“Racing the Cure: A Benefit for Oliver Gant” is a benefit concert in honor of Oliver Gant featuring some of North Carolina’s hottest talent

Format, Pet Shop Boys' new B-sides collection, shows how clever artists can make pop gold from a single's flipside The one-word titles of Pet Shop Boys albums always repay a second look and so it proves with Format, the name of their second volume of B-sides, covering 1995-2009. The B-side is a means of expression that owes its existence to outmoded formats: first the vinyl disc that needed both sides filling, then the CD single, which doubled or tripled the demand for extra music. During the 90s, when formatting went into overdrive, chart positions could be decided by how ...

Sun In Winter is a bedroom recording project of Finn Gilroy, a university student from Dunedin, New Zealand. Heavily influenced by Lo fi, shoegaze, drone, doom, indie rock, post rock/metal and inspired especially by acts such as ‘The Cure’, ‘Joy Division’, ‘This Will Destroy You’, ‘Year of No Light’, ‘Rosetta’, ‘Have a Nice Life’, ‘Isis’, [...]

The Decemberists have dissolved their support of the Susan G. Komen for the Cure Foundation after the organization's decision to stop providing funding for Planned Parenthood. The issue hits close to home for the band, since keyboardist Jenny Conlee suffered from breast cancer but is currently in

RIFF ROCKIT released his self-titled debut album last month, bestowing his conceptual form of ''kindie rock'' upon the little ones far and wide. As the music was hitting the market, Rockit's real-life alter-ego EVAN MICHAEL  was finalizing plans for something even more important - a run at raising funds for the Leukemia and Lymphoma Society.  Michael was first diagnosed with an extremely aggressive form of Leukemia (AML) just 15 years ago, and fortunately he's been cancer-free for 11 years after ''initially undergoing chemotherapy, two years of remission, a full disease relapse in 2000, and receiving the allogenic bone marrow ...

Chances are at some point this year, if you’re on Facebook or Twitter, you’ve already received a re-post/Tweet of an article prophesising on the ‘death of guitar music’, or a general analysis of how bands are seemingly becoming a redundant musical medium. Clearly that’s not a line Rockfeedback is going to buy into and it’s certainly a very blinkered argument that must be looking at the genre groupings within the ever decreasing ‘units moved’ metrics of the last few years. Young Galaxy are a band who prove quite the ointment to this line of argument ...

The Decemberists (pictured) have been selling ‘Team Jenny’ t-shirts to raise money for the Susan G. Komen For The Cure foundation ever since their keyboard player, Jenny Conlee, was diagnosed with breast cancer of May in last year. (She was officially declared to be in remission in October.) Now that the Komen foundation are no longer giving money to Planned Parenthood as part of a widespread removal of support in the lead-up to the American Presidential election, The Decemberists will no longer ...

Back in the summer of 2007 I ended up working in Toronto for four months. It was a fantastic experience and I've loads of great memories inclduding musical highlights thanks to great live gigs. I of course took the i-pod with me on the adventure but I also threw about 20 CDs into the suitcase to keep me going as well, including the debut from a littkle-known but critically acclaimed band from Scotland called The Twilight Sad . Fourteen Autumns and Fifteen Winters will always be part of the soundtrack of my summer in Canada. Many was the late night ...

It's good that - in the face of the sort of bad publicity even Mel Gibson couldn't generate - the Susan G Komen Foundation have reversed their original decision to punish Planned Parenthood for helping people in difficult situations. Amongst those who sounded their outrage at a cancer charity behaving like right-wing politicians were The Decemberists : The Decemberists are deeply troubled by Komen for the Cure's recent decision to cut off funding to Planned Parenthood, a vital resource in the battle against breast cancer. Providing cancer screenings to low income women is integral to the prevention and defeat of ...

When Decemberists’ member Jenny Conlee was diagnosed with breast cancer, the band rallied round. As well as supporting their friend – whose cancer is now in remission – they sold merch to raise money for cancer charities, and donated it to the Susan G Komen for the Cure Foundation. However, Komen recently announced it was ceasing to provide Planned Parenthood with funding for breast cancer exams because PP facilitates abortion, an act widely seen as a concession to the right wing of US politics. The Decemberists have now issued a clear statement by cutting off all funds to Komen, and instead redirecting ...

Quite possibly the coolest music video ever shot. The Cure’s Robert Smith + Siouxsie’s Steven Severin play an inviting instrumental in 1983. Download it: The Glove – A Blues in Drag p.s. vimeo apparently doesn’t believe that archiving rare and beautifully shot music videos is a just use of their services so they took the [...]

Politics and popular music have been mixing since before the Vietnam war, and it seems that The Decemberists are one of the latest musicians to make a political statement. As the NY Times has reported, one of the nation's most prominent advocacy groups for breast cancer awareness, Susan G. Komen for the Cure, has pulled its financial support for the branch of Planned Parenthood that provides breast cancer screenings for low-income women, total donations that have reached $700,000 annually in th

Having played festivals all over the world since releasing their first album Origins in 2006, The Horrors should be ready to rock this year's two weekends at Coachella. Their tour with Florence + The Machine this spring should spark a few new fans as well. Sounding like Depeche Mode and looking like The Cure, the boys in this English band were not even out of the womb when those bands were formed! Not to be confused with any small-town USA metal bands, The Horrors have been on music critics' radar for several years. Pitchfork named "Sheena Is A Parasite" (the ...

Everybody is supposed to regard Hüsker Dü as one of, if not the greatest exponents of American hardcore punk. As such, we are all supposed to bow down to them and admire their "influence" on those who came after, right? They were the ones who, along with the Violent Femmes , encapsulated the very essence of what it means to be a teenager in the eighties. Indeed, if you try to bring some sort of order to the tracks, it appears you are listening to the somewhat sorry tale of a disaffected, disillusioned, alienated youth who drifts away from his familiar ...

But unlike most of you, the Decemberists are a big fancy rock band with a Grammy nomination. So when they pull their support, it makes Rolling Stone : The Decemberists have withdrawn their fundraising support for the Susan G. Komen for the Cure Foundation after the organization’s decision to stop providing funding for Planned Parenthood. The rockers have realigned themselves with Planned Parenthood’s Breast Health Emergency Fund since Komen withdrew funding for breast cancer examinations on Tuesday. Komen claimed that a change in their grants policy prevented them from contributing further, though Planned Parenthood insisted that the foundation had ...