Royal Trux's Jennifer Herrema also guests on the album.

By Blurt Staff

Congratulations, the new studio album from MGMT, will be released on April 13 on Columbia. It's the successor to 2008's Oracular Spectacular.

Congratulations is described as "a collection of nine individual musical tours de force sequenced to flow with sonic and thematic coherence."

The tracks are:  "It's Working," "Song for Dan Treacy," "Someone's Missing," "Flash Delirium," "I Found a Whistle," "Siberian Breaks," "Brian Eno," "Lady Dada's Nightmare," and "Congratulations."

Hey, we are all about tours de force and songs titled after Brian Eno.

Produced by MGMT and Sonic Boom (Spacemen 3, E.A.R., Spectrum), Congratulations was recorded throughout 2009 in upstate New York, Malibu, and Brooklyn and features Andrew Vanwyngarden and Ben Goldwasser, MGMT's core duo, performing with Matt Asti (bass, backing vocals), Will Berman (drums, backing vocals), and James Richardson (guitar, backing vocals), the band's live line-up.

Congratulations offered MGMT the opportunity to work with a couple of their musical idols and influences including album co-producer Sonic Boom (Pete Kember) and Royal Trux front-woman Jennifer Herrema, who contributed guest vocals.  "We've been lucky enough to meet and work with some of our all-time musical heroes," Andrew says, marveling at MGMT's good collaborative karma.  "It's so great to be around such amazing and unusual musical minds."

Ben and Andrew first met Sonic Boom at a Spectrum show in London in February 2009 and wound up onstage jamming with the band on "Suicide," a vintage Spacemen 3 track paying homage to another MGMT influence.

MGMT has become an international festival favorite with performances at South By Southwest, Coachella, Lollapalooza and Bonnaroo in the states and the Glastonbury extravaganza in the UK.  The band has toured with Beck, Yeasayer and Of Montreal, among others, while becoming a headline concert attraction in its own right.  MGMT is confirmed to appear at the 2010 Coachella and Bamboozle festivals.

It's the news we have been waiting for! To heck with that Bonnaroo announcement, we are booking our flight to England today.

By Blurt Staff

Legendary British pop duo Go West will embark on a rare 11-date UK tour in April 2010. Seriously. We are not kidding about that "legendary" part - time to break out the parachute pants, kids! This is more important than, like, the Pavement reunion.

The duo, of course, is Peter Cox (vocals) and Richard Drummie (guitar), and they are best known for their smash hit singles "We Close Our Eyes" and "Call Me", the UK tour will kick off on Thursday April 8th at the Cheltenham Town Hall. 

Described as "The 25th Anniversary Concert", Go West's tour will see the band perform songs drawn from across their career, including yet more Top Ten singles such as "The King Of Wishful Thinking", "True Colours", "I Wanna Hear It From You" and "The King Is Dead."

April 2010 tour dates include Cheltenam (Apr 8), Lowestoft (Apr 9), Birmingham (Apr 10), Gateshead (Apr 11), Basildon (Apr 15), Chatham (Apr 16), Peterborough (Apr 17), Barrow (Apr 18), Rhyl (Apr 21), London (Apr 23), Milton Keynes (Apr 25 / 26).

To coincide with Go West's nationwide UK tour, the band will release a re-recorded version of their 1985 hit ‘Call Me' coupled with brand new song ‘Skin Deep'. The single will be available as a CD and digital download.

Ballet originally performed in London in 2006 to fairly good reviews.

By Fred Mills

Heading to Toronto anytime soon? Well, not actually soon; more like next November 24-28. But if you are, you should first consult the 2010-11 calendar of the National Ballet of Canada, as among the performances they'll be doing in the new season is Chroma by Britain's Wayne McGregor - a ballet featuring orchestral versions of White Stripes songs. (Thanks to Pitchfork for the tip.)

According to the NBoC's website, choreographer McGregor "revels in the amalgamation of the unlikely," which is a pretty fair description of how most folks would think about a marriage of contemporary ballet and White Stripes music.

"McGregor's multi-disciplinary works emerge from those experimental frontiers where the theoretical merges with the physical, and dance pushes up against and interacts with film, the visual arts, architecture, technology and science. Chroma, from 2006, is a perfect example. Set to a score of orchestrated versions of songs by the rock band The White Stripes, the work pits the angular, rough-edged music and the choreographer's energetic, exacting style against a stark, minimalist architectural space, allowing the audience to see the nature of physical movement in an entirely new and invigorating light."

So there you have it. Apparently the dancers will be performing in "flesh colored dancewear," which is entirely logical (should be white and red dancewear, actually). Although trying to imagine them hoofing it through "The Hardest Button to Button," "Aluminum" and "Blue Orchid" is a head scratcher, but no matter - this is all pretty intriguing news.

The ballet was previously staged in London in November of 2006 at the Royal Opera House and you can read a pretty lively review of it here.

Other shows during the 2010-11 season for the ballet company include relatively standard fare such as Cinderella, The Nutcracker and Don Quixote. Currently they have Swan Lake and West Side Story among the performances slated for the coming months.

John Fogerty, Medeski Martin & Wood, Flaming Lips, Weezer, Dave Matthews Band, Jeff Beck, Avett Brothers, Black Keys, Phoenix and more.... U2 rumors not confirmed yet as of this writing.

By Fred Mills

The waiting is over. We told you about that cryptic announcement announcing the announcement, so here are the details. The 2010 Bonnaroo, which takes place June 10-13 in Manchester, Tenn., officially unveiled this year's lineup in an intriguing fashion that, depending on which fan or pundit you polled, was either very cool or damned annoying. The artists themselves made individual announcements via their own websites and social media platforms, and Bonnaroo additionally sent out clues via their Twitter feed, so you had to bounce around all over the web to actually get confirmations on this or that artist (although, luckily, some media sites were compiling the list themselves and updating it every few minutes as they figured out who else was playing).

Now Bonnaroo has compiled the list of names at its MySpace page, and as we type is doling the announcements out a little at a time.Among the headliners are Weezer, John Fogerty, the Flaming Lips (doing Dark Side of the Moon, natch), Dave Matthews Band, the Avett Brothers, Phoenx and the Black Keys.

But what about those U2 rumors? Ah! We'll have to keep refreshing our browsers all day to find out, apparently!

Lineup as of this writing:

The Flaming Lips w/Stardeath and the White Dwarfs
Weezer
Phoenix
John Fogerty
OK Go
Baroness
The Carolina Chocolate Drops
Jeff Beck
Medeski Martin & Wood
Blues Traveler
Isis
Punch Brothers
Dave Matthews Band
The Avett Brothers
311
Chromeo (w/ Daryl Hall)
Cross Canadian Ragweed
Bassnectar
Neon Indian
Monte Montgomery
The Asterisk
Big Sam's Funky Nation
The Constellations
The Black Keys

Steve Martin w/Steep Canyon Rangers

UPDATE/ADDITIONS:
The xx
Regina Spektor
Wale
Mayer Hawthorne

Ingrid Michaelson

Jay-Z
LCD Soundsystem
Dead Weather
Zac Brown Band
The National
Kris Kristofferson
Melvins
Stevie Wonder
Norah Jones
John Prine
Dave Rawlings
Baaba Maal
Dr. Dog
Kid Cudi
Tokyo Police Club
Japandroids
Jimmy Cliff
Thievery Corporation
She and Him
GWAR

General admission tickets are on sale NOW at the Bonnaroo site for a mere $234.50 plus fees (reaching up to $35 total, yikes). They also have a payment plan. All tickets are 4-day passes that include camping and parking. Hint: the Bonnaroo servers are pretty busy right now, so you might want to wait until tonight to go grab tickets.

[Photo Credit: C. Taylor Crothers]

Seriously, anything is fair game. Not they will be forced to answer "anything," but still.... Here's your chance to find out all those things about Spoon you always wanted to know but were afraid to ask.

By The Blurt Editors

Earlier this month Britt Daniel & Co. released its latest album,Transference, on Merge, and a big national tour will be kicking off in mid-March starting with an NPR Music showcase in Austin at SXSW. We've got the tour details here.

Meanwhile, we're offering you a chance to ask Spoon whatever questions you want, kinda like the way those British mags grill a washed-up classic rock personality each month, but way cooler, ‘cos it's Spoon of course. Wanna know how Britt gets his hair so perfect? Where they got the name Spoon from? Who's a Republican and who's a Democrat in the band? Maybe even some lingering queries about the agony and the ecstasy of their old major label nemesis Ron Laffitte? Ask away! The results will be included in a far reaching and sure-to-be entertaining interview at blurt-online.com and the upcoming issue of BLURT.

And if this goes well, maybe our next contest of this ilk will be "Ask Laffitte".... Hey, it could happen...

Email your questions to: askspoon@blurt-online.com

Incidentally, make sure you identify yourself in some way - it doesn't have to be elaborate, but at the very least give your first name and where you are from, e.g.:

Wayne
OKC, Oklahoma

Hey, it's just common courtesy. Internet anonymity is for pussies.

Psychedelic theater rains down on the Paradise Rock Club on Jan. 27.

By Wyndham Lewis

The toughest thing about reviewing an Of Montreal performance is not describing the psychedelic pop nugget-ry they mine, or the theatricality they have consistently built on during the past decade, and it certainly isn't counting the articles of clothing frontman Kevin Barnes is wearing by the encore (one; x-small); the most difficult part of telling you what went down at the Paradise Rock Club in Boston on Thursday night is the spelling the goddamn song titles.

The band kicked off the action with the straightforwardly named Suffer for Fashion, a song that, when released in 2007, signaled completion of the bands evolution into treble-y synth/guitar rock.  Coupled with Barnes high whine and penchant for vocal effects, the thin sound and personal songwriting earned high praise and a legion of fans, along with an army of detractors.  On this night, the opening number perfectly illustrated how the bands constant touring has forged a supremely confident front-man backed by a band that has realized much fuller, and heavier live sound. 

It has been interesting to watch the progression of this band that used to feel a bit contrived, like a boys and girls playing rock star in the bedroom, but now feels like it has genuine personality and charisma.  What used to seem like weird for weird's sake, or an attempt to upset or shock their high school tormentors now seems like a well harnessed vision with the musical chops to match.

As a performer and writer, Barnes continues to up the sexual ante on stage and record.  For a long time, he seemed to be held up in a sort of visual purgatory, having neither the purposefully grotesque physicality of Arthur Kane or Tim Harrington (in tutu) nor the raw sexuality/beauty of Prince or Bowie.  Historically, he looked like the component parts of a guy wearing make-up and some woman's clothing.  This time was different.  He has really developed into the cocksure leader that embodies the whole package and commands (not asks for) the audience's attention.

Barnes donned a lime green wrap cardigan, matching head-band, white tank-top, gold medallion and a Bloomingdale counter's worth of eye make-up, but for his beard, he would have looked at home dropping his kids off at Country Day with the neighborhood moms. 

Early in the set, there were no breaks between songs, and as they crested into Forecast Fascist Future the stage-to-ceiling split screen showed song-specific animation and images shot in real time from a handheld camera.   Much of the screen time was dedicated to images that literally illustrated lyrics, including fox heads with rotating crab-claws. It all played out like a trippy revue.  

Given the theatrical elements, it is safe to call Of Montreal equal parts band and troupe.  The band is relatively conventional - bass, drums, keys, guitars - but there are multiple people pulling double and triple duty as techs/dancers/characters.  It is hard to tell who is doing what, but it is obviously not for the audience to know how Of Montreal's 'sausage' is made. 

The young, enthusiastic crowd was, at times, rapt by dueling Medusas, pigs and tigers in cream colored suits, carrying cock-fighters in black body stockings and bejeweled fencing masks. Making for colorful theater as the screen pumped out more Fat Albert meets Uncle Albert style images.

The music and stage show were neither at war, nor in lock-step.  But, at no point do the absurdities on stage detract from the extremely well crafted, well delivered songs.  An Eluardian Instance, Spike the Senses and And I've Seen a Bloody Shadow groove strongly.  Helmsgate is Like a Promethian Curse is reworked into a more muscular, pulsating song that turns the plea for help from the record into a conquered demon live.   A Sentence of Sorts in Kongsvinger took the titillated crowd from head nodding to full on dance party.

Barnes' lime green wrap served as a green screen as well when visual effects were projected onto it on the large screen.  Like many of his props, it too is eventually shed as he made his transition from semi-androgynous tease to full on Prince Jr. mode with St. Exquisite's Confession and For Our Elegant Castle during which he delivers the playfully coy-boy chorus 'I like it both ways.'

The encore was the cherry on top.  From the introductory bass line of the Jackson 5 cover I Want You Back the crowd was shaking serious ass and its deferential treatment allowed the exuberance of the song to speak for itself.  The crowd left happy and fully entertained.

James Husband (aka Of Montreal drummer Jamie Huggins) opened the evening with a solid set culled from his recent solo record A Parallax I.  Husband, who resembles a young Eddie Money, has sat behind Kevin Barnes for more than half a decade now and they obviously share (with the entire Elephant 6 collective) a love of sixties pop.

On songs like While the Boys Went Down Under and Elephant Alibi, Husband tones down the production flourishes and exotic instrumentation that sometimes confuse a perfectly good melody from some of his E6 brethren (Of Montreal, Great Lakes, Elf power, etc...).  His recent covers EP contains multiple Guided by Voices tunes and that along with Love's Forever Changes is where his musical style seems rooted.  Find a great riff, A Grave in the Gravel, don't fuck it up, and move on to the next.

Husband benefited from an unusually full house for an opener due to a freezing cold night and the headliners' devoted college-age fan base.  He was well received, but in retrospect, his limitations as a singer and showman were brought into sharp contrast by evening's main attraction. 

To his credit, the band (nearly half of Of Montreal) was tight and enjoyable.  But they would have been well served to begin as upbeat and engaged as they ended.  The early part of the set was marked by too much inter-band discussion and not enough playing to the audience.  Kevin Barnes saw the back of Jamie for a change as he guested on drums mid-set.  That broke the monotony and early introspection, seemingly waking the band up to finish strongly.  

[Photo credit: Leó Stefánsson]

Latest effort from the shapeshifting Lidell due in May.

By Blurt Staff

Warp Records will release Jamie Lidell's third full-length album Compass on May 18. The album was recorded in Los Angeles, New York and Canada. Guests on Compass include Beck, Feist, Gonzales, Chris Taylor of Grizzly Bear and Pat Sansone of Wilco.

Warp calls it his "most eclectic album yet. Songs shift, chop, change and mutate genres and forms before our very ears. It's got funk in spades; the jaw-dropping power of the vocals is stronger than ever; it rocks, it pops, it's sweet, angry, hard, soulful and soft, often within the span of a single track. It's the restless album that finally matches the soul of its creator."

Sessions began at Beck's Hudson Studios in Los Angeles, where they got together with Wilco, Leslie Feist and veteran drummer James Gadson (who's hit sticks for Bill Withers, Quincy Jones among many others) for Beck's Record Club project. Inspired by the chemistry of those jams, they shifted to the legendary Ocean Way Studios. There, they were joined by producer/keyboardist Brian Lebarton, singer Nikka Costa, and Justin Stanley. All would have an important impact on the album. Pat Sansone from Wilco and Chilly Gonzales (who's played on both Multiply and Jim) were present as "musical meta-spirits," recording their parts remotely and delivering them via the internet.

Back in New York Lidell began to make sense of this (in his words) "great big mess on the hard drive."Then it was up to Feist's ranch in the Niagara Escarpment with Chris Taylor, producer and member of Grizzly Bear.

"I wrote every song in a month," Lidells said. "It's been an emotional couple of years, so I tapped into what I wanted to say and started writing. There was a lot to draw on."

Lidell plans to tour 2010 with a band again - "but stripping it back; keeping it lean."

Creates LP art for soulsters Kings Go Forth; MP3 below.

By Fred Mills

A few years ago, when BLURT was a little ol' rock magazine called Harp, we ran a story about the so-called "imaginary soul superstar" Mingering Mike, a kind of outsider artist from D.C. who for years had created hand-drawn record sleeves for his non-existent back catalog - that is, as the "performer" Mingering Mike he'd "released" a slew of soul and funk albums and singles over the years, as "evidenced" by the extant artwork.

There never was any actual music, of course, but the sleeves themselves were a prime example of classic outsider art that, upon being discovered at a flew market in 2003 by a curious crate digger, wound up getting compiled in a Mingering Mike book and displayed in art galleries.

Neil Strauss of the New York Times told the story of Mingering Mike in a wonderful 2004 piece - check it out here. It's pretty fascinating. The book's readily available at Amazon as well.

Now comes news that Mingering Mike has created his first "real" sleeve art for the Milwaukee soul combo Kings Go Forth. It's displayed above. Titled The Outsiders Are Back, the album is due April 20 from Luaka Bop. Oliver Wang's esteemed Soul-Sides.com blog has some further details on the band and Mike here.

Meanwhile, check out this smoking MP3 from the band in which they channel their inner Curtis Mayfield: "One Day"

(Above photo of Mingering Mike from Toolbox DC. You can read more from ‘em here.)

Legendary jam band announces series of residencies for this summer; hasn't toured in three years.

By Blurt Staff

The String Cheese Incident will perform a handful of "Incidents" in 2010. The band will play their hometown venue, Denver's Red Rocks Amphitheatre, on July 23, 24, and 25.  In addition they'll set up camp at a site close to the band's/fans' hearts, Horning's Hideout (near Portland, Oregon), July 29 through August 1.

This announcement ends a three-year break from performing; a hiatus interrupted only once - this past summer- when SCI united to headline Rothbury for one incredible Incident.  (Fans can download that 2009 performance in its entirety at www.iClips.net, or check out a sneak peek at www.stringcheeseincident.com).

Tickets will go on sale tomorrow, Feb. 9 - see details below. Every ticket order placed at www.stringcheeseincident.com will receive a download code to LiveCheese.com for a FREE "Best of" SCI sampler - "Cheese on the Rocks" (RR) and/or "Cheese in the Trees" (HH) - depending on the tickets purchased. Each download features over 100-minutes of old-school SCI.

July 23, 24, and 25, 2010

Red Rocks Amphitheatre

Morrison, Colorado

Red Rocks Ticket Information:

Tuesday, February 9 at 10:00 am MST - Presale at www.stringcheeseincident.com

Friday, February 12 at 10:00 am MST - KBCO Presale at www.kbco.com

Saturday, February 13 at 10:00 am MST - Public On Sale www.ticketmaster.com

***

July 29 - August 1, 2010

Horning's Hideout

North Plains, OR

Full Festival Line Up and Schedule To Be Announced

Presented by Madison House Presents

Horning's Hideout Ticket Information:

Tickets available beginning Tuesday, February 9 at 10:00 am MST

Only at www.stringcheeseincident.com

            Four- day tickets and RV Passes available.

[Photo Credit: C. Taylor Crothers]

Spring dates in Europe now bumped to September and October.

By Blurt Staff

Leonard Cohen was about to embark upon a European tour next month but now dates are being rescheduled for September following a lower back injury the bard sustained recently while exercising. His promoters, AEG Worldwide, described it as "a compression injury."

He'll be taking time off to do physical therapy and get back into full fighting form - which, as anyone who's seen him do his nearly three-hour concerts recently will attest, is impressive indeed for a 75 year old.

Cohen manager Robert Kory said, in a statement, "Doctors have confirmed that Mr. Cohen is otherwise in terrific shape, thanks to years of exercise and careful diet, and simply needs appropriate time to recover from the lower back injury."

Cohen also had an incident last September when he collapsed onstage in Spain, apparently from a case of food poisoning.

Those rescheduled dates:

9-15 Caen, France - Zenith
9-17 Grenoble, France - Palais des Sports
9-19 Strasbourg, France - Zenith
9-21 Marseille, France - Le Dome
9-23 Tours, France - Parc Des Expositions
9-25 Lille, France - Zenith Grand Palais
10-04 Katowice, Poland - Spodek
10-07 Moscow, Russia - Kremlin Palace
10-13 Bratislava, Slovakia - Sibamac Arena