Pretty Hate Machine has been re-released in remastered form. Proceed accordingly.

We Heathen have informed you before that Zoe Keating is someone you need to know about.

This is just more evidence:

Also via WookieNix.

On Colbert last night, he performed his hit replacing “Fuck You” with “Fox News.”

It’s over at Mohney’s place.

Tom Waits recorded some music with the Preservation Hall Jazz Band:

On November 19th, Preservation Hall Recordings will release 504 limited edition hand-numbered 78 rpm vinyl records featuring two tracks by the Preservation Hall Jazz Band with very special guest Tom Waits. Proceeds from the sale of this very special project will benefit the Preservation Hall Junior Jazz & Heritage Brass Band.

Mr. Waits traveled to New Orleans in 2009 to record two songs with the Preservation Hall Jazz Band for the critically acclaimed project Preservation: An album to benefit Preservation Hall and the Preservation Hall Music Outreach Program, “Tootie Ma Was A Big Fine Thing,” and “Corrine Died On The Battlefield,” Originally recorded by Danny Barker in 1947, these two selections are the earliest known recorded examples of Mardi Gras Indian chants.

The two tracks will now be packaged in a special limited edition 78 rpm format record, each signed and numbered by Preservation Hall Creative Director Ben Jaffe. The first one hundred records will be accompanied by a custom-made Preservation Hall 78rpm record player as part of a Deluxe Donation package.

Said “deluxe” package is still only $200, and will be available to the first 100 purchases on November 19 at Preservation Hall at 10AM central, or online the day after.

I think I’m about to go buy a plane ticket, as the nice lady at the shop just told me she believes the deluxe edition will only be available onsite. SWA has roundtrips for about $130 for that Friday…

Gnarls Barkley does Radiohead live.

Dude, seriously, check this out. NOW. (Video, music, Tesla coils…)

The Houston Press Rocks Off blog has a great list of the Top Ten Bleakest Songs in Country Music. For my money, #5 is about 5 spots too low, but it’s a damn fine list.

Ladies and Gentleheathen, invite you to invest the required 3:57 in the following Rammstein video, which contains within it what can only be described as a somewhat revisionist take on a story ordinarily associated with Disney.

Merlin nails it again with this delightful Dead Kennedys encomium. Time to taste what you most fear, kiddies.

Also, note the graphic he uses at the end, and consider for a moment what a strange item that is, and how foreign it is to the high school seniors of today.

Arcade Fire’s “video” for The Wilderness Downtown is a fascinating HTML5 site, best viewed with Google Chrome. Seriously, check this out. It helps if you remember your childhood address.

In response to a Facebook campaign, on August 27, Iowa State carillonneur (look it up) and associate professor of music Tin-Shi Tam played Bad Romance on the carillon. Enjoy. (Via MeFi.)

This just smokes: Talking Heads, “Born Under Punches,” live performance, from nineteen eighty. That’s Adrian Belew, apparently, on guitar, and “oh my God I can’t breathe Tina Weymouth looks so much like an angel. A gorgeous, muscular, platinum blonde angel” on bass. (Via Merlin, who is also the source of the Tina quote.)

This astounding sort of complex multilayered music is still arresting and unusual today, but compare it to, say, the top records of 1980 to get an idea of how weird it was thirty years ago. Make time for this today, especially if your name is “Frank” or “Mike” or “Rick.”

F**K YOU. NSFW, but really toe-tappingly fantastic.

Dr Dre is working on a surround-sound astronomy instrumental.

Deep Purple meets Hef, ca. 1968, on something called “Playboy After Dark.”

In the 70s, [James Williamson][1] played guitar and shared songwriting duties with Iggy and the Stooges, most notably on on the seminal Raw Power record. The band subsequently broke up, despite the success of Raw Power, and Williamson went back to school before, eventually, joining Sony for the bulk of his electrical engineering career.

Last year, Sony was issuing early retirements, and Williamson took one. The Stooges had of course reformed around 2003, but when Williamson couldn’t rejoin them they’d used their original guitarist Ron Asheton — who died suddenly around the same time Williamson retired, and all of a sudden a former Sony VP was back playing punk rock again (Video link, but short and worth it).

Prince remains a deeply strange individual, as one Daily Mirror writer discovered in a long-form, short-notice interview now widely quoted online (i.e., in reference to Prince’s antipathy for the Internet).

The aforementioned Zoe Keating has a new album out; download starts at $8, but you can pay more. The official Heathen price is $12. Go. Listen. Buy.

Ministry covers ‘Radar Love’. (Via @richard_kadrey on Twitter.)

And, as it happens, a True Blood fan: Oh, Sookie.

Bootsy Collins has launched the world’s first University of Funk.

Via Siege, we find this over on Youtube, from 1983. Brown was 50; Jackson and Prince were babes of 25.

The weirdest one actually turns out to be Prince, which is not what I expected.

It’s a twofer:

• The Sunshine Bores The Daylights Outta Me: the Stones reissue of “Exile on Main St” drops today with damn near a CD’s worth of extra tracks.
• Thirty Years Ago Today, Ian Curtis inadvertently changed Joy Division into New Order, with decidedly mixed results.

Enjoy as you see fit. I’m going with the Stones, me.

Just that this cover of a Wilco song has way more soul than the original. Christ, there’s BRASS.

Also, the lead singer makes a leisure suit look dapper. WTF?

Today’s best phrase: [H]ow a fourth-hand Rat pedal and a borrowed Peavey Bandit can save your life for a little while, from Merlin’s post about music, heros, and saving your soul. (Also, Merlin has excellent taste in heros.)

I don’t think I can overstate how completely TRUE this post is. He totally nails it in all sorts of ways. Plus, I had the “Kurt Bloch” experience with Pat DiNizio in a Memphis bar called Alex’s one time, and it went pretty much the same way. For a certain class of misanthropic types — especially folks like me, and Merlin, who grew up far away from the music centers of our youth — Lou Reed wasn’t kidding or exaggerating when he talked about lives being saved by rock and roll. He was telling the gospel truth.

Now, if you’ll excuse me, I’m going to run the cats out of my office by playing the stereo as God, Lou Reed, Jonathan Richman, and Pat DiNizio intended. Roadrunner once, roadrunner twice…

Chill out. You’re okay. You’ll be fine. Just breathe..

Or, at least, I’ll point you here, and you can relive the heyday of 120 Minutes yourself, courtesy of an obsessive fan and a whole bunch of Youtube links. Enjoy.

Widely blogged, I got it at Merlin’s place. It’s from an interview with Choire Sicha and Paul Ford, on the occasion of the latter leaving Harper’s this week, originally published here:

Choire: What is your favorite Alex Chilton video, song or tale?

Paul: My favorite tale is from Our Band Could Be Your Life, when he shut down Gibby Haynes’s rampage through the Netherlands:

Moments later a man entered the dressing room and asked if he could borrow a guitar. “BORROW A GUITAR??!!! WELL, WHO THE FUCK ARE YOU???!!! [Gibby Haynes of the Butthole Surfers] screamed, eyes flashing in delirious anticpation of forthcoming violence. But the man was totally unfazed.

“I’m Alex Chilton,” the man answered calmly.

Haynes was flabbergasted. After a long pause, he methodically opened the remaining guitar cases one by one and gestured at them as if to say, “Take anything you want.”

Icon Alex Chilton — how cool do you have to be to get the Replacements to name a song after you? — died today in New Orleans, they say of a heart attack. He was 59.

I need some time to digest this, but Chilton’s music with Big Star and others defines the Heathen college experience as much as any artist other than U2 or the Velvet Underground. Mark Linkous I’ll miss. Barry Hannah, too. But Chilton, man. Damn.

“Won’t you tell me what you’re thinking of / Would you be an outlaw for my love?”

(It occurs to me that many may not know that Chilton also was a Box Top, and sang The Letter, a song that every single one of you know.)

On 19 January, Brit band The Heavy was on Letterman. They blew the roof off; normally staid Letterman was so excited that he told them to “go again! go again!”, and so they did.

How You Like Me Now?

Don’t miss this. For SRS. It’s James Brown meets hip-hop meets R&B meets, I dunno, the growl and smash of Zeppelin. TOP NOTCH, as a friend of mine used to say.

(Via MeFi, which also links the official video. MeFi also points out why you know this song already. Them kids is goin’ places.)

Because with a video as awesome as this, there is completely ZERO reason not to. It features Beyonce and Tarantino’s Pussy Wagon, for crying out loud.

Oh my god. It’s a mirage. I’m tellin’ y’all, it’s…

Yeah, it’s like that. A bit more context, in case you need it.

Miles Davis, What I Say, 1971. From, if I’m not mistaken, the Cellar Door Sessions. In addition to Davis, you’ll see Keith Jarrett and no shortage of other luminaries in the clip.

Sparklehorse’s Mark Linkous is dead.

More videos here.

Amanda Fucking Palmer is promoting and shepherding a band called Evelyn Evelyn comprised, we are told, of a set of Siamese twins.

There’s virtually no chance this is authentic, but I love the whole idea either way.

Go check out these Prince rehearsal videos from about 1984 before they get C&D’d right off teh Intarwub.

Every mashup you can think of is not a good idea, okay?

So. Central Rain, October 6 1983. On Letterman, natch.

(More? Merlin posted a followup.)

Metafilter just ran a great omnibus post on Michael Hedges, chock full of great performance clips from YouTube. Go. Click. Watch. Listen.

Ok, not 12. Closer to 21. But it’s still worth your time to check out this video, which captures a lineup gone now for almost 25 years. Dave Mustaine was kicked out by the end of the year, and original bassist Cliff Burton would die in a bus crash in Sweden before the end of 1986.

Goodnight Keith Moon.

This song is not in English, but it sure sounds like it. Check it out.

Check out the Eigenharp.

Last night, during the U2 show at Reliant — which, by the way, was amazing; it really takes something to pull off a credible rock and roll show at that scale, about which much later — Mrs Heathen pulled my arm to yell in my ear:

“When’s the last time we heard this?”

The song was “Beautiful Day.” The answer: January 18, 2009. At the Lincoln Memorial. With about a million of our closest friends, in the cold and wet joy that was the pre-Inaugural concert.

Somehow, I’d missed this excellent video for Modest Mouse’s “Float On.” If you have, too, here’s your chance to rectify that.

Sorta makes you miss the era when MTV actually played these things, doesn’t it?

Most Heathen are already familiar with the concept of mondegreens, i.e. amusingly misheard music lyrics a la “‘Scuse me while I kiss this guy.”

When you cross languages, though, you can get a whole ‘nother level of weird: Heathen nation, I give you Soramimi. Soramimi are English lyrics that can be misheard as weird Japanese phrases. There are examples at the link.

There’s a Glitter and Doom concert record coming.

Peep this.