The Walkmen Release Teaser Trailer For New Album Heaven

The Walkmen have just finished up their seventh album entitled Heaven. It's due out on June 5th and you can pre-order a copy here. You can also watch a teaser trailer down below if you that news didn't get you excited enough.

The Walkmen | [Official Site] [Twitter] [Facebook]

LCD Soundsystem Release Trailer For SHUT UP AND PLAY THE HITS

Premiering at this year's Sundance Film Festival in Park City, UT is a film by the title of SHUT UP AND PLAY THE HITS. The "part concert film, part documentary, part intimate narrative" marks the end of LCD Soundsystem as a band, with James Murphy and company packing it in with a final performance at famed Madison Square Garden.

Watch a trailer down below and find more information, including a director's Q&A with The Creators Project (which is an amazingly cool website by the way). Hopefully, we'll get to check this out soon here in Austin. Looking at you SXSW...

Blur Documentary "No Distance Left To Run" (Trailer)

Taken from Blur's official site:

A feature length documentary film telling the story of blur is due for cinema release on January 19th. “No Distance Left to Run” is directed by 32 (Dylan Southern & Will Lovelace) and is a Pulse Films production.

Filmed throughout the band’s 2009 rehearsals and acclaimed summer tour, No Distance Left To Run finds all four members of Blur together for the first time in nine years. With previously unseen archive material alongside new interviews and reportage, the film recounts the highs and lows of a very British band from the late 80’s to their headline return at Glastonbury and Hyde Park. The result is a musing on Englishness and identity and a portrait of friendship and resolution.

Justice Releases Trailer For "A Cross The Universe" DVD

Today, Justice released a trailer for their new documentary A Cross The Universe, which comes out November 24. Roman Gavras, So Me, and Justice all worked on the doc. According to NME, "the DVD is in the style of the Dig! documentary, that featured Brian Jonestown Massacre and Dandy Warhols." The trailer is NSFW by the way.

Here's an older trailer featuring more footage.

Arctic Monkeys To Release Live DVD

It seems like everyone these days are putting out live concerts DVDs. Add the Arctic Monkeys to that list. Arctic Monkeys At The Apollo is a 76-minute film of a concert the guys performed in Manchester, England late last year.

The Domino Records/Warp Films/Bang Bang Films production is due on DVD November 3 in the UK, though select independent theaters around the UK will hold "one night only" screenings October 14 featuring a special intro from the band. Look for a Stateside release of the DVD next year. [Via Pitchfork]

I bet it would awesome to see this in a theater, especially an IMAX. They're amazing live!

[Arctic Monkeys Official Site]
[Arctic Monkeys Myspace]

Arctic Monkeys - You Know I'm No Good [Amy Winehouse Cover] (mp3)

Pitchfork had a different setlist than the Arctic Monkeys official site, so I went with the Monkeys.

Arctic Monkeys At The Apollo Track List:

1. Brianstorm
2. This House Is a Circus
3. Teddy Picker
4. I Bet You Look Good on the Dancefloor
5. Dancing Shoes
6. From the Ritz to the Rubble
7. Fake Tales of San Francisco
8. When the Sun Goes Down
9. Nettles
10. D Is for Danger
11. Leave Before the Lights Come On
12. Fluorescent Adolescent
13. Still Take You Home
14. Da Frame 2R
15. Plastic Tramp
16. 505
17. Do Me a Favour
18. A Certain Romance
19. The View From The Afternoon
20. If You Were There, Beware
    

Sonic Youth: Sleeping Nights Awake

The 10th annual CineVegas film festival has announced it's line-up and one of the main films is a documentary on Sonic Youth, called "Sonic Youth: Sleeping Nights Awake." The festival takes place on June 12-21 in Las Vegas, NV at the Brenden Theaters inside the Palms Casino Resort.

Produced by non-profit filmmaking patrons Project Moonshine, the twist with this digital-video doc was that it was shot entirely by seven high school students and featuring interviews, backstage footage, and 10 songs that were filmed live in Reno, Nevada back on July 4, 2006. [via The Playlist]

Here's a trailer for the documentary:

Also showing is Alex Gibney’s GONZO: The Life and Work of Dr. Hunter S. Thompson, a probing look into the uncanny life of Dr. Hunter S. Thompson.

New Joy Division Documentary

Arriving at the best possible moment, this documentary about groundbreaking postpunk band Joy Division is playing festivals alongside "Control," music-video master Anton Corbijn's well-received feature on the band. A solid, well-presented history of the English group's brief career, "Joy Division" has appeal for music buffs but could get mileage in theaters from a smart coordination with the feature film's release.

Placing a straightforward, chronological account of the band's existence in the context of Manchester, a city whose re-emergence from post-industrial gloom is credited to the pop music explosion Joy Division helped start, the docu contains plenty of testimony from all the surviving key musical players. (Singer Ian Curtis hanged himself in 1980; producer Martin Hannett, credited with inventing much of the group's distinctive sound, died in 1991.) Happily, TV host-turned-music entrepreneur Tony Wilson, who died last month, is among the interviewees. (Wilson was the colorful subject of Michael Winterbottom's "24 Hour Party People," which would make a fan-pleasing triple feature with "Joy Division" and "Control.")

Veteran music critic Jon Savage wrote the film, which makes sure to recount seminal moments like the 1976 Sex Pistols show that inspired so many bands, but it's group member Bernard Sumner who makes the most eloquent cultural observation about the shift from in-your-face Pistols-style punk to the more introspective music Joy Division helped instigate: "Sooner or later somebody was going to want to say more than 'f--- you' . . . to say 'I'm f---ed.'

"A good assortment of vintage performance clips chart the quick evolution of Joy Division's style, which was not only a matter of sound but also of Curtis' spasmlike movements at the microphone, a dance that evoked possession by malevolent spirits and foreshadowed the epilepsy that struck the singer suddenly, near the end of his life. As one who witnessed those shows puts it, the onstage surrender was "like he sacrificed something for you" in order to follow his muse.

Little of this material will be news to devoted followers of the band, though even they might be interested to know that Sumner never liked listening to their debut album "Unknown Pleasures" and that Peter Saville, who designed that iconic record sleeve, hadn't even listened to the music. For the rest of the audience, just the right amount of narrative detail, archive footage and analysis is included.

Director Grant Gee, known for the Radiohead film "Meeting People Is Easy," does little out of the ordinary here, outside of the appealing way he accompanies audio-only archive material with cleverly stylized waveforms. For a group whose influence had so much to do with the unintuitive manipulation of familiar sounds, that's a knowing touch.

Director/director of photography: Grant Gee; Writer: Jon Savage; Producers: Tom Astor, Tom Atencio, Jacqui Edenbrow; Music: Jerry Chater, Rashad Omar; Editor: Jerry Chater

(Via The Hollywood Reporter)

Below is a trailer.