Jawbox hasn’t played a show in years, but there’s a chance you’ll be able to catch the band in action soon. Well, so long as you can stay up late enough.

Sources close to the band say that Jawbox will reunite on a late-night TV show to coincide with the reissue of the band’s third and finest LP, For Your Own Special Sweetheart. This is not a prelude to a tour, the same people say. I spoke to J Robbins last week, and he didn’t mention anything about this, but he did admit that a few one-off shows weren’t totally outside the realm of possibility. “We’ve entertained the notion of playing some shows, but that’s as far as its gotten,” said Robbins. “It’s conceivable, but only remotely, that we could play some shows.”

But playing on somebody else’s show? Looks like that’s a little more of a possibility.

Update: According to Billboard, Jawbox will appear Dec. 8 on NBC’s “Late Night With Jimmy Fallon.”

“Savory” video after the jump:

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Sweater rockers of the greater D.C. area, it’s time to start knitting! Slumberland has just announced a 20th anniversary concert at Black Cat.

Way back in 1989, when DC was still more of an all-hardcore-all-the-time kind of place, Slumberland Records took a chance and pressed its first 7″, What Kind of Heaven Do You Want, a compilation featuring DC-based indie-pop bands Velocity Girl, Black Tambourine, and Powder Burns. Since then the label has become one of the most beloved purveyors of twee and fuzzy music, releasing a slate of well-loved records by Stereolab, Rocketship, and, more recently, Crystal Stilts, and The Pains of Being Pure at Heart.

The anniversary concert will feature performances by label artists both new (Crystal Stilts) and old (The Ropers, Nord Express). Lineup details after the jump.
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In 1995 my mother graciously agreed to take me to The Delta Center, in Salt Lake City, Utah, to see R.E.M. Sonic Youth opened this show, playing all twenty-minutes of “Diamond Sea” and a bunch of other stuff from its then-forthcoming album Washing Machine. That music was a big deal for me–it bridged the jam bands of my upbringing to the artier, noisier music that I would soon start seeking out and it had an open-ended spaciousness that I immediately associated with suburbs and the empty western landscape where I lived. It’s still my favorite Sonic Youth record, and I was disappointed when I recently read that Steve Shelly (the drummer) thinks that it’s the worst record they ever made.

Anyway, that was the birth of my long-running Sonic Youth fanboy-ism, which culminated earlier this week in my purchase of the band’s new album, The Eternal, through Matador’s Buy Early Get Now program.
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Looks like BMG Music Club has finally closed its doors to new members and is basically washed-up for good.

For those unfamiliar with BMG, when you signed up you got to pick 12 or so free CDs out of its catalog so long as you agreed to purchase one. This all played out over the course of a couple of months. After that was all over BMG would continue to mail you its CD of the month unless you sent them a card declining the offer. This CD was usually terrible and never free, which caused a little bit of household friction if you were too absent minded to keep up with the correspondence and wound up owing $16 for an unwanted copy of Eric Clapton’s Pilgrim.

Initially I was shocked that BMG had even made it this far into the new millennium. Twelve-for-one is a pretty good deal, but not as good a deal as the internet’s rather popular as-much-music-as-you-want-for-free counter offer.

But I gotta say, I feel a pang of grief at the institution’s passing. During high school 12 CDs deal gave me a chance to experiment with some records that wound up being very important for me, but I probably wouldn’t have bought at full price–Naked City’s first album, Talking Heads 77, Sonic Youth’s Washing Machine. Full disclosure, these were the only good CDs that I ordered. That leaves 9 more records and as I paw through the storage bin I realize that there was a reason that the cute punk rock girl in high school wasn’t into me and it probably had something to do with this copy of Phish’s Picture of Nectar, or this copy of Rusted Root’s When I Woke. Depressingly enough, hindsight indicates that BMG’s CD of the month–which included The Cars’ first record–was often way cooler than the hippie drivel that I was selecting myself.

Thanks BMG. I’ll miss you.

Darius Rucker deserves some credit for being the first African American to top the country music charts in 20 years and his single, “Don’t Think I Don’t Think About It”, has rightly drawn a fair amount of praise and recognition for the singer. Admittedly, as modern Nashville goes it ain’t that bad. But as Rucker constructs his brand new rhinestone temple, it seems like he’s trying to sweep the bones of his former band, Hootie & the Blowfish, into the basement and out of sight.

While reading Washington Post pop critic Josh DuLac’s recent profile on Rucker I was surprised to find that the front man seems to hold his multi-platinum selling group’s contributions to popular culture in about the same esteem as I do– a low one. He’s put the group on hiatus and during DuLac’s profile Rucker makes several subtle attempts to distance himself from the band’s insidious pro-shop rock, dropping low key disses along the lines of the “I loved Hootie…but.”

Read More “Throwing Blowfish to the Wolves” »

I really like Murmur. REM’s 1983 debut full-length is no less than a stone classic–the band’s single untouchable statement and it still stands up perfectly even after 25-years. Now that the album has been reissued as a double CD “Deluxe Edition” I own no fewer than three copies of it.

But I also recognize that Murmur is accountable for a great deal sorrow in all of our lives. This is the album that, in a very real way, gave birth to some of the most insidious singers of the 1990s. Whenever a shirtless dude with a Hare Krishna hairdo and scads of eyeliner climbs on stage and proceeds to weep openly in front of a plain-jane hard rock band, it’s all kind of Michael Stipe’s fault.

REM’s stroke of genius was that they were arty, but never too arty. They looked and sounded relatively benign, but seemed mysterious because they had a modestly freaky and pretentious front man, that being Stipe.

Read More ““Stipe-Syndrome” Considered” »