SOUND BITES

With the release of their sixth album ...Like Clockwork set for release in June, you had to know we were about due for a proper taste of what to expect from the first new Queens Of The Stone Age music in six years soon. Well, as it turns out, the Easter Bunny has seen fit to come through for us; last night, they debuted My God Is The Sun from the upcoming release during their set at Lollapalooza Brazil. But, enough out of me; let's crank this sucker up: My God Is The Sun has everything you could hope for from a new QOTSA song; a strong hook, pummeling riffage and some beefy drums (courtesy of former Mars Volta stickman Jon Theodore, making his live debut with the band, and on record by perennial badass Dave Grohl). As an added bonus you get a hazy, expertly executed breakdown that slows the ride to a crawl before sprinting to the finish. ...Like Clockwork is out sometime in June on Matador.

  One of the nice things about adding the Rapid Fire Reviews section to the blog is that now, when an album stream comes up, I don't necessarily have to put quite as much time into reporting on said stream. Traditionally (if you've frequented these streams here for a while), I will listen to the album and do a mini-review along with the link. Now, I can post up three links in one article without having to listen to a single note, with only a promise that I will check these out when time allows and add them to my handy dandy sidebar. So, here's three albums' worth of streamy goodness. Check 'em out, and look for my thoughts in the coming days. Enjoy! Stream Mudhoney's Vanishing Point here , courtesy Exclaim! Stream Killswitch Engage's Disarm The Descent here , again thanks to Exclaim! Stream The Black Angels' Indigo Meadow via Pitchfork Advance . All three albums hit store shelves April 2.

I've got to be honest, I'm feeling a little overwhelmed here. Earlier today, some three days after my previous blog post, I decided to do a few renovations to the blog. Spruce it up a bit, throw in a little new content, what have you. I was approaching 5500 total pageviews; I thought, "oh cool". I could never have been prepared for what came next. This evening, my I get an email notification that someone new had liked the blog's Facebook page. I thought nothing of it; after all, when posting about the new look, I asked for likes. Then, another like. And another. Then, a comment on my Headstones story from Monday. Now, I was a little baffled. As it turns out, Headstones bassist Tim White had tweeted a link to the blog post. I did a double take, and decided to investigate further. The tweet was embedded as part of an update box located on the official Headstones website. Score! But wait; there was more. I found another link to the post, this one from lead si...

If you're reading this, you've likely noticed that things have changed. How very perceptive of you. I figure by now that just about everyone who frequents this place has a widescreen monitor, so I've widened the layout so there isn't so much dead space on your screen. If you're still rocking that old CRT, apologies. Stretching it out also allows for a bigger sidebar, which you'll see is now big and beautiful (as opposed to the former incarnation, which was cramped and attention starved). And, with the bigger and awesomer sidebar comes Sound Bites' newest time waster. Rapid Fire Reviews is where I'll neatly sum up most albums I'm listening to with a quick paragraph and a (dreaded) rating out of 10; like Pitchfork, except I'm not a pretentious elitist snob and/or getting paid for favorable reviews. As I hear more, I'll add to the list up until the point that I feel it's taking up enough space, at which point I'll start deleting from ...

When Headstones announced they were finally getting together for a new record (a decade since they'd released one, as the band drifted apart and Hugh Dillon's acting career began to pay dividends), they did so by letting their fans get in on the ground floor. Headstones got self-promotion right. They started accepting pledges toward the funding of the new record on October 19th at their official Pledge Music site , with pledge items ranging from $10 (digital download of album) and $5,000 (a private Headstones unplugged show for you and your friends). Within a day, they'd reached 90% of their goal; as of this writing, they sit at 283% reached. Headstones got funding right. With a planned release date of March 26 looming, something happened. They messed around and got a record deal after a subsidiary of Universal Music (who had originally signed the band back in '92) loved what they heard, and wanted to release it worldwide. The logistics of these things tend to...

Plenty of history's great bands have celebrated two decades of rocking with albums that attempt to showcase what all those years have done for them; the hope is to give adoring fans another fine addition to their collection while opening the door to a new generation, which is what twenty years in business can do for a band. However, if history has taught us anything, it's that these attempts have a very low success rate. Twenty years after Kill 'Em All put thrash on the map, Metallica rang in their third decade with the messy, difficult St. Anger , an album nearly universally panned as their worst. The twentieth anniversary of AC/DC's debut LP saw them unleash the underwhelming Ballbreaker on its fans. R.E.M.'s album quality was never the same after drummer Bill Berry left in '96, but even the pessimists were disappointed by Around the Sun , a mind-numbing snoozefest of an album that followed their debut full-length by 21 years in 2004. Even The Rolling Stone...

It's been a long time since soundtracks have been relevant, hasn't it? Back in the mid 80's and early 90's, the soundtrack was king, and not just for rock music; hell, one of the biggest selling albums of all time is the soundtrack for The Bodyguard because of that God-awful Whitney Houston song. Now, with the movie industry crying about their lost money and the average music consumer just going for singles anyway, the soundtrack no longer seems a viable option for studios. Sure, they still exist, but only in the way pickles still exist on fast food cheeseburgers (some will enjoy them, many don't want anything to do with them).