Catch the raw power of Iggy & The Stooges

Feb. 28, 2007

Iggy’s back! Again! The leader of the legen-dary punk band The Stooges has announced plans to hit the road - complete with the rest of The Stooges - for a tour that will kick off early next month in Montana. Why all the big plans?  Well, The Stooges and Pop are recording their first studio album in over 30 years, which they’ve dubbed The Weirdness. Catch ’em live at the SXSW Festival in Austin, TX on March 17, at the United Palace in NYC on April 9, the State Theater in Detroit on April 13, or the Warfield in San Fran on April 19.  More dates are expected to be announced...
 
Guess who else is back? That’s right, pumpkinheads - after a long awaited are-they-or-aren’t-they debate, the Smashing Pumpkins are returning with a reunion album and, so far, even a few live dates. The album itself has been titled Zeitgeist, and is the subject of a questionable release date - one report says that the release date has simply officially been stated as “summer,” while another more specific source insists that it’ll hit stores on July 7. Tim
e will tell. In the meantime, you can catch the Pumpkins at Germany’s Rock am Ring fest in early June, and Austria’s Nova Rock fest on June 15; an appearance at this year’s Lollapalooza is also rumored, but has yet to be announced...
 
LCD Soundsystem are going to be even busier than the Pumpkins on the road - they’ve just announced the dates they’ve got planned for a major North American tour that will kick off at the end of March. Following the wrap-up of their UK/European tour, the band will hit NYC on March 30 and 31, and then follow up that duo of dates with stops in Los Angeles (4/29), Seattle (5/2), Vancouver (5/4), Chicago (5/6), Detroit (5/7), and Toronto (5/8).  LCD is touring in support of their upcoming album, Sound of Silver, which will drop March 19...
 
And speaking of the aforementioned Iggy-Pop-hosting SXSW (the South by Southwest Music Fest), they’ve finally gotten around to announcing the preliminary lineup for the 21st year of the influential show, which will take place in Austin, TX from March 14-17 and will feature over 1,300 bands playing live. You can expect to see (well, if you run around a lot, as the shows are so condensed time-wise) the likes of The Good, The Bad and The Queen; The Strokes’ Albert Hammond Jr. (his solo project); Scottish band The Fratellis (whom you might’ve heard in the latest day-glo-colored iPod commercial); Norway’s singer-songwriter Sondre Lerche; The Apples in Stereo; and new-album-bedecked Bloc Party...
 
MODERN ROCK LINK OF THE WEEK:  The 2007 Noise Pop Festival kicks off this week in San Francisco, and will run through March 4, complete with performances from Autolux, the Dandy Warhols, the Donnas, Sebadoh, Clinic, and Earlimart - find out  more at the event’s official website, www.noisepop.com...

MINI BUZZ:
Speaking of festivals, here’s a new festival alert:  Liverpool will play host to the brand-new Knowsley Park Music Fest beginning this year – the event will take place June 23-24, and for its first outing will feature headliners The Who and Keane...
A plethora of dates have been booked for this year’s Honda Civic Tour, which will feature headliner Fall Out Boy plus support act +44 - additional appearances will be made on the tour by the likes of Cobra Starship, Paul Wall, and The Academy Is, and tour stops will include Atlanta, GA (4/19), Vancouver (5/6), Minneapolis (5/16), Toronto (5/26), Detroit (5/27), and Chicago (6/10 and 6/11)...
Further Seems Forever will release their upcoming special-materials album, The Final Curtain, on April 3;  the disc will feature live tracks, unreleased songs, acoustic material, and much more...
Army of Anyone - featuring, of course, Stone Temple Pilots brothers Dean and Robert DeLeo and Filter’s Richard Patrick - will play their first ever Los Angeles show at the Key Club on March 1...
Fans of the now-disbanded Luna rejoice - two of the band’s members will be embarking on a new project that’s bound to carry some of the same sounds that made Luna great.  Dean Wareham and Britta Phillips, now billed as Dean and Britta, will drop their debut disc, Back Numbers, this week...
And popster Justin Timberlake has just become the first musician to have his own branded channel on the VCast Verizon mobile phone video service - it’s called JT-TV (of course) and will provide four areas of programming, music, movies, lifestyle, and fashion - snazzy...
 
And here are this week’s equally snazzy new releases...
ON CD:  Field Music’s Tones of Town... Aqueduct’s Or Give Me Death... Magic Numbers’ Those Are the Brokes... Calla’s Strength in Numbers... The Frames’ The Cost... and Richard Swift’s Dressed Up For the Letdown... 
ON DVD:  Ben Folds’ Live at My Space... The Fray’s How to Save a Life... Romeo + Juliet: The Music Edition... and U2’s Achtung Baby - Under Review ... and that’s the buzz for this week’s Modern Rock.
 
Questions, comments, rants, raves, suggestions on this column or your fave musicians?  Send ‘em to Kristi at modernrocker@gmail.com