Meatloaf announces new tour…updated with mp3!

Meatloaf is venturing out into Europe to explore the continent’s venues and crowds. Can this mean that he is possibly doing a few US visits soon?

Upon casting an eye toward the ‘loaf’s Wikipedia page, one discovers that the music he performs is classified in one way as “Wagnerian Rock.” Based on the Rock Opera genre, it is a fairly interesting read.

MP3: Paradise by the Dashboard Lights

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M@M: Feist-I Feel It All

A recent performance by Feist on Stephen Colbert’s The Colbert Report. What a babe:

Buy Feist/MP3: I Feel It All

A Heart Falls Down, Sentimentally

Upon recommendation from a close friend, I (reluctantly) shut off the music to the video for Scarlett Johansson’s new yet-to-be-released Tom Waits cover “Falling Down,” and instead played She & Him’s Sentimental Heart. Magnificent.

Step one: Download She & Him’s “Sentimental Heart”
Step two: click HERE to watch the video.
Step three: turn the sound off of the video.
Step four: Play song and video.

Congrats to City Pages Best of Winners (except one)

Especially DJ Soviet Panda.  Considering how Too Much Love has revived what it means to dance in Prince’s home (read: not Coachella), his category must’ve been created just for him:

Soviet Panda may travel rather light, without vinyl crates to tote to his weekly residency at First Avenue’s Too Much Love dance nights. But whether holier-than-thou crate diggers like it or not, the new millennium is upon us, and the title “disc jockey” now has a secondary definition. Soviet Panda’s runaway success owes much to the fact that First Avenue has opened its doors to an 18-and-up crowd, and a few moments inside the decidedly adolescent TML will have the grownups snickering and shaking their heads all the way to the bar. But Too Much Love isn’t just a clever title—it’s an apt description of the flood of good will that overfills the city’s biggest nightclub on a weekly basis, a flood powerful enough to drown even the staunchest of our inner wallflowers. Soviet Panda has an exhaustive playlist of soul, funk, and electro, and he seamlessly mixes everything into an alchemic solution infectious enough to make you forget that there isn’t a single wax groove within miles. Your scorn for Ableton Live is unseemly in this modern age. Ones and Twos? Zeroes and Ones? It’s all digits. Get to TML and get freaky.

ONE MAJOR OVERSIGHT: Best Live Artist Skoal Kodiak? Puh-lease. Give me these guys any day.

Check out the City Pages’ annual Best of the Twin Cities metro area HERE.

Change: It’s bigger than guns, bigger than cigarettes… (mp3-rich!)

Indie music giant Pitchfork has been down for the last couple of hours and we are having a near-record number of hits on our site today. Do I sense a shift in the winds, a changing of the guard?

Maybe Bob Dylan thinks so…

…and so do The Flaming Lips…

…as does Tupac and Bowie…

…and while She and Him speak the truth…

…so does Sam Cooke.

MP3 track titles after the jump.

UPDATE: Pitchfork was up and running five minutes after I started this post.  Damn them.  And they also posted a video of Scarlett Johansson’s Falling Down.

New Coldplay-Give a listen…

Violet Hill, the first single from the new CP album, was put out for free on their web site and will be up there for a week. But why even go there (except for some cool graphics); you can just grab the mp3 right here:

Violet Hill

On first listen, I’m digging it big time. We’ll see what happens the second, third, and fifteenth time through. Also, the feeling I got upon first listen: sound a little like “Further on (Up the Road)” from Bruce Springsteen’s The Rising:

Buy the Boss/MP3: Further on (Up the Road)

Sweet album cover after the jump:

News Beat, Finding a Gideon’s Bible Edition

Raccoon blamed for expensive power failure

By PAUL WALSH, Star Tribune–A wayward raccoon is being blamed for an expensive power failure that struck a handful of small towns near Rochester, Minn., last night and lasted until well into the morning.

Lewiston, Stockton, Utica, Wyattville, Altura and rural areas in between all lost electricity to varying degrees starting at about 9 p.m. Monday, said Lewiston Fire Chief Charlie Matzke and a utility spokesman.

In the meantime, school was called off in the Lewiston-Altura District, the chief said, “and the kids are happy. It’s kind of a nice day.”

Those darned Rocky Raccoons…

Buy The Beatles Please!

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News Beat, International Irony Edition

‘Free Tibet’ flags made in China

Police in southern China have discovered a factory manufacturing Free Tibet flags, media reports say.

The factory in Guangdong had been completing overseas orders for the flag of the Tibetan government-in-exile.

Workers said they thought they were just making colourful flags and did not realise their meaning.

But then some of them saw TV images of protesters holding the emblem and they alerted the authorities, according to Hong Kong’s Ming Pao newspaper.

I’m sure the Chinese government, under major scrutiny from the international scene as the Olympics approach, view this as an accident.  And as Elvis Costello says:

Accidents Will Happen

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Prince Covers Radiohead @ Coachella-UPDATE

Here is a video clip of the Minneapolis master in his near perfection:

Buy Prince/MP3: Let’s Go Crazy (the song he closed his Coachella set with)

Buy Radiohead/MP3: Creep

Coldplay to play free London and NYC shows

Keep an eye on their web site to get a chance at some free tickets.

www.coldplay.com

Buy Coldplay/MP3: God Put a Smile Upon Your Face

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