romantic-ish outfit, and that’s pretty much what was delivered, though more organic and meaty-sounding than expected. Propelled by two drummers with nary an electronic kit or laptop in sight, they had songs that weren’t especially deep – like their influences – but heavy on hooks and groove. The quality of the tunes made up for the general lack of stage presence and mood-killing stage banter – there’s really no need to introduce each song with the title and the style it’s in.

Photos: The Modern Men @ The Paragon Theatre – October 20, 2010
MySpace: The Modern Men

I’d intended to see the next act, Styrofoam Ones, a number of times back in Toronto but apparently we both had to travel to the east coast for that to happen. And interestingly, their set was the inverse of Modern Men’s, in both the positive and negative sense. Delayed by some technical issues, when the trio finally got underway they seemed a bit out of sorts, audibly out of time with one another and when your MO is tightness, that’s a problem. This, however, was offset to a degree by the fact that they didn’t seem to notice or care and kept playing with enough on-stage attitude and swagger that you almost believed that this was how they meant to sound. Within a few songs they did get it together, though, and from then on their showmanship was working with and not in spite of their tunes – good-time synth-rock that favoured vintage combo organ sounds rather than ’80s square waves and reliant more on punkish energy than sophistication.

Photos: Styrofoam Ones @ The Paragon Theatre – October 20, 2010
MP3: Styrofoam Ones – “Blue Lines”
Video: Styrofoam Ones – “Blue Lines”
MySpace: Styrofoam Ones

I had been advised to check out San Francisco’s Ty Segall – whom I’d never heard a note of – on the basis that his shows in Toronto not long ago were “intense”. After being in the front line (or kill zone) of his show at the Seahorse Tavern last night, I’d say that yeah, that’s pretty accurate. And it’s not because his stuff – garage rock with a goodly amount of pop melodicism injected – is especially aggressive or even his performance. It’s because his fans – jammed into the small underground space – were intent on creating bedlam and he was perfectly happy to soundtrack it, and woe to anyone who was so unfortunate as to be up front innocently trying to take some pictures. But besides being kicked in the head by a crowdsurfer and mashed into the stage ad nauseum, it wasn’t really that bad – I’ve been in worse – and for the most part it was just people having fun. Amidst material that I presume was from his latest record Melted, we got a cover of Sabbath’s “Paranoid” and the kids going nuts somehow managed to find another gear. Fun times, nothing broken, night one finis.

Photos: Ty Segall @ The Seahorse Tavern – October 20, 2010
MP3: Ty Segall – “It #1”
Video: Ty Segall – “Finger”
Video: Ty Segall – “Lovely One”
Video: Ty Segall – “Cents”

Spinner has a profile on the Halifax Pop Explosion.

For Folk’s Sake and Blast interview Dan Mangan. He plays Trinity-St. Paul’s on October 28.

NOW talks to both halves of the Diamond Rings/PS I Love You bill playing the Garrison on Tuesday, while eye features just PS I Love You.

Crystal Castles have a date at the Sound Academy on April 2.

Video: Crystal Castles – “Baptism”

The National have released a video for the version of “Terrible Love” that appears on the deluxe edition of High Violet which is coming November 22.

Video: The National – “Terrible Love” (alternate version)

The Line Of Best Fit talks to The Joy Formidable; their forthcoming debut The Big Roar is out in early 2011 and they kick off a North American tour on November 3 at the Horseshoe.

Laura Marling tells NME that she no longer intends to release a second album in 2010 but will instead finish off new material early next year and release that instead. Which is fine, but one hopes that at least some of the material that was recorded alongside I Speak Because I Can will eventually see the light of day in some form.

Frank YangPeelander-Z means many things to many people – Japanese Power Ranger-suited comic punks to some, incomprehensibly entertaining novelty act to others, and plain incomprehensible to the rest. To me, they mean the Hot Freaks! shows at The Mohawk in Austin, Texas, which were the highlights of SxSWs past. Those days are probably over and gone, however, so it was very obliging of them to come up to Toronto for two shows last week and help craft some new memories.

This was their first time back in town in a decade – a fact I found remarkable because it meant they’d been DOING what they do for 10 years plus – and while I’m a double-dose of Peelander would have been doubly entertaining, I opted to go to the second of the shows at The Silver Dollar simply because it was closer to home and seemed like a more climbable venue than The Velvet Underground and with better human bowling lanes. Besides making up for an extended absence from Canada, they were previewing their new record P-TV-Z, due out September 28, and really – do you need an excuse to dress up and engage in the sort of bedlam that Peelander do? No, I don’t think you do.

As far as the performance went, it was pretty much everything you could hope for. For the hour that they were on stage (and off the stage), there was the giant squid costume, nose picking, human bowling, replacing the band with audience members, singalongs, limbo, jump rope, conga lines, so many Mikes, and while the Silver Dollar isn’t nearly as conducive to scaling and surfing as The Mohawk, Peelander Red still managed to crowd surf upright onto the bar and back to the stage. Very impressive. And while there’s a temptation to assume the music comes secondary to the antics, just a little attention reveals that they’re capable and versatile musicians. I mean, YOU try playing bass while dressed as a giant squid guitar. Not that easy, is it. But most importantly, Peelander-Z are fun beyond words and utterly unique. And this show was better than the last one at the Mohawk in that Peelander Green didn’t feel compelled to chuck a drumstick at me this time.

Photos: Peelander-Z @ The Silver Dollar – September 2, 2010
MP3: Peelander-Z – “E-I-E-I-O”
MP3: Peelander-Z – “S.T.E.A.K.”
MP3: Peelander-Z – “Rocket Gold Star”
MP3: Peelander-Z – “Champion”
MP3: Peelander-Z – “Panda Punk”
Video: Peelander-Z – “E-I-E-I-O”
Video: Peelander-Z – “Ninja High Schooool”
Video: Peelander-Z – “S.T.E.A.K.”
Video: Peelander-Z – “Mad Tiger”
MySpace: Peelander-Z

Belle & Sebastian are previewing two songs from their new record Write About Love via a 30-minute talk show webisode; sounds like it’s going to be a winner, folks. The album is out October 12 and they play Massey Hall the same evening. The first MP3 from the album is supposed to be made available today as well. Update: The track is now available email-widget-swapsies-style.

The Telegraph and The Guardian talked to Laura Marling about being nominated a second time for the Mercury Prize, which is being awarded tonight.

Clash interviews Richard Thompson about his new album Dream Attic.

Billy Bragg talks to Billboard about teaming up with Roseanne Cash and Joe Henry for a new album due out in late 2011.

Unbelievably, The Charlatans’ North American tour in support of Who We Touch, out next Tuesday, is due to begin tonight in Atlanta and they still haven’t cancelled it. They might even already be on this side of the Atlantic! Perhaps flush with confidence that the apocalypse isn’t imminent, they’ve scheduled an in-store at Sunrise Records on Yonge St at 7PM next Friday, September 17, before their show at Lee’s Palace later that evening. And they’ve just released a new video from said record, which is apparently quite decent.

Video: The Charlatans – “My Foolish Pride”

Beatroute interviews The Dø, in town at the Mod Club this coming Sunday night, September 11.

The Guardian interviews Nick Cave of Grinderman. Grinderman 2 is out next Tuesday and they’re at The Phoenix on November 11.

I didn’t pay much attention to Pitchfork’s Top 200 Tracks of The ’90s series last week, save for skipping to the end on Friday and going, “huh”, but their just-posted ’90s In Lists piece was equal parts hilarious, nostalgic, depressing and terrifying – the last one mostly because that, right there, is my high school and university years and it was so so so so long away. The only thing that’s going to be more depressing today – god willing – is biking to work past the hordes of 17-year old frosh starting at the University Of Toronto who have no clue about 90% of the stuff in those lists. Hello, kids! I’m twice your age! Get off my lawn!