Despite having just returned home from nearly four months on the road (including tours with Incubus, Bloc Party, and sold out headline dates at LA’s El Rey Theatre and NYC’s Bowery Ballroom among others), Albert Hammond, Jr. will venture out again this summer in support of his debut solo album Yours To Keep (released 3/6/07 by Scratchie/New Line). The upcoming tour will also feature Albert’s debut appearance on CBS’ The Late Late Show with Craig Ferguson, airing May 23.
Yours To Keep has already earned Albert Esquire’s 2007 Esky award for ‘Best Solo Debut’ amidst other glowing reviews. Spin called the album “top shelf indie pop (4 stars)” and The New Yorker called Albert “a songwriter in his own right…[Yours To Keep] is a light, sunny affair.” Even Ric Ocasek gushed about the album in his New York Times guest playlist, saying “[Albert] writes phenomenal songs.”

In addition to Albert on vocals and guitar, the band features:

Matt Romano – drums
Steve Schiltz – guitar
Marc Eskenazi – guitar/keyboard
Josh Lattanzi – bass

See confirmed dates below, and check www.myspace.com/alberthammondjr for further show confirmations. Albert is pleased to have The Dead Trees, an exciting young band from Boston, as support for the entire tour.

May 20 – San Francisco CA – The Independent
May 21 – Los Angeles CA – House Of Blues
May 22 – San Diego CA – House Of Blues
May 23 – The Late Late Show with Craig Ferguson
May 24 – Scottsdale AZ – Martini Ranch
May 26 – Denver CO – Marquis Theatre
May 27 – Albuquerque NM – Launch Pad
May 31 – Houston TX – Warehouse Live
June 3 – Austin TX – The Parish
June 4 – Dallas TX – House Of Blues, Cambridge Room
June 5 – Kansas City MO – The Record Bar
June 7 – St. Paul MN – Station 4
June 8 – Chicago IL – The Metro
June 9 – Detroit MI – St. Andrews Hall
June 13 – Northampton MA – Pearl Street
June 15 – Asbury Park NJ – Stone Pony
June 18 – New York NY – Webster Hall

For more information contact Steve Martin or Eliot Wadsworth at Nasty Little Man. Press materials for Albert including photos and album art are available at www.nastylittleman.com

Mike “Mike D” Diamond, Adam “MCA” Yauch and Adam “Adrock” Horovitz have confirmed a June 26 release date for their seventh studio album, The Mix-Up, on Capitol Records.
The Mix-Up is Beastie Boys’ first-ever full album of all-new instrumental material. The follow-up to 2004’s To The 5 Boroughs, The Mix-Up features Diamond, Horovitz and Yauch back on drums, guitar and bass, with able assistance from Keyboard Money Mark and percussionist Alfredo Ortiz, on 12 brand new wordless, sample-less, scratchless originals. Sure to please fans of the instrumental cuts from Check Your Head and Ill Communication and the cult hit compilation album made up largely of those tracks, The In Sound From Way Out!, The Mix-Up finds NYC’s favorite sons drawing on one of their arsenal’s primary strengths and pushing it into bold new directions.
Beastie Boys will kick off a summer’s worth of worldwide touring May 26 & 27 with two sets at the Sasquatch! Festival at the Gorge in Washington State. The band will be playing at several European festivals throughout June and July, including Live Earth at Wembley Stadium on July 7.

The complete track listing for The Mix-Up is:

1. B For My Name
2. 14th St. Break
3. Suco De Tangerina
4. The Gala Event
5. Electric Worm
6. Freaky Hijiki
7. Off The Grid
8. The Rat Cage
9. The Melee
10. Dramastically Different *
11. The Cousin Of Death
12. The Kangaroo Rat

* Yes “Dramastically” is intentional.

For further information, please contact Steve Martin or Laura Eldeiry at nasty little man tel 212 343 0740- e-mail laura@nastylittleman.com

RAMMSTEIN’s live DVD/CD extravaganza Völkerball has been confirmed for U.S. release late summer 2007 via Universal Music.

Völkerball, which translates literally as “People’s Ball,” is a multi-format audio/visual 5.1 package documenting the November 2004–July 2005 tour supporting the Reise, Reise tour that played to one million people across 21 different countries, every venue hosting an enormous castle laboratory set, a cool 140 tons of gear and transport and 63 crew members (plus local hands & drivers), including five on the pyro side alone!

Völkerball boasts the no-half-measures approach to art that Rammstein fans have come to expect since the six Berliners’ 1995 debut album Herzeleid, their 1998 worldwide breakthrough and first U.S. gold album Sehnsucht and subsequent efforts Mutter (2001), Reise, Reise (2004) and Rosenrot (2005). The collection is of particular interest to the U.S. fan, being that while nearly 40,000 turned out for these shows in Moscow and St. Petersburg alone (just to cite those cities as examples), the Reise, Reise tour never made it to U.S. shores.

Völkerball is therefore the first chance for the North American Rammstein fanatic to experience this once in a lifetime outing-and those fans are legion: Rammstein records typically exceed U.S. sales of 200,000 without supporting tour dates, while Entertainment Weekly recently profiled a Rammstein aficionado for their “Obsessive Fan of the Week” column. Völkerball offers said “obsessives” an entire concert from Nimes in Southern France, filmed in a Roman amphitheatre in front of 12,500 fans; selected footage from London, Tokyo and Moscow, plus two documentaries showing the musicians at their most candid & relaxed, making for an overall package that gives a never-before-seen insight into both Rammstein the band and Rammstein the people.

Völkerball will be available in the following formats:

Standard Edition: 2 disc set, available in a CD digi-pack (1 DVD, 140 minutes live video; 1 CD, 75 minutes live audio)

Special Edition: 3 disc set, available in a DVD digi-pack (1 DVD, 140 minutes live video; 1 DVD, 90 minutes of documentary footage, including Anakonda Im Netz (Anaconda In The Net) and Reise, Reise: The Making Of The Album; 1 CD, 75 minutes live audio)

Limited Edition: 190-Page Tour Photo Book, including all of the 3 disc content plus the complete audio to the live show (140 minutes): a prestige 4 disc set.
For further information, please contact Steve Martin or Laura Eldeiry at nasty little man tel 212 343 0740 e-mail laura@nastylittleman.com

The collaboration between Gorillaz/Blur founder Damon Albarn, former Clash bassist Paul Simonon, Verve guitarist Simon Tong and Fela Kuti/Africa 70 drummer Tony Allen first documented with the January 20 release of The Good, The Bad & The Queen continues with the release of an iTunes exclusive EP and a series of high profile festival and headline shows in the U.S., UK and Europe.

The Live From SoHo EP was recorded March 12 at the Apple Store in New York’s SoHo, documenting the first TGTBTQ performance in the U.S. The EP captures five tracks from the album that ROLLING STONE called “dark, muted balladry a la Syd Barrett or the Beatles’ White Album, with a touch of dub” augmented and embellished by Mike Smith (Keyboards), Isabelle Dunn (Cello), Antonia Pagulatos (Violin), Kotono Sato (Violin) and Stella Page (Viola).

In addition, a July 9th outdoor date at the Tower of London went on sale today, adding added to a spring/summer itinerary that already includes the Coachella Valley Music & Arts Festival (April 28), the Grand Ballroom in San Francisco (April 29) and festival dates throughout the summer in Spain, Germany, Belgium, Norway, Switzerland and Austria.

Of the band’s recent debut North American trek, during which The Good, The Bad & The Queen was performed in its entirety for capacity crowds in Toronto, New York, Washington DC, Austin and New Orleans, the CHICAGO SUN-TIMES observed “Judging on its own merits for what it is instead of what its members once did in different guises, it’s beautiful, powerful music made all the more effective live by a four-piece string section and the ability to watch Allen in action, playing deceptively simple but extraordinarily effective rhythms while hardly seeming to move at all.”

For further information, contact Steve Martin or Laura Eldeiry at nasty little man t 212 343 0740 e laura@nastylittleman.com

In the wake of the unique “design your own album cover” artwork concept for his latest album The Information, Beck has launched an exciting creative collaboration with the team at Sketchel. The result is a custom designed, limited edition BECK SKETCHEL shoulder bag with original artwork by celebrated French artist Genevieve Gauckler.

Created by the Jeremyville crew, Sketchel is an international collaborative art bag project featuring original artwork by some of the freshest, most talented artists in the world. Each bag houses a heavy canvas panel that displays the artwork. Genevieve’s design incorporates graphics from The Information, graphics which themselves are also available as iron-ons for making custom Beck t-shirts.

The BECK SKETCHELS are a limited edition series and are available in the US only at Beck.com. For more information and images please contact Steve Martin or Eliot Wadsworth at nasty little man, or visit www.beck.com/sketchel.

For more information about Jeremyville and Sketchel visit www.jeremyville.com.

“I was mesmerized… It was transcendent, and I think the comment I made was ‘well, I can go home now, this is just the most beautiful thing i’m going to hear here'”–David Dye, Host of WXPN’s World Cafe on Bird’s SXSW performance

Armchair Apocrypha, the new album by ANDREW BIRD, debuted this week at #76 in the BILLBOARD 200.

Find out why Armchair Apocrypha is “What Everyone Should Be Talking About” (GQ), “a vast, optimistic album” (THE NEW YORKER) and “just the right parts darkness and light” (NEWSWEEK) and what’s made him INTERVIEW’s Cult Musician of the Month.

ANDREW BIRD heads out on tour next month–preceded by his network TV debut April 10 on THE LATE SHOW WITH DAVID LETTERMAN. The tour begins April 11 in Grand Rapids will include stops at the Coachella festival, Chicago’s Riviera Theater, San Francisco’s Fillmore, and New York’s Webster Hall before concluding at Washington DC’s 9:30 Club for a set that will be webcast live as part of NPR’s All Songs Considered live concert series.

04/11/07 – Grand Rapids, MI – Ladies Literary Club @ Calvin College*
04/12/07 – Detroit, MI – The Majestic Theater*
04/13/07 – Columbus, OH – The Southern Theater*
04/14/07 – Newport, KY – The Southgate House*
04/16/07 – Nashville, TN – Mercy Lounge*
04/17/07 – St. Louis, MO – The Pageant*
04/18/07 – Urbana, IL – The Canopy Club*
04/20/07 – Chicago, IL – The Riviera Theater
04/21/07 – Milwaukee, WI – The Pitman Theater at Alverno College
04/22/07 – Columbia, MO – The Blue Note
04/23/07 – Omaha, NE – Sokol Underground
04/25/07 – Boulder, CO – Fox Theater
04/27/07 – Tucson, AZ – The Rialto Theater
04/28/07 – Indio, CA – Coachella Valley Music & Arts Festival
05/01/07 – San Francisco, CA – The Fillmore
05/02/07 – Sacramento, CA – Harlows
05/04/07 – Portland, OR – The Crystal Ballroom
05/05/07 – Seattle, WA – The Showbox Theater
05/06/07 – Bellingham, WA – Western Washington University
05/07/07 – Calgary, AB – Liberty Lounge at Mount Royal College
05/11/07 – Minneapolis, MN – First Avenue
05/12/07 – Grinnell, IA – Herrick Chapel @ Grinnell College (SOLO SHOW)
05/16/07 – Boston, MA – Berklee Performance Center @ the Berklee College of Music
05/17/07 – New York, NY – Webster Hall
05/18/07 – Philadelphia, PA – Theater of the Living Arts
05/20/07 – Washington, DC – 930 Club

* Cortney Tidwell Supporting
For further information, contact Steve Martin or Laura Eldeiry at nasty little man 212 343 0740 laura@nastylittleman.com

Spoon has confirmed the release date and track listing of its as yet untitled sixth full-length studio album. The record will be released July 10 on Merge and will consist of the following tracks:

1. Don’t Make Me A Target
2. The Ghost Of You Lingers
3. You Got Yr Cherry Bomb
4. Don’t You Evah
5. Rhthm And Soul
6. Eddie’s Ragga
7. The Underdog
8. My Little Japanese Cigarette Case
9. Finer Feelings
10. Black Like Me

The new record will be preceded by a series of east coast shows in April and appearances at the Sasquatch and Bonnaroo festivals. A full U.S. tour will follow in the fall.

Spoon is comprised of four gentlemen: Britt Daniel, Jim Eno, Eric Harvey and Rob Pope. The band’s debut album Telephono was released in 1996 and was combined with the 1997 EP Soft Effects for a recent re-release. Other Spoon full-lengths have included A Series Of Sneaks (1998), Girls Can Tell (2001), Kill The Moonlight (2002) and the most recent Gimme Fiction (2005), which received raves from THE NEW YORK TIMES, TIME, NEWSWEEK, ENTERTAINMENT WEEKLY and VANITY FAIR, and wound up on BLENDER and SPIN’s Best of 2005 lists. More recently, Britt co-authored the score to the feature film STRANGER THAN FICTION, to which Spoon contributed the exclusive track “The Book I Write” as well as several other songs.

For further information, please contact Steve Martin or Laura Eldeiry at nasty little man t 212 343 0740 e laura@nastylittleman.com

Due to overwhelming popular demand, Ryan Adams June 5 Stonehenge concert has been… canceled?

Event organizers English Heritage withdrew permission for the show after its announcement led to requests far beyond capacity and projections for registration to the Salisbury Festival of which it was a featured attraction. The organizers cited additional concerns, such as Adams’ fans causing unprecedented traffic congestion in and around the festival site and attendant “driver distraction on A344/A303,” concern over “gatecrashers” storming the long since sold out event, and technical issues with amplified music at the site.

While Ryan respects English Heritage’s decision and concern for the hallowed ground of Stonehenge, he is nevertheless saddened and disappointed that both he and fans who had purchased tickets will not experience this once in a career performance.

Ryan Adams’ Easy Tiger will now be released June 26 on Lost Highway.
While the final sequence is still TBD, Easy Tiger will be comprised of the following tracks: “Goodnight Rose”, “Everybody Knows”, “The Sun Also Sets”, “Halloween Head”, “Off Broadway”, “Two Hearts”, “Tears Of Gold”, “These Girls”, “Two”, “I Taught Myself How To Grow Old”, “Oh My God, Whatever, Etc.”, “Rip Off”, and “Pearls On A String”.

Easy Tiger will be Ryan Adams’ ninth full length collection of new studio recordings, following Heartbreaker (2000), Gold (2001), Demolition (2002), Rock N Roll (2003), Love Is Hell (2004), Cold Roses (2005), Jacksonville City Nights (2005), and 29 (2005).