The strangeness around Paul Westerberg’s 49:00 album is ever increasing as Aquarium Drunkard explains here with the disappearance of the album and the appearance of  5:05 which just coincidentally is the difference in running time between the original album and its title.  We blogged about the original appearance of 49:00 here and Aquarium Drunkard did here.

The promotional engines have stepped up a gear for Dido with her thirds album finally due for release soon.  As part of this a new song is being made available as a downloadable free MP3 download called Look No Further taken from the new album.

Dido related site:

• http://www.didomusic.com/
• http://www.myspace.com/dido
• http://www.facebook.com/dido
• http://uk.youtube.com/dido
• http://www.bebo.com/dido

The Chemical Brothers have released an EP on iTunes called Midnight Madness which includes a Soulwax remix of Hey Boy, Hey Girl.

After a hectic weekend, I’m catching up with news to discover the sad news that the great Jerry Wexler has passed on.  I’ll not write reams about his exploits, but recommend you read about them your self, but looking at his book – Rhythm & Blues (also called My Life in Rhythm & Blues), if you wan the shortened details then check out Stereophile: Jerry Wexler Dead at 91.

Thanks to BOfH for bringing a very interesting article about a a music fan in the US who is bringing his collection of 78’s into the twenty first century by converting them to MP3. The full article can be found at Listening Post from Wired.com.  Clif Bolling has been ripping his notable collection of old 78s to MP3 and posting them to his website so that he could access the MP3s from anywhere he wants. Hits in the website had been low until information about Cliff’s activity hit Reddit and StumbleUpon at which point interest and the number of hits his site had went through the roof.

The interesting thing is issues of copyright, it would seem that concern was not over possible copyright breach; Cliff is working on the principle of no takedown notice must mean all is ok – a little naive, but given the likelihood that this material isn’t available anymore (some of the recordings at 70+ years old) it would be hard to prove he has inflicted losses on the record companies.  Given the copyright risk, it is strange to read that Cliff’s wife was more concerned about how the music might be perceived as the recordings weren’t subject to modern political correctness or legislation over sexism or racism.

It will be interesting to see if the interest in Cliff’s efforts result in the master recordings for some of this material are tracked down, cleaned up and made available through more legitimate channels.  In the meantime we can probably look upon Cliff’s efforts as twenty first century equivalent to the great archivist Alan Lomax.

Paul Weller’s next single from the 22 Dreams album is going to be ‘All I Wanna Do (Is Be With You)‘. The digital release will be on the 18th and the physical formats will follow a week later.
The CD single is released with three tracks with a radio edit of  ‘All I Wanna Do (Is Be With You)‘ along with ‘Push It Along’ and ‘Big Brass Buttons’ featuring Bobby Gillespie.
There will also be collectible 7″ vinyl options, the first coming in a Green Island Records 7″ bag with  ‘All I Wanna Do (Is Be With You)‘ Radio Edit backed by ‘Push It Along’. The second comes in an Artworked 7″ bag with an acoustic version of  ‘All I Wanna Do (Is Be With You)‘ backed by an acoustic version of ‘Pretty Flamingo’. You can order all the formats as part of a multi-buy special offer for just £4.99 exclusively from Townsend Records here.

The NME has reported here that a new website has been launched following Radiohead’s recent experiment with In Rainbows model; namely, you decide how much you’d like to pay for the music.  The site is called Aralie.com.  But before you get too excited at the idea of being able to buy all of Radiohead’s back catalogue for not much money, the site wont have any major artists as it is currently aimed at Independent artists.

  I hope the site succeeds and that perhaps artists like Radiohead and Paul Westerberg sell albums through the site to help support them and get the rest of the record industry thinking, oh and new indie artists get more punters checking them out.

According to AlbumVote, U2 will be releasing their first new album in four years (the last being ‘How To Dismantle An Atomic Bomb”) in October.  Keane have also announced their next album called Perfect Symmetry to be released on October 13th 2008.  The next Verve release – to be called Forth is now well known about which is released later this month.

Other interesting looking releases coming according to metacritic:

• Ray LaMontagne – Gossip in the Rain
• Lindsey Buckingham (sometime Fleetwood Mac guitarist) – Gift of Screws
• Chemical Brothers
• Dido
• Jem – Down To Earth
• The Killers
• Massive attack
• Starsailor – All The Plans
• Kaiser Chiefs – Off With Their Heads (13/10)
• Snow Patrol