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Brian Wilson's interview with the Voice's Stacey Anderson will appear in our June 8 issue, just in time for his residency at Highline Ballroom June 11-13. During the shows, the reclusive genius will perform last year's album of George Gershwin standards, Brian Wilson Reimagines Gershwin, as well as select Beach Boys hits.

While speaking with Anderson today, Wilson denied the rumor that the Beach Boys will reunite next year in celebration of their 50th anniversary, as reported in Rolling Stone and by the BBC.

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​Earlier this month, the Voice's Philip Mlynar took a look at the dilemma faced by Slaughterhouse, the all-star underground rap crew recently signed to Eminem's imprint, Shady Records. Balancing their credibility with the profit-making aims of a major label might be tricky in the current moment, but, Mlynar argued, "Slaughterhouse are finally rolling with the right team" now that they're on board with Eminem and his crew. Today's announcement that Em and Slaughterhouse member Royce da 5'9" would revive their Bad Meets Evil collaboration--which was last spotted together on record in 1999--would seem to be the first piece of evidence bearing out that hypothesis.

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The prospect of post-blues dirge shredders Come reforming with all four original members didn't exactly trigger an earth-shaking ruckus akin to what ensued when Guided by Voices and Dinosaur Jr schlepped their "classic" lineups on the road. But the reunion of singer/guitarist/badass Thalia Zedek, fellow axe-grinder Chis Brokaw (also of slowcore purists Codeine), original bassist Sean O'Brien, and drummer Arthur Johnson (of Athens rascals Kilkenny Cats and Bar-B-Q Killers, respectively) has fire; throughout the band's existence, Come trudged on and killed it, deconstructing the blues through a dead-serious, cigarette-induced doom-n-gloom and releasing four LPs--including 1992's monolith downer Eleven: Eleven, still lauded as an indie-rock classic nearly two decades later--before disbanding in 2001.

The band made a triumphant return to the stage to celebrate Matador's 21st anniversary in Las Vegas last year, and they play New York this Saturday at the Bell House. We spoke to Zedek and Brokaw via email.

Recently, Sound of the City interviewed Matt Sweeney of Chavez and he raved about Come, saying you guys were the template for Chavez. Did you hear a Come influence in Chavez? Do you think those guys ripped you off?

Brokaw: I'm flattered, but I never heard it. I never thought they sounded like us at all. We were both trying to do something interesting with the two guitars-bass-drums set-up. It seemed like lots of bands at the time were.

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​At last, some '90s/early '00s nostalgia we can get behind: the veteran Kent, Ohio guitar-rock quartet Party of Helicopters are reuniting this weekend to play their first two New York shows since breaking up in 2004. Allegedly it was a particularly grim show in the basement of the old Knitting Factory that year that finally persuaded guitarist and chief songwriter Jamie Stillman to split up the band; since then, there have been a handful of mostly Ohio-centric reunion dates (in 2007, 2009, and 2010), but they haven't returned here until now. In our humble opinion they sounded like a gang of angels shredding in heaven but many friends of ours have violently disagreed over the years, due in part to the dazed and kinda abstractly sexual behavior of frontman Joe Dennis. But no other band had a better way with melody; no other band could flat out play like these guys could. Here's what our pal Chris Ryan wrote about them in these pages back in 2001, the year they released penultimate album Mt. Forever:

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​"I was there . . . at Le Poisson Rouge . . . in 2011." The utopian dance club Paradise Garage, ruled by legendary DJ Larry Levan with a velvet fist from 1977 to 1987, is perhaps the mother of all Aw Dude You Missed It NYC nightlife spots, its reputation among dance-music fiends undiminished and unassailable. "I once said that I was obsessed with the place but couldn't get my friends to come with me," noted Steve Lewis in BlackBook recently. "So I got new friends." Convincing your own friends to drop by the Paradise Garage Reunion Party will probably not be such a hassle.

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Crass in 1984. This photo was taken by a man named Trunt, of course.

​See the update below...

It doesn't get any bigger or more important than Crass, the Essex-born collective that helped integrate radical anarchist politics with punk rock, a bond that endures--insofar as the genre does--to this day. Their records from the '70s and '80s are deliriously weird mixes of Dadaist poetry, militantly pacifist hardcore, bad jokes, and weird noises; like any band worth anything from that era, they survived prosecution from their own government and any number of bans of their records. The collective faded as a musical entity in the mid-'80s and hasn't been heard from much since, retreating to the Dial House in Essex, where various former Crass members have since come and gone, frequently while nude. Three years ago the band's Penny Rimbaud sat in on Japanther's Dinosaur Death Dance at PS122, declaiming spoken word poetry and smoking lots of weed. But that, barring a reissue here and there and performances by various affiliates (Steve Ignorant, the Crass Collective), has been it. Until now, anyway.

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See if you can spot this grinning blogger in the above picture. Photo by Keith Marlowe, via Brooklyn Vegan.

​Beloved early '90s hardcore band Universal Order of Armageddon are resistant to the term "reunion" (according to drummer-turned-Del Posto pastry chef Brooks Headley, they prefer "money losing labor of love"), but whatever it was they did at Death By Audio back in July--their first New York performance in over fifteen years--was one of the best shows we've seen in 2010. Because the four members of the band are busy, successful people, we figured this wouldn't be happening again anytime soon, but it turns out we were wrong: UOA will reunite (ahem) for a couple more New York shows in January, at the Cake Shop and the sight of their July triumph, Death By Audio, on January 21st and 22nd. The Cake Shop show is with SOTC pals and fearsome Providence-based two-piece the Body and the recently YIMBY'd Orphan; the show on the 22nd, at Death By Audio, will be with Fight Amp and Trophy Wife. We emailed Brooks to find out what the deal was with the January dates:

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Ay! All photos by Jesse Serwer

​The Diplomats
Hammerstein Ballroom
Friday, November 27

Better Than: Byrd Gang, Skull Gang, Purple City, U.N., Dipset West

It seems a little silly, really, this Dipset revival. When times grew lean for the Cam'ron-led crew a few years back, the support staff--from Jones on down--convinced themselves that they didn't need the brains of the operation anymore. This turned out not to be true, of course, and it took Cam'ron getting back with the old gang--right as he was enjoying a rebirth of sorts with new ally Vado--to make people care again. "Salute," the first and, thus far, only track issued by the newly reconstituted crew, is noisy, fresh and kind of undeniable. New York rap doesn't have much else going for it these days, so what the heck.

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Flyer via Brooklyn Vegan

​One more name to take off the '90s Bands That Haven't Reunited list, we guess. Foundational San Diego act Unbroken were the crossover-metal predecessors to much of the Gravity Records and Three One G-sponsored screaming hardcore that dominated a small sector of independent music in the early '90s--members of the band would go on to form Swing Kids, Struggle, Some Girls, etc. and help spawn the scene that ultimately spawned the Locust. Guitarist Eric Allen, who went on to play in Swing Kids with Locust frontman and Three One G-founder Justin Pearson, later committed suicide; since then the two bands have played the occasional reunion show together in his memory, most recently in May of last year. But Unbroken haven't been in New York since the nineties. That's about to change: they're playing a newly announced show at Santos Party House on April 9th; tickets are on sale now. Be as cynical as you like but Universal Order of Armageddon, to take another random example of a reunited punk act from the last decade, absolutely slayed when they played here a couple months ago. Here's video of Unbroken looking a little bro'd out (but certainly motivated) in Chicago, circa 2009:

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​Jarvis Cocker's Pulp will return for a run of summer festivals in 2011, including Spain's Primavera Sound and London's Wireless Festival, the band announced Monday morning. Along with Cocker, the line-up will feature regulars Nick Banks, Candida Doyle, Steve MacKey, Russell Senior and Mark Webber. For more details, come this way...

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