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After twelve years of shimmering minimalist rock, Luna are calling it a day. The New Yorkers’ new album, Rendezvous (due October 26th), will be their last, and they will play their final U.S. and European dates through early 2005.

“Anyone who has ever been in a band knows why,” says frontman Dean Wareham of the breakup. “This is what bands do. There was no incident, no fight, or anything like that. We’ve been around for a long time. If you look at the other bands that stay together this long, they are usually making millions of dollars.”

Wareham formed Luna in 1991 after departing the influential Galaxie 500, and, throughout Luna’s nine albums, Wareham continued to evolve his somber, moody sound. While Rolling Stone named 1995’s hypnotic Penthouse one of the best records of the Nineties, Luna gradually grew warmer and more upbeat, particularly on 2002’s Romantica and the new Rendezvous, helmed by producer Bryce Goggin (Phish, Pavement).

Despite several lineup changes and record deals, Luna — now Wareham, guitarist Sean Eden, drummer Lee Wall and bassist Britta Phillips — soldiered on. Over the last two years, they’ve released two albums, an EP and the Wareham-Phillips record L’Avventura. Though matter-of-fact about the breakup, Wareham does acknowledge that there is an emotional side to calling it quits. “I can see why people are sad,” says Wareham. “I was very sad when the Clash broke up. It’s kind of like when a friend dies. But it’s difficult to organize your life around a rock & roll band. And I want to stop when we all like each other.”

After Luna’s final tour wraps up, Wareham plans to begin writing a second album with Phillips, and he may do another project with Hong Kong actress Maggie Cheung, who recorded Wareham-penned songs for her recent film, Clean.

Wareham will also continue to pursue his budding acting career. He played a credit-card thief in the indie film Piggie and appeared as a bartender on an episode of TV’s Law and Order. He says, laughing, “As David St. Hubbins said in This Is Spinal Tap, ‘Got time for all those projects now.'”

Luna tour dates:

10/30: Hoboken, NJ, Maxwell’s
11/5: Cambridge, MA, Middle East
11/7: Toronto, Lee’s Palace
11/9: Cleveland, Beachland Ballroom
11/10: Ann Arbor, MI, Blind Pig
11/11-12: Chicago, Abbey Pub
11/14: Minneapolis, MN, Fine Line Music Cafe
11/15: Madison, WI, High Noon Saloon
11/16: Champaign, IL, High Dive
11/18: Newport, KY, Southgate House
11/19: Nashville, Exit/In
11/20: Atlanta, Echo Lounge
11/21: Carrboro, NC, Cat’s Cradle
11/22: Baltimore, Ottobar
11/27: New York, Irving Plaza
12/31: New York, Southpaw

Source rollingstone.com.

Loveland Ski Area in Colorado was the first U.S. resort to open for the new 2004-2005 ski season this morning. Loveland, which is located at the base of the Continental Divide and at an elevation of 10,600 feet, is the first resort to open with continuous operation for the season.

The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences on Thursday announced Chris Rock will host the next Academy Awards telecast.

Rock, who’s been in the films “Head of State” and “Dogma,” is best known for his standup comedy specials “Bigger & Blacker,” “Bring the Pain” and “Never Scared.”

Rock, 39, has previously hosted the MTV’s Movie Awards.

“I am a huge fan of Chris Rock,” said Gil Cates, the producer of the Oscars telecast. “He always makes me laugh and he always has something interesting to say. Chris represents the best of the new generation of comics. Having him host the Oscars is terrific.”

The one-time “Saturday Night Live” regular has won three Emmys for his TV programs and two Grammys for his comedy albums.

Rock currently is shooting a remake of “The Longest Yard” with Adam Sandler and recently provided the voice of the zebra in the animated feature “Madagascar,” both to be released in May 2005.

His other film credits include “Head of State,” “Bad Company,” “Down to Earth” and “Nurse Betty.”

The 77th Academy Awards telecast is set for February 27.

Source CNN.com.

Only in Las Vegas: Beatles songs, as portrayed by the acrobatic troupe Cirque du Soleil, will replace animal training duo Siegfried and Roy at one of the city’s biggest tourist theaters, according to a deal announced on Thursday.

Characters from Beatles songs like “Eleanor Rigby,” “Nowhere Man” and “I am the Walrus” will be featured in the $30 million show about the Beatles’ life in the 1960s, said Gilles Ste-Croix, the Cirque du Soleil vice president of creation in charge of the project.

The show marks a musical first: the Beatles have never before allowed a major theatrical performance of their music, but surviving members Paul McCartney and Ringo Starr as well as Yoko Ono and Olivia Harrison, the widows of John Lennon and George Harrison have approved the deal.

The show will take the place of the magic and animal taming duo Siegfried & Roy, in a new, roughly $100 million, theater at the Mirage casino on the Las Vegas Strip, Montreal-based Cirque said.

Siegfried & Roy closed a year ago after a tiger mauled animal trainer Roy Horn.

The Cirque show will be a financial partnership between Cirque, the Beatles’ Apple Corp, and casino owner MGM Mirage, which will also pay for the theater.

Before his death, former Beatle George Harrison struck up a friendship with Cirque founder Guy Laliberte, leading to the idea for the production.

Source CNN.com.

De La Soul’s seventh album,The Grind Date, is aptly titled, as the hip-hop vets have been slogging away for fifteen years. “We’ve remained relevant,” says Pos, “but it’s been a lot of work.”

The Grind Date is De La Soul’s first since 2001’sAOI: Bionix and it’s the debut release on Sanctuary Urban Records Group, the fledgling hip-hop label of Destiny’s Child manager (and Beyonce’s father) Matthew Knowles. And while the De La Soul always strives to be innovative, they delivered more thoughtful, narrative songs — especially the first single, “Shopping Bags.”

“It focuses on how men trick women,” Pos says. “I was like, ‘Wow, that’s not something men usually talk about.’ They want to pay for the drinks to get something in return.”

The album features a guest spot from director Spike Lee, who introduces “Church.” “It just reminded me of the end of [Lee’s 1988 film]School Daze, when Laurence Fishburne screams “Wake up!'” Pos says. “I was like, ‘Yo, that would be great if we could get Spike Lee.’ He was in the middle of scouting for a movie, but he gave a call and said, ‘Look, I’m in the area.’ And he was in and out in five minutes.”

De La Soul will embark on an extensive tour with a stop in a rather unconventional venue: a college classroom — the group is set to lecture on the subject of hip-hop at New York University this fall. Pos says that while being a hip-hop veteran doesn’t mean he has license to be more critical of younger acts, he does claim to have a bit more perspective.

“My problem [with hip-hop] is there’s no balance,” he explains. “Before I even came on in rap, there was always drugs and materialism. But there was also always a balance . . . Alongside [Naughty by Nature’s] ‘O.P.P.,’ there was [Public Enemy’s] ‘Fight the Power.’ Alongside N.W.A there was [De La Soul’s]3 Feet High and Rising . . . We just play a balance in comparison to what everybody else is doing.”

De La Soul tour dates:

10/19: Atlanta, GA, Earthlink Live
10/20: Charleston, SC, Music Farm
10/21: Lexington, KY, The Dame
10/22: Washington, DC, 9:30 Club
10/23: Amagansett, NY, Stephen Talkhouse
10/24: New Haven, CT, Toad’s Place
10/25: Boston, Paradise Rock Club
10/26: Philadelphia, The Trocadero, Balcony Bar
10/27: New York, B.B. King’s Blues Club
10/29: Northampton, MA, Pearl Street
10/31: Toronto, Phoenix Concert Theatre
11/1: Pittsburgh, Mr. Smalls Fun House
11/2: Cleveland, Peabody’s Down Under
11/3: Columbus, OH, Al Rosa Villa
11/4: Bloomington, IN, Bluebird Nightclub
11/7: Lawrence, KS, Granada Theatre
11/8: Boulder, CO, Fox Theatre
11/9: Colorado Springs, CO, 32 Bleu
11/10: Salt Lake City, Shaggy’s Velvet Room
11/12: Portland, OR, Roseland Theater
11/15: Seattle, Showbox
11/16: Eugene, OR, McDonald Theatre
11/17: San Francisco, Slim’s
11/18: Sacramento, Empire
11/19: Santa Cruz, CA, The Catalyst
11/20: West Hollywood, CA, House of Blues

Source .

Late Morphine frontman Mark Sandman will be celebrated via the forthcoming two-CD/DVD box set “Sandbox: Mark Sandman Original Music,” due Nov. 16 from Hi-N-Dry Records.

The collection features cuts taken largely from his stints with Morphine and its predecessor Treat Her Right, a blues-based quartet that also featured Morphine drummer Billy Conway. The 31 tracks will include a handful of previously released items as well as a host of rarities, while the DVD boasts rare footage and live performances.

Sandman died in 1999 after collapsing on stage during a Morphine show in Rome. Conway and saxophonist Dana Colley organized the Morphine Orchestra tour the following year, taking a host of musicians on the road to play the band’s songs in tribute to the fallen songwriter.

Source billboard.com.

The Basement Jaxx will finish the tour behind 2003’s Kish Kash by making their first appearance in South Africa. The dance duo will play the D+10 festival — a series of art, comedy, music and sporting events sponsored by the British High Commission — celebrating a decade of South African democracy. The Jaxx perform Friday at the Cape Town Convention Center, and the following day at the Johannesburg Gallagher Estate.
When asked why they made the trip, the Jaxx’s Simon Ratcliffe says simply, “They’re celebrating ten years since the end of Apartheid!”

The crowd expected at D+10 was also a plus. “It’ll be a lot more mixed,” bandmate Felix Buxton says. “Normally it’s the white middle-classes. We were offered DJ gigs there before that we didn’t do because going to South Africa to play a big, white rave seemed a bit like carrying on the privilege. It’s nice to try to do something positive.”

Joining them for the shows will be American-born chanteuse Nomvula Malinga (Vula), whose father hails from South Africa. She recorded a track this summer with the Jaxx that may end up on their next album. “That sounded really good,” Buxton says. “It’s going somewhere, and it’s different.”

As with their 2001 album Rooty — named for a club night the duo started in London — the Jaxx won’t hibernate in the studio for long, but road-test the new material before they release it.

“The most important thing for us at the moment is to get some songs finished and on vinyl,” Ratcliffe says, “and go out and play.”

Source rollingstone.com.

The Flaming Lips have begun work on their next Warner Bros. studio album with longtime producer Dave Fridmann. However, Lips frontman Wayne Coyne admits to Billboard.com, “It isn’t as though we have an album’s worth of songs ready to go. We have maybe five or six things that have some shape to them, but we’re not in any real hurry to say, ‘Let’s get these in shape and put them out.'”

The reason? The group is busy with any number of other projects, including shooting a video in Austin, Texas, this week for “SpongeBob & Patrick Confront the Psychic Wall of Energy,” which has been tapped as the first single from Warner Bros.’ “SpongeBob SquarePants” movie soundtrack. Work is also resuming on the Lips’ long-in-the-works feature film, “Christmas on Mars.”

But Coyne says the songs committed to tape so far, including “Time Travel??,” “Mr. Ambulance Driver” and “Space Bible,” point at exciting new directions for the ever-evolving Lips. “Some of this new stuff hints at more of a collage of classical, jazz, rock and folk, all sometimes happening within in the framework of the same song, but not a collection of cliched sounds,” he says. “We just want to get a strange collection of moods.”

“Have you seen those ads in the back of Reader’s Digest where you can send in a poem and have it set to music? They are so strange and unique,” Coyne continues. “Sometimes, I kick myself that we haven’t done something of this ilk, where there’s no limits or embarrassment. Are we being retarded or super-geniuses? You just don’t really care. I don’t know if [“Time Travel??”] will make the album, but it was a lot of fun to do when you’re reaching for new stuff. It’s about time travel, but not something that will be invented by scientists. It’s something we already have within the power of our own minds — we can transcend living and breathing and travel through our own memories.”

The new album, tentatively titled “At War With the Mystics,” will be the follow-up to 2002’s “Yoshimi Battles the Pink Robots.” That set has sold a career-best 398,000 copies in the United States, according to Nielsen SoundScan.

Meanwhile, during a recent session at Fridmann’s Tarbox Road Studio in upstate New York, the Lips also began work on a 5.1 Surround Sound mix of their acclaimed 1999 release “The Soft Bulletin,” tentatively due next spring.

“That, of all the records we’ve done, is really the only one that had seven or eight other songs we didn’t release,” Coyne says. “For fans of that record, this is going to be a very cool item. I can talk about the songs and the making of them, and it will have these little psychedelic cartoons in the spirit of the album. ‘The Soft Bulletin’ gave us such a different perspective and a new life — there’s a richness there that will be fun to go back and revisit.”

As for “Christmas on Mars,” Coyne says “about half” of the film is still left to be shot. “I’m building the sets myself and I write everything out that people say,” he adds. “It’s not all my ideas, but as much of the Flaming Lips are in this as can be.”

“At the moment, we’re thinking of releasing a DVD of the movie and a bunch of extras with behind-the-scenes footage, along with a CD that is basically the soundtrack, but also some pieces that go beyond what’s in the movie,” Coyne says. “Bands limit themselves to thinking, ‘This is what I do. I’m just in a band.’ But I figured, let’s do movies! Let’s do soundtracks! Let’s do it all ourselves!”

“In the best of both worlds, we’d have a new Flaming Lips album by the summer of 2005 and a Flaming Lips movie in the fall of 2005,” he concludes. “You can only be one person in one place at one time, but if you make a movie, you can be a lot of places at the same time!”

Source billboard.com.

Pearl Jam will cap its tenure on Epic next month with its first hits collection. Due Nov. 16 via Epic, the double-disc, 33-track “rearviewmirror (greatest hits 1991-2003)” sports 16 top 10 hits on Billboard’s Mainstream Rock Tracks chart, including the No. 1s “Daughter,” “Betterman” and “Given To Fly,” as well as 13 top 10 entries on the Modern Rock Tracks survey.

In lieu of new songs, “rearviewmirror” (the discs for which are split into an “Upside” and “Downside”) boasts remixes of three songs from the Seattle rock act’s seminal 1991 debut, “Ten.” Longtime producer Brendan O’Brien was behind the boards for new mixes of “Once,” “Alive” and “Black.”

Beyond such staples as “Elderly Woman Behind the Counter in a Small Town,” “Dissident,” “Wishlist” and “Even Flow,” the album includes a cover of Victoria Williams’ “Crazy Mary” (first issued on the 1993 “Sweet Relief” compilation), the live favorite “Yellow Ledbetter” (which reached seven Billboard charts in the mid-’90s despite never being promoted to radio) and “Man of the Hour,” penned for the 2003 Tim Burton film “Big Fish.”

Also featured is “Last Kiss,” a 1950s cover released on a 1999 charity single that improbably became the band’s biggest hit, peaking at No. 2 on the Billboard Hot 100. The lone Pearl Jam track that appeared on the Hot 100 but is missing from the album is “Tremor Christ,” which peaked at No. 18 in the fall of 1995.

Pearl Jam recently wrapped its run on the Vote for Change tour and is expected to hit the studio next month to begin work on its eighth album.

Here is the track listing for “rearviewmirror”:

Upside:
“Once”
“Alive”
“Even Flow”
“Jeremy”
“State of Love and Trust”
“Animal”
“Go”
“Dissident”
“Rearviewmirror”
“Spin the Black Circle”
“Corduroy”
“Not for You”
“I Got ID”
“Hail Hail”
“Do the Evolution”
“Save You”

Downside:
“Black”
“Breath”
“Daughter”
“Elderly Woman Behind the Counter in a Small Town”
“Immortality”
“Betterman”
“Nothingman”
“Who You Are”
“Off He Goes”
“Given to Fly”
“Wishlist”
“Last Kiss”
“Nothing As It Seems”
“Light Years”
“I Am Mine”
“Man of the Hour”
“Yellow Ledbetter”

Source billboard.com.

Moonshine Still is excited to announce that Vince Herman (lead singer of Leftover Salmon) will be opening each of their shows in the first two weeks of November. There is chemistry between both Vince and Moonshine and when the two perform together magic is sure to happen. The tour will have them playing from North Carolina to Florida including two headlining festival shows with Vince performing as part of the band (Sweetwater Fest in Milledgeville, GA and Down on the Farm in Tallahassee, Fl).

Formed in 1996 in Macon, GA, Moonshine Still (MsS), is a nationally touring 6-piece band that has garnered a large grassroots following with their unparalleled live performances and high-tech intelligent light display. These new sons of the South have a full force sound that is large enough to fill arenas and, at times, subtle enough to make the whole room quiet with anticipation. Playing collectively as a unit, Moonshine Still takes on many different styles of music keeping everyone on their toes not knowing what kind of style they will go into next. Be it their harmonious jams with stunning guitar and keyboard solos, the spirit of Georgia churches, Electronic TripHop, or a soulful Roots Rock with vocal rises.

See moonshinestill.com for more info