Pitchfork

Photo by Natalie Kardos

-- Wilco have joined the list of bands showing love to indie retailers on Record Store Day. On April 18, indie record stores will start selling copies of Ashes of American Flags, Wilco's DVD document of their winter 2008 tour. The rest of the world gets it two weeks later. Frontman Jeff Tweedy tells Billboard all about it here.

-- The by:Larm festival will take over a whole pile of Oslo, Norway music venues on February 19-21. This year's roster includes Lindstrøm, Annie, Fennesz, the Whitest Boy Alive, Frida Hyvönen, Hanne Hukkelberg, and an insane number of Scandinavian acts that you've never heard of.

--On February 17, Drag City will issue ...For the World to See, the never-heard album from the Detroit proto-punk band Death, whose story reads sort of like the Bad Brains story except a few years earlier and without the whole inventing hardcore thing.
 
-- The uber-cool German electronic label Kompakt will release Pop Ambient 2009, the latest in its annual compilation series, on February 16. This year, the album includes joints from Tim Hecker, Burger/Voigt, and Jürgen Paape.

People love to get mad talking about Coldplay, but when you see them doing the soaring anthemic Brit-rock thing in an actual arena surrounded by blinding columns of light, you have to hand it to them: They know exactly what they're doing. This is, after all, a band with a history of releasing gigantic yellow beach balls into the crowd right when the opening notes of "Yellow" hits. There is no getting mad at that. It's simply not possible.

So it's good to see that they're going on another full-scale North American outdoor-shed tour this summer. Worth noting: There seems to be a Lollapalooza-sized hole somewhere in that schedule, and Lolla is going to have to pull out something big to compete with all these other summer festivals.

Coldplay have also announced the opening acts for the tour. The British retro-jazzbo sibling group Kitty, Daisy & Lewis, who kind of sound like Squirrel Nut Zippers, will open the whole tour. Fellow Brit-rock mopers Elbow are also on the bill for half the tour, as are (this is awesome) blind Malian guitar heroes Amadou & Mariam.

And who knows? Coldplay is hard at work with producer Brian Eno yet again, so they may have a few more rafter-shaking jams ready for us by the time they hit these shores. Coldplay will also be among the huge roster of performers at this Sunday's Grammy Awards, and for some reason there will also be a "60 Minutes" segment on the band right before the awards show. Because, you know, there's nothing else important happening in the world.

-- In these tough times, dance-informed indie shoegazers need to stick together. So School of Seven Bells, the New York dream-pop trio made up of splintered pieces of On!Air!Library! and the Secret Machines, are heading out on a quick U.S. tour this February with breezy fake-Japanese motorik revivalists Fujiya & Miyagi. School of Seven Bells will also tour the UK this February and drop the "Iamundernodisguise" single on both sides of the Atlantic; it'll be out on Ghostly International in North America on February 17 and on February 16 on Full Time Hobby in Europe. Fujiya & Miyagi, meanwhile, will continue on through America after parting ways with School of Seven Bells, before heading out on their own Euro trek in March.

-- Portland skronk-funk duo Panther, who confusingly enough have nothing to do with either the Panthers or Japanther, will tour Europe this spring, even playing a few dates in Russia. (Russians need to dance artily, too!) To celebrate, the German label Altin Village will release a new Panther 12" called The Birds EP, which will feature six new songs. Altin Village has also put out stuff by Japanther. Aaaah!

-- Australian producer Mark Pritchard, who has recorded a ton of electronic music under a gang of different names (Jedi Knights, Troubleman, Harmonic 33) over the years, has another album ready to go. On March 3, Warp will release When Machines Exceed Human Intelligence, the first album from Pritchard's Detroit-inspired Harmonic 313 alias. He'll hit the road Down Under and in Europe over the coming months.

-- The Watson Twins used to be Jenny Lewis's shimmery backup singers, but now they're doing shimmery up-front singing on their own. They'll release their Live at Fingerprints EP on Vanguard on February 17, featuring acoustic songs recorded at an in-store at the Long Beach, California record store Fingerprints. Around the same time, they'll head out on a North American tour, headlining some shows and then opening a few more for Ben Kweller.

For context: The last time Axl Rose participated in a major print interview nine years ago, the iPod didn't exist. So his talk with Billboard is a pretty big deal, especially since Axl is known as a quote machine who takes shit from no one (see: "Get in the Ring"). The interview-- which you can read in full here-- does not disappoint. Now that his forever-delayed behemoth Chinese Democracy is underwhelming on almost every level imaginable, he's getting a few things off his chest. Axl goes off on his label, Slash and the haters.

A round-up of the best bits:

Belle and Sebastian leader Stuart Murdoch likes to tell stories about boys and girls, so it was only a matter of time before he made a musical film featuring stories about boys and girls. God Help the Girl is that film. As previously reported, the movie will have a soundtrack featuring all of his Belle and Sebastian buddies along with the Divine Comedy's Neil Hannon, Asya from Smoosh, a couple internet contest winners and others. The soundtrack album will be released in June according to a new blog post from Mr. Murdoch himself. (Matador will release it.)

The 12-song album was recorded in Glasgow and features reworkings of Belle & Sebastian tunes "Act of the Apostle" and "Funny Little Frog". The first single is called "Come Monday Night" and it's "a lullaby for an overworked boy," according to the script. In the MySpace entry, Murdoch also mentions a possible collaboration with Swedish indie pop group Those Dancing Days. He also talks about his sock drawer and current listening habits-- lots of fun fodder for potential stalkers, in other words.

The freak-folk scene is all about showing love to its unappreciated ancestors. Up until recently, the Connecticut songwriter Kath Bloom was probably better-known for landing a song on the Before Sunrise soundtrack than for a career that spans more than three decades. All of a sudden, though, she's teetering on a Vashti Bunyan level of rebirth, as Chapter Music gets set to release its double-disc Bloom tribute Loving Takes This Course: A Tribute to the Songs of Kath Bloom on April 7.

The album, compiled by Chapter Music's Guy Blackman and I Am a Sex Addict director (and Will Oldham co-conspirator) Caveh Zahedi features one disc of indie heavyweights like Devendra Banhart, Bill Callahan, Mark Kozelek, the Concretes, and the Dodos covering Bloom's songs and a second disc of the original songs themselves. So it'll be easy to figure out right away whether Devendra did her justice or not.

This month and next, Bloom will play a few scattered shows in the U.S.

While the Radiohead/Lil Wayne/Kanye West Grammy mashup performance still only exists in the deepest reaches of my consciousness, there are other intriguing (and definitely more reality-based) whispers about Radiohead's first Grammy performance ever pinging around the net.

The most believable one has the band playing In Rainbows opener "15 Step" with the help of USC's Marching Band (via At Ease). While there are no big-band flourishes on the LP version of "15 Step", its syncopated rhythm does seem ripe for the big-bass-drum 'n' stand-up-snare treatment. And the Grammys seem to have a thing for marching bands (see: "Hey Ya", "Gold Digger"). Whatever happens, you'll be able to see it go down live on your TV set this Sunday, February 8, at 8 p.m. ET/PT on CBS.

Other performers include: M.I.A. (hopefully), Coldplay, Kanye West, Lil Wayne, Paul McCartney with Dave Grohl, Rihanna, T.I. and Justin Timberlake, U2, Jay-Z, and Katy Perry. I am wildly excited. Then again, I genuinely like Katy Perry.

Pink Mountaintops, the slightly more mellowed-out solo project of Black Mountain frontman Stephen McBean, are set to release their (his?) third album. Jagjaguwar will put out Outside Love on May 5. A whole gang of Beam's friends in the Canadian underground rock mafia showed up to contribute, including Black Mountain members Amber Webber, Matthew Camirand, and Joshua Wells, as well as Jesse Sykes of Sweet Hereafter fame and A Silver Mt. Zion's Sophie Trudeau.

At the moment, Beam's only got one live show lined up, at the All Tomorrow's Parties Festival on May 8 in Minehead, England.

Last month, we reported that another Prefuse 73 album was among the 58 bazillion new projects that ADD glitch-rap tycoon Guillermo Scott Herren had in the works. Well, now we've got a few details on it. On April 14, Warp will release the truly awkwardly-titled Everything She Touched Turned Ampexian.

The ridiculously awesome, Yes-worthy cover art is above. No word on whether this album will be a conceptual narrative about that robot spaceman's adventures on the freaky-tree planet.

Do you guys realize how long Cursive have been around? Bill Clinton was president when they released their first album. They've been repping Saddle Creek since before Bright Eyes and the Faint and Rilo Kiley were things that people knew or cared about. Odds are they've been making spiky, depressive barroom indie since way before you've been listening to spiky, depressive barroom indie.

And Mama, I'm Swollen, their new, kinda nastily-named album, will be Cursive album number seven. That's a lot of albums Saddle Creek will release it on March 10.

That's the murkily pretty Mama, I'm Swollen cover above, and the tracklist is below. Around the time the album drops, the band will play a few shows.