Kevin Barnes, Jeff Mangum in Wacky Elephant 6 Movie
Plus: Olivia Tremor Control's Hart, Elf Power's Rieger

Of Montreal's Kevin Barnes as a bumbling constable! Neutral Milk Hotel's Jeff Mangum in a lobster suit! It's something only those crazies in Athens, Georgia could dream up, and now they've snatched that dream out of the ether and committed it to celluloid.

Major Organ and the Adding Machine, the filmic companion to the mysterious Elephant Six Collective omnibus album of the same name-- long a subject of intrigue among E6 maniacs-- will finally find its way to screens in 2008. And boy does it look bonkers!

The city's own Orange Twin imprint, which released the original album back in 2001, plans to unleash a Major Organ DVD/expanded CD set in spring of next year. The short film should also soon be invading select theaters and various festivals.

Directed by Joey Foreman and Eric Harris, Major Organ counts among its cast members the aforementioned Barnes and Mangum, along with William Cullen Hart (The Olivia Tremor Control, Circulatory System), Julian Koster (OTC, NMH), Andrew Rieger (Elf Power), and the ladies of Dixie Blood Mustache. These folks also contributed to the making of the Major Organ album, but shhhh, you're not supposed to know about that.

Daniel Lanois Unveils Sixth Solo Album, Film

After reading today's review of The Joshua Tree: Deluxe Edition, perhaps you're revisiting the album (which is celebrating its 20th anniversary). And perhaps you want to catch up with one of the producers who accompanied U2 as "the band finally took a moment to ponder the wide-open American spaces it had been traveling through for years." Well, Brian Eno is likely off producing the new Coldplay record, so why not cozy up to Daniel Lanois, who is planning the release of his sixth solo album?

Titled Here Is What Is and billed as the soundtrack to an accompanying documentary of the same name, the album finds Lanois teaming with jazz drummer Brian Blade and pianist Garth Hudson (of the Band). According to a press release, Here Is also features "philosophical interludes and inspiring conversations with Brian Eno taken from the film."

Both the record and the documentary will come out March 18 on CD and DVD respectively (the former via Redeye Distribution), but Lanois is giving the album a digital release via his own Red Floor Records on December 15. The download comes in high-quality waveform (.wav) format and, thankfully for the iPod generation, also regular mp3 format.

Of the documentary, which will make its U.S. premiere at SXSW in March, Lanois says, "The film is a camera following me around over the course of a year, in and out of recording studios documenting once and for all the way it really happens." Adam Vollick and Adam Samuels aided Lanois in the directing.

And finally, back to U2. Lanois is currently in the studio with the band working on the follow-up to 2004's How to Dismantle an Atom Bomb. [MORE...]

P.T. Anderson/Elliott Smith Film to Surface in 2008?
Jon Brion, Fiona Apple, Bette Midler, Rastafarian basketball players involved??

Everyone loves a good mystery. Quite a few people love Elliott Smith. And quite a few people love Paul Thomas Anderson as well. So here, how about a story that rolls all three into one?

According to "DVD Magazine of Rare and Unseen Short Films" Wholphin (linked via fan mecca and "definitive P.T. Anderson resource" Cigarettes and Red Vines), the beloved director of such films as Magnolia, Boogie Nights, and the forthcoming, Jonny Greenwood-scored There Will Be Blood once made a little film involving the late Elliott Smith.

In this film, wrote Wholphin, Smith plays "a Rastafarian basketball player." Um, yeah.

While Smith's publicist confirmed said short film exists, further details on it are scant at best. We don't know its title, for one, nor whether it indeed, as Cigarettes and Red Vines has suggested, spun off from a proposed variety show featuring Smith pal Jon Brion.

The P.T. fansite quotes an unidentified Anderson interview from 2003 in which the director mentions a "thing we did as a test a few years back with Fiona [Apple], sweet Elliott Smith, the great Brad Mehldau, and Jon [Brion] at [Los Angeles'] Cello Studios."

"Look for a bizarre and wonderful Bette Midler cameo," added Anderson.

That thing, however, is "very simple, straightforward, no flashy pants-- just music." So, probably not the same as the basketball thing. Does this mean there are two P.T. Anderson-directed Elliott Smith films? Ack, my head hurts.

Whatever Anderson's got, it's presently stashed away in some storage unit in L.A., and the director won't have a chance to get at it until he wraps up promotional duties surrounding There Will Be Blood. At that point, Wholphin-- which originally intended to showcase the short in its Fall 2006 issue-- may very well share it with the world via Issue 6, due in mid-2008. Or they may not.

This wouldn't be a mystery without suspense, now would it?

Rufus Wainwright's Judy Garland Tribute Hits CD/DVD

Photo by Akmal Naim

On April 23, 1961, Judy Garland took the stage at New York City's Carnegie Hall and, by all accounts, tore the roof off the sucker. The performance is the stuff of legend: Just ask Rufus Wainwright, who's spent the past years performing a tribute to the performance and to the memory of Garland herself. A CD/DVD set collecting a pair of Wainwright's recent performances of Garland's material will be released December 4 from Geffen.

Featuring musical direction by noted Broadway maestro Stephen Oremus, the Rufus Does Judy at Carnegie Hall CD finds Mr. Wainwright taking the same stage as his late muse in an October 2006 performance. The accompanying DVD, Rufus! Rufus! Rufus! Does Judy! Judy! Judy! Live at the London Palladium, captures Wainwright's antics in the UK earlier this year. Both were reportedly inspired by the comfort Wainwright took in Garland's music following the September 11 attacks, a rejection of "this blissful ignorance of the state of America" which Wainwright felt took over in the wake of that tragedy.

Wainwright, currently touring Europe, has quite a few gigs all over the world in the next few months. Those dates after the jump. [MORE...]

Manu Chao Preps Digital Releases, Reissues

You'd think a year filled with big festival appearances, a sold-out tour, and an internationally successful new album would be enough for Manu Chao. [Cue Belushi] But noooooooo! He's got to go plan reissues and digital releases of a bunch of his old records too. Dude is insatiable.

The first of these "new" Manu Chao releases appears on November 20, when a good portion of his back catalog makes the jump to (legal) digital format.

Then, in late January, physical reissues of three Manu Chao releases will hit stores. Proxima Estación: Esperanza, Manu Chao's 2001 album, comes expanded with four videos, for "Me Gustas Tu", "Merry Blues", "La Chinita", and "Mr. Bobby". The 2002 live album Radio Bemba Sound System is the other CD getting reissued, and it comes with three clips from a 2007 Manu Chao concert in Paris as bonuses. The third reissue? Why, it's live DVD Babylonia en Guagua. That reissue comes with bonus documentaries Babylon's Fever and Todos a Genova, plus two other bonus films: Proxima Estacion...Esperanza and Infinita Tristeza.

All of these things come courtesy of Nacional/Because.

Metric Release Live DVD, iTunes EP
But will they ever release the stranglehold their songs have on my heart?

Finally, a Metric DVD I don't have to watch with my Kaplan math tutor. Canadian synth-rock superstars Metric will issue the live DVD Live at Metropolis February 12 on Last Gang Records. It captures the band in action at a Fall 2006 Montreal stop on their Live It Out tour, and also includes the videos for Live It Out's three singles.

To sweeten an already sugary deal, iTunes will offer a Live at Metropolis EP come mid-December. It will feature "Patriarch on a Vespa", "The Police and The Private", and "Too Little Too Late" from the Metropolis set, as well as the DVD trailer, for less than a buck.

If all this live stuff has got you salivating for a Metric show, well, you're gonna make a puddle before that happens. Metric's recent tour with Crystal Castles has wrapped, with no future dates scheduled for now. Makes you wish there was some kind of concert film or something to tide you over in the interim, don't it? Hey... [MORE...]

Alan Sparhawk's Black-Eyed Snakes Go Skiing on DVD
Black Mountain pissed they didn't think of idea first

Usually when a band releases a DVD, it's of some live show, or it's a documentary chronicling the history of the band, or maybe it's some kooky music-related movie with interviews and music videos as extras. Not so for Low guitarist/vocalist Alan Sparhawk's Black-Eyed Snakes side project.

The Snakes have released a short film called Cross Country With the Snakes on DVD, featuring the cross-country skiing talents of the band and, in particular, those of drummer and one-time Olympic hopeful Brad Nelson. And sure, the DVD-- shot by skiing fanatic Hansi Johnson-- also has some live footage from the shows the band played on its Colorado/Utah road trip, but the real prize is getting to see the Snakes' impression of Low's "Belarus" video.

As part of the Banff Mountain Film Festival tour, Cross Country With the Snakes will screen at Minneapolis' Midwest Mountaineering on November 16 and 17 and at the Duluth Cross Country Ski Club on November 18 and 19. The DVD is available from Low's chairkickers.com now.

For their part, Low still have those Down Under dates scheduled in January, starting January 9 in Auckland, New Zealand. [MORE...]

Interpol Expand Love With DVD, Prep Single

Photo by Matt Ziegler

You snooze, you win, apparently. Folks who slept on scooping up a copy of Interpol's Our Love to Admire when it came out this past summer, get ready for a treat: Interpol are about to offer up even more Love to Admire, as the deluxe edition of the album arrives November 19 in the UK via Capitol/Parlophone.

Just how deluxe, you ask? Why, bonus DVD deluxe, my friend. In addition to the 11 audio tracks that comprise the regular release, Love redux will also come packed with a bonus DVD EP boasting live performances-- recorded at London's Astoria earlier this year-- of jams from the past two Interpol discs, plus a couple Love music videos. Alas, no "Stella", and no Carlos D centerfolds. Maybe next time, guys.

What's more, the next Our Love to Admire single is due December 3 UK-ways. Not surprisingly, it's for "No I in Threesome" (that video's been around for a minute now), and format and tracklist details have not yet materialized.

Interpol set sail for Europe, with first mates Blonde Redhead, next week. [MORE...]

Pumpkins Prep Another Best Buy-Only Zeitgeist

Why, Billy, why? Just when some people we know made up had finally finished paying off the credit card interest after buying FOUR different versions of Smashing Pumpkins' Zeitgeist-- which, let's face it, is no Mellon Collie and the Infinite Sadness-- at FOUR different retailers, you go and plop another one on us.

Zeitgeist: The Umpteenth Unnecessary Edition or whatever drops at Best Buy locations and only Best Buy locations October 30 (aka tomorrow). It seems indie retailers (not to mention fans) can suck it once again.

Why, when you already have the regular edition, the Target edition, the iTunes edition, and the original Best Buy edition, might you actually consider possibly wanting this artifact too? Well, it has a few bonus tracks-- one from the first Best Buy Zeitgeist ("Death From Above"), one from the iTunes Zeitgeist ("Stellar"), and one that appears nowhere else ("Ma Belle"). It also comes with a DVD sporting the full-length documentary Inside the Zeitgeist. And, um, somebody put the cover art in Photoshop and desaturated it. (They're calling this a "metallic silver color scheme"; it's a "scheme" all right.)

Well, at least they got one thing right. Excess is very much in the spirit of the times. [MORE...]

Bob Dylan Releases DVD of Newport Performances

What's life without the occasional DVD? No stranger to cross-media promotions, XM radio host Bob Dylan will release The Other Side of the Mirror: Bob Dylan Live at the Newport Folk Festival 1963-1965 via Columbia/Legacy on October 30.

Collected on the DVD are 80 minutes of Dylan's performances at the titular festival during the titular years, most of which are previously unreleased. Aside from an interview with the project's Academy Award-winning director and producer Murray Lerner, the DVD has no bonus features.

For those who can't confine themselves to the mere home theater experience when it comes to live Dylan, he and his band have a handful of U.S. dates left on their previously reported tour with Elvis Costello. The next of those shows is in Iowa City on October 24.

After that tour ends, the I'm Not There Dylan tribute concert takes place November 7 in New York City. Perhaps not so coincidentally, the I'm Not There soundtrack drops October 30, the same day as the Newport DVD. [MORE...]

Oasis Find the "Lord" on New Single, Documentary DVD

It's been a minute since last we heard from those exemplars of reserve Oasis. Of course, isn't that always the case? Every few years, they throw some big hooks and swirling choruses down on wax, collect the requisite "best record since Be Here Now" pullquotes, slag off whoever's big at the moment (I can hear it now: "That Kanye kook's a real wanker, innit?"), tour a bit, punch a dude, and step off for a few more years. Hey, whatever works.

Annnnd Oasis are back! With a new single and a new(ish) DVD that share a title! They're both called Lord Don't Slow Me Down, and we shall discuss the previously Forkcasted single first. You'll be able to have and to hold that sweet "Lord" October 21, though only via digital outlets. So goes the Beatles goes Oasis, I suppose.

Then there's the Universal-issued DVD: it's a tour documentary that screened in select theaters last year, it features a commentary track from Liam, Noel, Andy, and Gem, and for a limited time, it'll come with a bonus disc with 16 tracks culled from a July 2005 show at City of Manchester Stadium. That thing'll drop November 6.

As for those always-tentative future plans? No tour as such, but a full-length is planned for next year. Word on the street is, it's the best one since Don't Believe the Truth.

Ghost Release Spooky Live Overture CD/DVD

A crowd of people gathers in a converted boat warehouse located on Japan's Yokohama Bay. Once inside, the doors are closed and locked behind them, and they are told that no one will enter or exit until a concert is performed in total darkness.

It sounds like the premise of a horror flick in the Saw/The Descent vein, but it's actually the way a Ghost concert on October 9, 2006 began. The band played an entirely improvised, 90-minute set at the Nippon Yusen Soko venue that night, and they will release a CD/DVD document of the event via Drag City on October 23.

Overture: Live in Nippon Yusen Soko 2006 is Ghost's first entirely improvised release. The DVD portion of the package features the whole concert, divided into three chapters for convenience, while the CD version of the show was edited down to a single, 56-minute track.

To celebrate the new release, Drag City will host a "Ghost Night" at Rodan in Chicago tomorrow evening (October 18), featuring DJs and a screening of the DVD.

In the tour department, Ghost's Michio Kurihara is currently on tour with Boris and Damon & Naomi. The tour's next stop is tomorrow night in San Antonio. [MORE...]

Do you have a news tip for us? Anything crazy happen at a show you attended recently? Do you have inside info on the bands we cover? Is one of your favorite artists (that's not somebody you know personally) releasing a new record you'd like to see covered? You will remain completely anonymous, unless we are given your express permission to reveal your identity. (Please note that publicists, managers, booking agents, and other artist representatives are generally exempt from this rule, but will also be granted anonymity if requested.)