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Road Warriors 31

September 14, 2007 / Mike Farley

Meg White of the White Stripes is suffering from “acute anxiety,” prompting the band to cancel its upcoming US tour that was set to begin this week. Refunds are available at points of purchase. So far, the Stripes are still planning to tour the UK beginning October 24.

Word is that this year’s American Idol tour of the top 10 finalists didn’t do so well. Maybe it was the cost of concert tickets, or maybe it was the declining interest in the show as a whole. But the fact is, this show keeps pumping new pop artists into the system like no other medium. A few of the more popular alumni from the show are now in the early stages of planning a spring 2008 tour: Season 2 champ Ruben Studdard, as well as Clay Aiken and Kimberley Locke.

After winning the VMA for Best Group, Fall Out Boy is planning some intimate shows to give back to their fans. Since the shows are unannounced, we have no information to announce, but that’s the beauty of events like this. Bassist Pete Wentz says that the shows will be in some small venues, and will be primarily acoustic versions of FOB songs as well as some covers.

After being on the road for two years, The Fray are taking a break and recharging their batteries. Plans are in place to tour Europe in the fall, and the band is also working on their next album.

After postponing a bunch of tour dates this fall because they wanted to finish recording, The Cure has announced it will head back to the US in the spring of 2008 beginning May 9 in Washington DC. Tickets for the postponed dates will be honored for the newly scheduled shows. In addition, shows were added to the tour including stops in Kansas City, Phoenix, Austin, Fort Lauderdale and Cleveland.

The concert to raise funs for a Martin Luther King, Jr. memorial at the National Mall in Washington DC this coming Tuesday has added a few more high profile artists: Ludacris, Talib Kweli, and Wyclef Jean. Among the other acts already confirmed are John Legend, Robin Thicke, Stevie Wonder and Joss Stone.

Another band foregoing a US tour to work on new material is the Kaiser Chiefs, who will still be playing their New York and Austin shows but canceling the dates in between. Here is the updated Continue reading »

Alternative, American Idol, Concerts, Hip Hop, Indie Labels, Pop, Radio

DMed’s Video of the Week: Encore, “All Through the Night”

September 14, 2007 / David Medsker

A publicist friend sent this my way, and I’ve had a stupid grin on my face ever since. If you came of age in the late ’70s, you will totally appreciate this video, which takes a TV show that’s near and dear to the hearts of late thirtysomethings everywhere, and brilliantly re-edits it to sync up to Encore’s discotastic “All Through the Night.” Sweeeet.

External Music, Pop, Songs, Videos

Trapt! Live! Rawk! Whoooooo! _\nn/

September 13, 2007 / David Medsker

On a personal note, I do not miss the days when Spellcheck bands ruled the earth (Korn, Staind, Linkin Park, Trapt), but I understand that those bands sold positively boatloads of records, so this post is for the fans, yo. If you haven’t heard their new live album, succinctly titled Live!, you can stream the album here. Rawk on, brutha.

Alternative, Rock, Songs

Man-about-MySpace: Feist-pod Nano

September 12, 2007 / Dr. Flucke

The new iPod Nano Video commercial is a joke. To me, it just screams “Don’t buy this, because you can’t see anything on my postage-stamp screen!” And don’t take me as an Apple-basher, because I get it. A lifelong Mac devotee, I bought the 5GB iPod, then 15GB, then 40GB, and then 80GB iPods. If there were a 160GB available, I’d eBay my 80-gigger and get one–and proudly sync it to my Mac.

It’s just that, with his “technology magic” act, Steve Jobs is starting to look trite as the late Doug Henning did there at the end. I want a music player, not a Blackberry-Palm-phone-thing. I don’t want my iPod polluted with a bunch of crappy software that half-works. Plus, with the iPod’s well-known battery issues, what, I want to put my grocery list on my iPod so I can burn the battery out faster? Flucke that. And I certainly don’t want videos, because what good is a music video at 14 pixels square? Plus, all I need is to be driving on the highway amongst a bunch of 17-year-old chickie-doo Feist fans trying to watch the damn video on their Nanos when they should be, er, steering their cars and getting out of my way.

The only thing more embarrassing than watching Steve Jobs unveil some incremental upgrade to his iWhateverDuJour is the slobbering “oohing” and “ahhing” of the audience watching him. Pathetic sycophants, all of them. Ugh. Not like Mike Dell has any charisma whatsoever, but at least Dell devotees don’t wilt like wounded flowers when he speaks.

Which brings us to MySpace, which fixes the problem of the iPod Nano Video commercial. No, it turns out, the video is not a poor Busby Berkeley clone production starring a drunken Britney, Nicole, Lindsay, Paris, and their entourages filmed from the balcony at Pure, which it kinda resembles Nano-sized.

(In fact, a quasi-interesting NYT article explains how the singer, Feist, actually wears t-shirts and jeans most of the time and took something of a chance donning the blue pantsuit for the video–in my opinion, to great effect.)

iPod devotees hipped to Feist via the commercial (and not our own Mike Farley’s review from months ago) can’t go to her own site, which she says was overrun by porn spammers.

In fact, the 30-something Torontonian’s MySpace is the place to go to check out her act, at full size. Before you go, here’s that video the iPod Nano does a great job of not showing on the TV commercial: