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Much has already been written about the Shins’ new album, Wincing the Night Away (which comes out Tuesday), including the fact that the majority of the songs were inspired by singer/songwriter James Mercer’s bouts of “crippling insomnia.” Whether or not that’s entirely true is debatable , but what’s more interesting is the fact that, for the first time in almost 15 years of playing together, the Shins have become a band about which much is written. And more pertinently, very little of it is about their career-making shout-out in Zach Braff’s 2004 flick, “Garden State,” or one of their songs… Read more »

Fears of race clashes on Monday led organizers of Australia’s biggest outdoor rock concert to bar fans from carrying the national flag, sparking a furious reaction from the country’s prime minister and war veterans. After fights between ethnic Croatian and Serbian fans outside the Australian Open tennis tournament last week and 2005 race clashes on Sydney’s beaches, Big Day Out concert organizers said Australia’s flag was a “gang color” which could incite hatred. “It was racism disguised as patriotism and I’m not going to tolerate it,” event producer Ken West told Australian newspapers. The concert Web site said the flag… Read more »

Chris Martin will feature on the new Kanye West album, the hip hop icon has revealed. The Coldplay star appeared on “Beach Chair,” a track on Kingdom Come, Jay-Z’s return to the hip-hop world, last year. Kanye has now revealed that he and Martin have recorded a song called “Homecoming,” which is scheduled to be the first single from the follow-up to Late Registration. The LP is provisionally titled Graduation and is tentatively due for release towards the end of 2007, reports Billboard. Kanye is also currently working on a TV show with Rick Rubin and Curb Your Enthusiasm mastermind… Read more »

Last we heard from Garbage, in the fall of 2005, the group was going on an indefinite hiatus. Fortunately for fans, that break is not turning out like, say, Blink-182’s “hiatus.” “We’re recording a couple new songs at the end of February,” drummer Butch Vig revealed recently. “I think everyone’s excited about getting back in a room and playing some music together.” The new tunes will be included on a Garbage greatest-hits album the band is putting together for release later in the year. “We’ve been working on it for a while,” Vig said. “There was originally talk about doing… Read more »

The album Rick James was working on before his fatal 2004 heart attack will be released in early May, his business manager said. The as-yet-untitled Stone City Records release features tracks the funk singer wrote in the last two or three years of his life; it was originally due in August 2005 via Sanctuary. “This is one he really wanted out,” Ron Kramer told Billboard.com. “He really didn’t want anybody else on these songs. He wanted to prove himself again. He wanted people to enjoy him; his music.” The album’s first single, “Deeper Still,” will hit urban radio in late… Read more »

Dustin Kensrue hasn’t been getting much sleep lately. The release of his debut solo album, Please Come Home, is right around the corner, and his month-old daughter has been doing her best to keep him up too. Oh, and there’s that little project he’s been working on with Thrice, the band he’s fronted since 1998: a collection of 25 songs, spread across four CDs that will be known collectively as The Elements. Thrice, Kensrue said, are about halfway through the writing and recording of The Elements, which is bound to be one of the most ambitious studio efforts in recent… Read more »

One week after he leapt into the crowd and began wailing on a security guard at the Sunshine Theater in Albuquerque, New Mexico, Fall Out Boy bassist Pete Wentz is still a little bit sore, a little bit embarrassed and – in what might be a first – a little bit wary of talking about the incident. But that isn’t stopping his bandmates from giving their accounts of the punch-up, which occurred while FOB was playing the final song of their set during last weekend’s gig at the Sunshine . “I was standing on a riser, stage left, and I… Read more »

A surge in downloaded songs and mobile-phone ringtones failed to make up for declines in sales of compact discs last year, an industry group said. Music downloads almost doubled to about $2 billion last year, accounting for about 10 percent of the industry’s global sales, the International Federation of the Phonographic Industry said in a statement today. While that’s up from 5.5 percent in 2005, it’s still not enough to offset the revenue lost due to piracy and declining sales of physical media such as CDs. “I would like to be announcing that a fall in CD sales is being… Read more »

January 16 might go down as a day of infamy on the mixtape circuit. In a major development in the Recording Industry Association of America’s quest to stop what they believe to be the bootlegging of music, the Atlanta office of mixtape king DJ Drama’s Aphilliate Music Group was raided Tuesday by police. Drama (real name Tyree Simmons) and Aphilliate partner Donald “Don” Cannon were taken into custody along with 17 other individuals Tuesday. Police seized over 50,000 mixtapes in the raid, according to reports from Atlanta’s Fox affiliate, WAGA. In addition to housing the day-to-day operations of the Aphilliate… Read more »

SAN FRANCISCO – Apple’s new iPhone appears to be the clearest statement yet of what Steve Jobs’s impact has been on consumer electronics. It is not that he invents new technologies. He refines existing ones. Mr. Jobs himself acknowledged that when asked during an interview on Tuesday whether he thought the iPhone represented a trend toward the convergence of computing and communications. “I don’t want people to think of this as a computer,” he said. “I think of it as reinventing the phone.” If the iPhone succeeds commercially, it will be new proof of Mr. Jobs’s power and influence over… Read more »