-- At this year's Pitchfork Music Festival, artists including Sleigh Bells, Major Lazer, Titus Andronicus, Local Natives, St. Vincent, and more personalized records, posters, and other items for Rock for Kids, a Chicago organization that provides music education for youngsters. The items are currently up for auction-- check 'em out here.

-- Experimental metal guitarist Mick Barr (Krallice, Orthrelm, Crom Tech) has a new guitar-only opus under his Ocrilim moniker called Absolve. It's a limited-edition, 100-copy CD run only available at his site.

-- Montreal-based dark electro-rockers Suuns have signed with indie powerhouse Secretly Canadian. Download their six-song Zeroes EP for the price of an e-mail address here. Suuns go on tour with Besnard Lakes and Land of Talk this fall; dates here.

-- Archer Prewitt (The Sea and Cake), Freakwater, Bottomless Pit, Robbie Fulks, and Scotland Yard Gospel Choir are a few of the bands playing this year's Wavelength Music and Arts Festival in Three Oaks, Michigan this Saturday, July 31.

Okay, gang - if you guys keep up with the blogs that talk about indie rock and the like, maybe you have heard about how last night's party at Shea Stadium, celebrating the success of the performance by Wavves, Dom and Cloud Nothings at the Knitting Factory earlier that evening, hit an enormous snag when some rascal threw a bottle off of Shea's scenic balcony and shattered the back window of a police car. Believe it or not, I was scheduled to act as a DJ at this party, sharing wheels-of-steel duties with Ryan Schrieber of Pitchfork Media fame. I arrived late due to various public transit mishaps, as the police were seemingly just cooling down from their earlier rage(and who could really blame them?), and were on their way out. It looked at this point like the party might be DOA - the organizers were unsure if there was going to be any sort of DJing at all, which was annoying to me because I had schlepped all of my pedals and my four track and so on (I use these when I DJ, for reasons that are still unclear) all the way from Greenpoint, which isn't the end of the world or anything, but not the sort of thing I do at one am for my health. Whatever the fate of the party, those few who were still in attendance seemed to be in a big hurry to get out. Before long, Shea Stadium held...

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Hello dear friends. It is our distinct pleasure, this day, to announce what will likely be the last leg of the proper "Monitour," the ongoing promotional exercise behind our latest record, The Monitor. Monitor + tour = "Monitour," remember? Thus far, it has taken us all over these United States, and over a reasonable chunk of Western Europe, and this Autumn, we will fumble across the beautiful American landscape once more to entertain you. A daunting task, we know, for yr palate is sophisticated and yr standards elevated. You deserve the best, and happily for us, we have been able to enlist five of the most entertaining and straight up party rocking young people in all of rock and roll to travel with us and spread the good news about the electric guitar. Who could I be referring to but Philadelphia's number one neo-classic rockers Free Energy?

Our relationship with Free Energy goes all the way back to the Autumn of 2009, when we had just completed our "Bring on the Dudes" tour with our BFFs the So So Glos. We agreed to tack on a show at Georgetown University in DC at the end of the tour. Naturally, after forty or so days of slugging it out on the American indie rock circuit (and putting up with all the SSG's antics), we were dead tired and ready for an evening of zombie-esque behavior. This was until the opening act at the show, a group we had never...

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Photo by Elisabeth Vitale

New Jersey's own Titus Andronicus unleash their sprawling suburban blues all over North America this summer. So get ready for big, bleating major chords, and even some goofy dancing. They'll play songs from their recently Best New Music'd, Civil War-themed album The Monitor, including the super-long ones. Neo-classic rockers Free Energy join them on select dates. Titus' full itinerary and a live video can be found below:

Titus Andronicus:

06-26 Brooklyn, NY - Barge Park (Northside Festival) *
07-01-04 Roskilde, Denmark - Roskilde Festival
07-10 New Haven, CT - Lily's Pad #
07-11 Northampton, MA - Pearl Street #
07-12 Albany, NY - Valentines #
07-13 Buffalo, NY - Ninth Ward #
07-14 Toronto, Ontario - Horseshoe Tavern #
07-15 Grand Rapids, MI - Intersection Lounge #
07-16 Chicago, IL - Subterranean (Pitchfork Music Festival Afterparty)
07-17 Chicago, IL - Pitchfork Music Festival
08-21 Boston, MA - Royale %
08-22 Montreal, Quebec - Il Motore %
08-23 Ottowa, Ontario - Mavericks %
08-25 Ithaca, NY - Castaways %
08-26 Columbus, OH - Summit
08-27 Toledo, OH - Mickey Finn's
08-28 St. Louis, MO - LouFest
08-29 Memphis, TN - Hi Tone
08-30 Little Rock, AR - Rev Room
08-31 Dallas, TX - Sons of Hermann Hall
09-01 Austin, TX - Emo's
09-02 El Paso, TX - Percolator
09-03 Phoenix, AZ - Trunk Space
09-08 San Francisco, CA...

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In a recent Pitchfork interview, funny guy David Cross talked about the similarities between musicians and comedians: "There's quite an overlap between musicians who have an affection towards comedy and comedians who fantasize about being in a band," he said. "The two worlds have more similarities than they do differences."

With that in mind, we're happy to announce the first ever Pitchfork Music Festival comedy stage! It's hosted by Les Savy Fav frontman (and Pitchfork.tv jokester) Tim Harrington and features veteran stand-up artist Eugene Mirman, "The State"/Wet Hot American Summer star Michael Showalter, "Daily Show" correspondent Wyatt Cenac, and "Saturday Night Live" writer Hannibal Buress. All the jokes go down on Friday, July 16, on the Balance Stage.

The Pitchfork Music Festival takes over Chicago's Union Park July 16-18. Three-day passes for the festival are sold out, as are tickets for Sunday and, as of right now, Saturday. But you can still get passes for Friday here.

The Pitchfork Music Festival's full schedule, including set times, is below.

2010 Pitchfork Music Festival schedule:

a = Aluminum Stage, b = Balance Stage, c = Connector Stage

Friday July 16 (gates at 3 p.m.):

3:30 Sharon Van Etten (a)
4:00 The Tallest Man on Earth (c)
4:35 El-P (a)
5:30 Liars (c)
5:45 Hannibal Buress (b)
6:25 Robyn (a)
6:30 Wyatt Cenac (b)
7:15 Michael Showalter (b)
7:20 Broken Social Scene (c)
8:00 Eugene Mirman (b)
8:30 Modest Mouse (a)

Saturday July 17...

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Barcelona's Primavera Sound Festival kicked off its first day with sets from Broken Social Scene, Pavement, the xx, Titus Andronicus, the Books, Fuck Buttons, Moderat, and more, as we reported yesterday.

On Day Two, things got even bigger and better, with sets from Pixies, Wilco [above], Spoon, Panda Bear, Yeasayer, the New Pornographers, Beach House, and Owen Pallett, among others. Check out selected write-ups of some of the night's big sets, plus a few shots from last night below; then head over to our photo book for full photo sets by Shannon McClean and Elisabeth Vitale.

Owen Pallett [Rockdelux Auditori; 4 p.m.]

The first time I saw Owen Pallett perform live, he was still called Final Fantasy. It was 2004, and he was the opening act for a little band called Arcade Fire. Needless to say, the crowd was hankering for the headline act, but after witnessing Pallett's violin-looping solo show, the audience was on its feet, howling for an encore. Since then Pallett's live reputation has only grown, as evidenced by an enormous Barcelona crowd that greeted him with hushed tones. Pallett's performance was a selection of material from albums new and old: a little He...

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Barcelona's Primavera Sound Festival kicked off its first day with sets from Broken Social Scene, Pavement, the xx, Titus Andronicus (pictured above), the Books, Fuck Buttons, Moderat, and more. Check out selected write-ups of some of the night's big sets, plus a few shots from last night below; then head over to our photo book for full photo sets by Shannon McClean and Elisabeth Vitale.

The xx [Ray-Ban Stage; 9:15 p.m.]

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We speak to three of the hottest acts to check out at Barcelona's San Miguel Primavera Sound Festival



Celebrating it's 10th anniversary this year, the 2010 San Miguel Primavera Sound Festival which goes down in the vast concrete Parc Del Forum next to the beach in Barcelona over the May Bank Holiday; already boasts this year's most impressive musical line-up.  You may already know about those two titans of 90s rock, Pixies and Pavement on co-headlining duty, as well as The XX's victory lap of their stunning album but beyond that, there's a veritable wealth of acts to check out, from bands du jour like Surfer Blood, The Drums, Titus Andronicus and Best Coast to indie delights like New Pornographers, The Antlers and No Age and off-the-beaten-tra... article continues »

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Once again, Pitchfork has curated a stage at the San Miguel Primavera Sound Festival, which takes place at Parc Del Forum in Barcelona, Spain May 27-29.

Acts playing the Pitchfork stage include Sleigh Bells, Titus Andronicus, Diplo, No Age, Surfer Blood, Lee "Scratch" Perry, Japandroids, Here We Go Magic, and more.

We're marking the occasion with our festival site, which includes a roundup of our past coverage of Pitchfork stage bands. Head on over to check out reviews, videos, interviews, and more. As Primavera gets started next week, we'll also have updates and photos from the festival. Click here to check it out.

There are bands playing other stages at Primavera, but we still like them. They include Pavement, Wilco, Broken Social Scene, the xx, Grizzly Bear, Pixies, Beach House, Spoon, the New Pornographers, Sunny Day Real Estate, and many, many more. The full list of every band playing the fest is here.

A three-day Primavera pass costs $240 (180 €) and a single-day pass costs $100 (75 €). You can buy them over here.

Now, we can also reveal the set times for the Pitchfork stage. Click below to see those, or click over to the Primavera site to see set times for the entire festival.

Thursday, May 27:

5:00 pm...

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