"Realistically speaking, it's probably going to leak." That's Grizzly Bear's Ed Droste, talking to Pitchfork last month about the band's forthcoming album Veckatimest. Earlier this week, Droste's prophecy came true. Warp doesn't plan to release Veckatimest until May 26 (May 25 in the UK), but the album is already all over the internet, albeit in extremely low-quality 128 kpbs form. Yesterday, Droste Twittered about the leak: " So yeah, it leaked. I'm happy people are loving it. Makes me smile! Just remember it's not a top notch sonic example. So keep that in mind."

When a few people had the temerity to request that Droste leak a better version himself, he responded thusly: " You know what, screw it here's a quality version of the album! ENJOY!!!" He added a link to the Insound pre-order page for the album. Droste's pretty funny!

On Grizzly Bear's blog, Droste elaborates: "Leaking is a tricky subject; as we all know, I've had my run ins with the law O__o (Hi, Mr. Sheriff!) I have conflicting opinions about it, as it's really complicated, but ultimately it saddens me that a bummer-quality version of Veckatimest is going around. Please consider putting your energies into a pre-order or into waiting till May 26 for the album the way we intend it to be presented."

It's worth pointing out that even in shitty webrip form, Veckatimest sounds exactly as mysteriously pretty as I'd hoped it would. Uh, not that I downloaded the leak or anything...

In happier Grizzly Bear news, they've revealed dates for their summer North American tour. Mixed in with the usual club dates, they've got a smattering of shows in large, luxurious seated venues like New York's Town Hall. As the rapturous reports from the band's recent show with the Brooklyn Philharmonic make clear, venues like this are really the ideal place to hear their expansive fragility.

You know, if Trent Reznor was going to go through all the trouble to link up with Jane's Addiction for an alt-rock veterans' tour, would it really have been that much trouble to turn it into a full-blown Lollapalooza '91 reunion? Is Ice-T's acting career keeping him so busy that he couldn't take a couple of months off? What about Living Colour? Or the Butthole Surfers? Those guys are probably all anxiously waiting by the phone just in case Reznor feels a sudden wave of nostalgic goodwill.

Even without Siouxsie and the Banshees or the Rollins Band, though, this NIN/JA jaunt is a beast of a tour, and we're already getting our devil sticks and "Censorship Is Unamerican" T-shirts out of mothballs. And since Reznor has written that he's ready to "disappear for a while" after this tour, this could be our last chance to experience the inevitable arena-wide hush when the first notes of "Something I Can Never Have" chime out.

Last month, we reported that both bands would serve as headliners for this year's Sasquatch Festival. And last night, Reznor announced the first wave of dates on the Nine Inch Nails website. Here's how they look:

(Note: Jane's Addiction aren't playing with Nine Inch Nails on the Chicago stop on the tour, which means they are probably playing this year's Lollapalooza. - Ed.)

Neil Young cares about the environment, dammit. He cares so much, in fact, that he's recorded an entire concept album about electric cars, which is pretty ridiculous. And now that absurd album has a release date and a tracklist. Reprise will release Fork in the Road, Young's billionth album, on April 7, Billboard reports.

But the oil industry isn't the only target of Young's grumpy-old-man ire. In a post on his website, Young recently lashed out at YouTube for not coming up with a fair way to pay all the artists whose music runs on the site. Last year, YouTube pulled all videos from every artist associated with Warner Music Group, Young's label, and Young is taking WMG's side. "YouTube has a responsibility to respect the artists it facilitates and resist punishing them to make a business point," he writes. (Via Cnet)

Photo by Hadas

As if the works of twitchy hard rock jam band the Mars Volta and spazzcore leaders Hella didn't cause listeners to foam at the mouth already, members of both groups have joined forces to form a new band dubbed El Grupo Nuevo de Omar Rodriguez-Lopez. Named after and led by Volta guitarist Omar Rodriguez-Lopez, the newfangled freak show includes his Volta band mates Cedric Bixler-Zavala (vocals) and Juan Alderete de la Peña (bass), along with Hella's Zach Hill (drums) and Jonathan Hischke (synth bass).

Those with heart conditions should probably just stop reading now and wait for the next Fleet Foxes story.

El Grupo Nuevo's debut release is called Cryptomnesia and it's out May 5 on Rodriguez-Lopez's new imprint, Rodriguez-Lopez Productions. (This guy likes the sound of his own name.) The record is the first of a trilogy (of course it is) that was originally recorded in 2006-- apparently Bixler-Zavala had to "dwell on the enormity of the recording" for two years before laying his vocals down, according to a press release. Seriously.

Via Wikipedia, cryptomnesia is "a memory bias whereby a person falsely recalls generating a thought, an idea, a song, or a joke, when the thought was actually generated by someone else." And, based on the LP's totally insane tracklist , it looks like this album will contain 11 songs and at least as many jokes. Well, we hope songs like "Elderly Pair Beaten With Hammer", "Shake Is for 8th Graders", and "Fuck Your Mouth" are in jest. Those curious about what this thing sounds like shouldn't be. But if you still are, check out this predictably kaleidoscopic teaser trailer.

In advance of the record's official release, the band will make 3,000 limited edition vinyl copies available at indie stores nationwide on April 18 as part of Record Store Day.

In other Rodriguez-Lopez news, the busiest man in schizo-prog recently produced actress-singer Juliette Lewis's new album, which is called Terra Incognita and has an utterly horrid cover that will force you to reconsider What's Eating Gilbert Grape.

Press on to see the Lewis sleeve and even more hilariously nutso track titles from Cryptomnesia:

When Woody Allen tried to tackle tabloid culture in Celebrity, he spectacularly fell on his face. But as many film scholars have pointed out, Woody Allen is not the bassist from Interpol. Clearly, that was the problem.

This April, Interpol bassist Carlos Dengler (aka Carlos D) will attempt to excel where Woody Allen failed. My Friends Told Me About You, Dengler's filmmaking debut, will premiere at New York's Anonymous Gallery on April 17, and it'll run until May 5. This is the movie we were talking about here, but it turns out it's not a horror movie at all. According to a press release, the 26-minute short film "targets the idea of celebrity as affliction." Trenchant! The trailer, featured on this website, does not feature Melanie Griffith talking about her boobs, so that's something.

Two years ago, we reported that Dengler had launched a website in an attempt to find film-scoring work. But his involvement in My Friends Told Me About You goes way beyond scoring. (You can hear excerpts from his My Friends score on his website.) Dengler co-wrote the film alongside its director, Chicago-based filmmaker Daniel Ryan. Dengler also serves as star and co-producer. And he wrote the score along with clarinetist Ian Mitchell. The other producer is Todd Eckert, who also co-produced Anton Corbijn's Ian Curtis biopic Control. Yes, seven years after Turn on the Bright Lights, it's still impossible to write anything about Interpol without mentioning Joy Division.

My Friends Told Me About You will also be included the Spring 2009 issue of Wholpin, the DVD magazine from the McSweeney's people.

The press release includes this gigantic pretentious thing that Dengler wrote about the nature of celebrity, and we've included the whole thing after the jump, just in case you really do not value your time.

Mastodon drummer Brann Dailor has already gone on record calling Crack the Skye, the band's forthcoming album, "my favorite thing that we've ever done." And in this Billboard story, Dailor goes on to flesh out the album's completely nutso concept a little further: "It's about a crippled young man who experiments with astral travel." Also somehow involved: Wormholes, Rasputin, a "golden umbilical cord." "It's all metaphors for personal shit," Dailor helpfully points out.

Unifying album concepts, of course, are nothing new to the Atlanta metal overlords. Their 2004 classic Leviathan, for instance, was somehow based on Herman Melville's Moby Dick . Fortunately, though, every past Mastodon album works as pure intuitive thundering brutality, and you don't have to be into the concept to get it.

The band sure is proud of their latest long-player, though. On their upcoming North American club tour, they'll play the album in its entirety. But they'll also play older songs, so you don't have to worry about leaving a Mastodon show without hearing "Blood and Thunder".

Talking to Billboard, guitarist Bill Kelliher explains: "There's something about [the album] where it would be weird to leave a song out. We'll incorporate a whole stage show, which will hopefully make it even more exciting for kids to come see and more visually stimulating." And Brooklyn Vegan reports that the band might have enlisted Josh Graham, the guy who does the brain-searingly great rear-projection films at Neurosis shows, to do their visuals. Sick. Like-minded and similarly great underground bashers Kylesa and Intronaut will open all the American shows, and then the band will head to Europe to play stadiums with Metallica.

And in other Mastodon news, mall-goers can get psyched to pick up a limited edition picture disc for first single "Divinations", backed by the instrumental version of the track, only at Hot Topic, starting March 10. iTunes is currently offering a pre-order of C rack the Skye that includes a version of album track "Oblivion" recorded on XFM radio in the UK as well as the instrumental version of the entire album. Yes, the entire album, with no words.

Billboard reports that the band might make a short film of all the songs from Crack the Skye, which Kelliher says will be their version of The Wall. It's to Mastodon's credit that I am unspeakably amped about this even though The Wall is basically the worst movie ever made.