Search Results for: april

Green Day played the biggest show of its week-long tour of the San Francisco Bay Area April 14th, performing its upcoming album, 21st Century Breakdown, in its entirety. After only eight full rehearsals of the opera and those two club dates, the six-piece Green Day – Armstrong, bassist Mike Dirnt and drummer Tre Cool with guitarist Jason White, keyboardist Jason Freese and guitarist Jeff Matika – had the Quadrophenia-like hang of 21st Century Breakdown’s classic rock melodies and lifetime-punk drive down solid. “I”m not fuckin’ around,” Armstrong crowed in “Horseshoes and Handgrenades,” and there was no insecurity in the way… Read more »

NEW YORK —  Green Day will appear at New York’s Bowery Ballroom on May 18, just three days after the release of the band’s hotly anticipated eighth studio album, “21st Century Breakdown,” MTV reports. The small club show is a rarity for the band, whose last album, 2004’s “American Idiot” sold more than 12 million copies. But the group has done some guerilla-style gigs in its hometown of San Francisco this past week, including a show at the 500-capacity DNA Lounge According to the New York Times’ ArtsBeat blog, the band played “21st Century Breakdown” in its entirety before running… Read more »

Death Cab for Cutie kicked off its U.S. tour last night with a stop at Philadelphia’s Tower Theater, a converted movie house with acoustics ready-made for frontman Ben Gibbard’s supernaturally clean and earnest whisper. Gibbard, recently engaged to fellow indie icon Zooey Deschanel, took the stage after solid performances from opening acts Cold War Kids and Ra Ra Riot and delivered an intimate solo rendition of “I Will Follow You Into the Dark” to a quiet, seated crowd. The rest of the band emerged and hit their stride with “The New Year,” a cut off of 2003’s “Transatlanticism” that ended… Read more »

Green Day’s “21st Century Breakdown”– the band’s eighth studio record and first since 2004’s Grammy-winning “American Idiot” – has a firm release date: May 15. While Tuesday is the traditional release day for albums in the U.S., the band is following the lead of labelmates Metallica and dropping its album worldwide on a Friday. First single “Know Your Enemy” will hit idobi Radio and digital retailers in April. “’American Idiot’ marked a really high bar for us,” Green Day frontman Billie Joe Armstrong tells Rolling Stone. “It’s easy to go, ‘OK, we can just write a collection of songs.’ But… Read more »

Miley Cyrus is attempting to teach an adult the Hoedown Throwdown, the big dance number from “Hannah Montana: The Movie” and it’s not going well. “We did it in one day!” she gasps. “We just all kind of made it up as we went along.” It doesn’t help that Cyrus offers this consolation and advice over the phone to a journalist who’s trying to follow along on YouTube — and untangle herself from the phone cord. “Well,” Cyrus patiently explains, “you have to be semi-coordinated to do it.” This is exactly how Cyrus’ legion of preteen female fans must be… Read more »

Kings of Leon will be among the headliners of this year’s Lollapalooza and Austin City Limits festivals, Billboard Magazine is reporting. Depeche Mode the Beastie Boys and Jane’s Addiction are also playing Lollapalooza, which takes place in Chicago’s Grant Park Aug. 7-9, the Chicago Tribune reports and Billboard’s sources confirm. Both events are produced by Austin, Texas-based C3 Productions. The full Lollapalooza lineup announcement is expected in April. Among the known top headliners for this year’s Lollapalooza, Kings of Leon are the only band that wasn’t around when the event debuted in 1991 as a traveling, multi-city festival. The Nashville-based… Read more »

BEIJING —  Oasis will not play in China for economic reasons and not because of any connection with the Tibet issue, an official at the promoter of the shows said. Oasis had said China blocked shows scheduled for Shanghai and Beijing after they found out that band member Noel Gallagher had appeared at a “Free Tibet” benefit concert in the United States in 1997. But a promoter from Beijing All Culture Communication Co Ltd, a small event company which promotes more ballet and traditional Chinese concerts than rock concerts told Reuters by telephone it was canceled due to a “tough… Read more »

Season two “American Idol” runner-up Clay Aiken has parted ways with RCA Records. A source told Billboard that the pop singer left the label a couple of months ago, on the heels of his 2008 album, “On My Way Here.” That set sold just 159,000 copies in the United States, according to Nielsen SoundScan Aiken’s 2003 debut, “Measure of a Man,” sold 2.78 million. The artist joins a slew of second-place finishers — Katharine McPhee,  Justin Guarini,  Blake Lewis and Bo Bice among them — whose post-“Idol” major-label deals have lapsed. Aiken will make a guest appearance on the April… Read more »

One night in the late 1990s, Conan O’Brien was hanging out in a Detroit bowling alley after shooting a remote segment with Ted Nugent (”I rode around in the woods with him, we had a guitar duel and then fired guns,” he recalls). “I have this vague memory of these really cool kids coming over and hanging out with us,” he says. “I knew nothing about them or what they did.” A few years later, O’Brien learned he had met Jack and Meg White that day when he popped into a Saturday Night Live rehearsal to check out the White… Read more »