On Friday, Rock Daily was so inspired by a visit from Tokio Hotel that we wondered what were the finest songs that incorporated the name of a city into the title. What we discovered was that the definitive winner was British, there are way too many songs about New York and a handful of readers think California is a city and that “Paradise City” is real (only in Axl’s mind, children). Check out the twenty biggest winners below, lead by the Clash’s signature anthem “London Calling.”

1. The Clash - “London Calling”
2. Kiss - “Detroit Rock City”
3. Billy Joel - “Allentown”
4. Randy Newman - “I Love L.A.”
5. Neil Young - “Philadelphia” (more…)

Death Cab for Cutie “Grapevine Fires”
A stark end-of-days prophecy that sounds its alarms softly, with organs and shuffling drums.
[Review]

The Roots “Get Busy”
Swampy synths coat this groove while ?uestlove expertly thumps and thwacks at the drums, working his way into a thick funk.
[Review]

Duffy “Mercy”
This Welsh singer-songwriter channels Dusty Springfield with a swinging soul melody and a voice so smoky it could fog glass.
[Review]
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“People sayin’, ‘Oh, I can’t understand his accent, I can’t tell what he’s sayin’. You don’t need to know what the fuck I’m sayin’,” barked Dizzee Rascal Saturday night in New York. It’s true — with Dizzee Rascal, it really doesn’t matter. The London MC held forth at Webster Hall, three shows into his first U.S. tour behind Maths + English, his nearly year-old album that only saw a Stateside release last month. Dizzee opened his hour-long set with “I Luv U” from 2003’s Boy in Da Corner, and stuck to that album (”Jus’ a Rascal,” “Stop Dat”) and Maths (”Where’s Da G’s,” “Flex”), nearly ignoring 2004’s Showtime except for a sprint through “Stand Up Tall.” It’s still hard to gauge if Dizzee has truly broken through in America after three albums, but if the full house was any indication — and the crowd’s willingness to open up a breakdance circle during “Old Skool” — his contingent of fans is dedicated to keep him trying. (more…)

Linkin Park frontman Chester Bennington debuted his new band, Dead by Sunrise, during an anniversary party for his tattoo parlor chain, Club Tattoo, at the Marquee Theatre in Tempe, Arizona, on Saturday. “I wouldn’t call it a side project,” Bennington said before the show. “We’re a full, ready-to-go band and so this is something we take very seriously.” The band, which includes Bennington and members of the group Julien-K (which contains several members of Orgy), is a traditional rock outfit that is more straight-ahead and melodic than Linkin Park.

Speaking of his other band, Bennington revealed that Linkin Park has already begun writing the follow-up to Minutes to Midnight. He explained the band had “the itch” to start writing again and headed toward the studio. “We’re way ahead of the game,” Bennington said. “We’re not planning on releasing a record this year. We don’t know when it’s going to come out. But we just started working on stuff in the studio. I never want to get in the way of what Linkin Park is. That’s my baby. That’s my band. Those are my best friends. The last thing I want to do is compromise what we’re doing.” Bennington also said he hopes to have a Dead by Sunrise album out by 2009, barring other commitments to other bands. “I want to make sure the record gets the chance to do what it can do.”

[Photo: Getty]

• John Mellencamp announced a July 15th release date for his new, T-Bone Burnett-produced album Life, Death, Love and Freedom, which will be distributed by the Starbucks-run label Hear Music. The album will be the first released in a new high-def format called “CODE,” which will make the digital tracks sound as warm as the master tapes.
• According to Whitesnake frontman and former Jimmy Page collaborator David Coverdale says a full-scale Led Zeppelin reunion tour was “very likely” and could happen by the end of the year.
• The jury selection is underway in the R. Kelly trial in Chicago. If found guilty of fourteen counts of child pornography, he could face as much as fifteen years in jail.
• ’90s indie cult favorites Ned’s Atomic Dustbin (most famous for the single “Kill Your Television”) will reunite for a show at London’s Astoria in December, after more than ten years apart.

[Photo: Getty]

While pale, expressionless Robert Smith look-alikes skulked around Fairfax, Virginia’s Patriot Center at Friday night’s Cure show, the man himself appeared almost jovial as the band kicked off its North American tour.

Click here for more photos from the Cure’s tour opener in Virginia

Smith flashed the crowd a demonic schoolgirl grin often, did a bit of goofy dancing and even poked fun at his own stamina, mock-panting after pulling off high and long-held notes on both “From the Edge of the Deep Green Sea” and “The End of the World.” Although he wasn’t feeling festive enough to accept a peck from guitarist Porl Thompson (back for his third time around with the group) as they played the intro to “A Forest,” the frontman expressed the maximum level of giddiness appropriate for a career malcontent. (more…)

There are a couple of booths about hundred feet away from where Death Cab for Cutie is testing out some of their new album, Narrow Stairs, at the Meehan Auditorium in Providence. One is hawking tee-shirts for charity — tempting, really, for the attendees of a concert that was pushed inside to avoid from the night’s downpour — and another is trying to convince a crowd of mostly Brown students to give blood on the first Friday after finals.

And these booths are really messing around with the New Material Barometer.

Because, from all indications, this is a crowd that is loving the new stuff. Ben Gibbard is “kind of excited about our new album” — so excited that he even lead off the set with the album’s opener, “Brixby Canyon Bridge.” (more…)

“It was the most intensive work I’ve ever done on anything,” Beck says the day after finishing his new record, sounding slightly dazed. For his 10th studio disc, Beck worked with Brian Burton, better known as Danger Mouse — who’s overcommitted as both a producer and a member of Gnarls Barkley, which just released a record of their own. “It was like trying to fit two years of songwriting into two and a half months,” Beck says. “I know I did at least 10 weeks with no days off, until four or five in the morning every night.”

Burton remembers Beck’s stamina during their late-night sessions: “He’s like a machine. I always got tired before he did. I stayed pretty late, but I’d usually hear the next day how late it went.” The resulting album, tentatively titled Modern Guilt, is full of off-kilter rhythms and left-field breakdowns, with an overall 1960s British vibe. Beck’s vocals float over the music as if he’s singing along to some mystical radio station in the next room. The title track has the groove of a good Zombies single, while the twangy guitar and uptempo beat of “Beggars Shoes” make it sound like Beck’s cruising at maximum speed down Route 66. The lyrics include lines about the ice caps melting down (and “the transistor sound”), but there were many earlier versions. “I can’t tell you how many times I wrote and recorded a complete song,” Beck says, “and then just took everything away but the drumbeat and wrote a whole new song.”

Beck and Danger Mouse knew each other casually before making the record — some of Beck’s former musicians ended up playing with Gnarls Barkley — but they were both surprised at how naturally they worked together. “It felt like we could have been making our fourth record together,” Beck says. “It did help that we share a lot of musical references. We spent the first week just talking about different records. His knowledge is pretty deep, especially with some of the obscure late-Sixties, early-Seventies rock.”

The original vision for Modern Guilt was 10 short tracks. “I was hoping all the songs would be two minutes long,” Beck says, “but then I got rid of all the short songs.” Each song started with Beck playing acoustic guitar over a drumbeat: If it made the cut, they’d flesh out the music, usually with Burton playing keyboard bass and Beck playing most of the other instruments. There were just a few guests: Joey Waronker added drums to the epic “Chem Trails,” which would have fit in nicely on an early Pink Floyd record. And Cat Power’s Chan Marshall added backing vocals to a few tracks, including the melancholy “Walls,” which includes the lyric “Some days are worse than you can imagine.”

Modern Guilt doesn’t have an official release date yet, but sources close to Beck say that he’s likely to rush it out in June, much like the recent blitzkrieg of releases from Gnarls Barkley and the Raconteurs. For Beck, always eager to shake up music-industry practices, the disc marks the end of his major-label contract. “I’ve had this deal since my early 20s,” says Beck, 37. “I don’t have any plans at the moment. It’s anybody’s guess where things are going week to week with the music business.”

Every time they take a stage, the B-52’s prove that there never has been another band remotely like them — even without their old thrift-store costumes and beehive wigs. At the Independent, a no-nonsense, 450-person-capacity San Francisco club, the veteran New Wave act road-tested a high-energy set that combined its all-purpose party anthems like “Love Shack” with jaunty new songs from Funplex, its first album in 16 years. Whether this stop on a short club trek was a dress rehearsal for Cyndi Lauper’s much larger True Colors summer tour or a way for the quartet to recharge its batteries at the kind of small joints it abandoned soon after unleashing its 1979 debut, the Athens, Georgia-originated band proved its singularly kitschy fusion of surf, garage and sci-fi dance-rock has aged as well as its members.

Opening their show with the locomotive rhythms of Funplex’s “Pump,” the four surviving B-52’s faced their enthusiastic fans in a line formation at the front of the stage that rarely shifted during the entire 100-minute set. (more…)

Nearly a decade after lashing out at Napster because their music was getting out there too early, Metallica will put material from their forthcoming album online on their own terms today with the launch of “Mission: Metallica.” The site currently features a trailer for what’s to come and the option to sign up for e-mail alerts, but the band promises that users will be able to watch footage of the band in the studio, hear riffs as they are written and enter to win backstage passes for concerts this summer. The band is also advertising something called “Mission: Metallica Platinum,” which will provide downloads of live shows and delivery of the physical album the day it comes out, though there is no indication of how much this service will cost. The band promises even more content concepts will premiere on the site in the coming weeks, all of which will lead up to the release of Metallica’s still-untitled new studio album, expected in September.

[Photo: Getty]

• The father of 17-year-old American Idol contestant David Archuleta has been banned from the show’s backstage after he insisted his son add a line of Sean Kingston’s “Beautiful Girls” into a rendition of “Stand by Me,” incurring extra charges for Idol.
• Snoop Dogg partnered with Willie Nelson for the video of Snoop’s “My Medicine,” and said he’s working on an LP tentatively titled Malice in Wonderland that was inspired by the dark music of composer Lalo Schifrin.
• Bob Dylan’s artwork will be showcased for the first time in the U.K. in a show opening June 14th. The collection will highlight pieces from Dylan’s time on the road from 1989-1992.
• DMX is being held by police on four felony drug charges and seven misdemeanor animal cruelty charges after being arrested Friday.

[Photo: Getty]

• This week, Trent Reznor did some spring cleaning and decided to give his fans Nine Inch Nails’ new album The Slip for free. The announcement was a surprise, as was Beck’s revelation that he had a new disc coming this summer.

• Madonna and Coldplay both revealed massive world tours, while we were front row at Radiohead’s first U.S. show in Florida and the small club show Bruce Springsteen played in Jersey.
• We inched closer to naming this year’s American Idol as the two Davids and Syesha became this season’s final three. Dread-head Jason Castro grasped for lyrics and packed his suitcase, but maybe that was his intention all along.
• Over in the Capri Lounge, we co-wrote Jessica Simpson’s ode to Dallas Cowboys quarterback Tomy Romo and ate wayyy too many Tim McGraw Fritos.

  [Photo: Getty]

Widespread Panic released their tenth studio album this year, Free Somehow, a record of riff-heavy jams and howling psychedelic ballads. But the band has never been defined by albums, but their endless touring and cult of loyal fans. For more than 20 years they have lived on the road, performing up to 250 shows a year — and never playing the same set list twice. They hold sell-out records at several venues around the country including the Red Rocks Amphitheatre near Denver (23 shows), and have been on the list of the top 50 grossing tour bands for eight consecutive years.

On a recent stop in New York, guitarist-singer John Bell, new guitarist Jimmy Herring and percussionist Domingo “Sunny” Ortiz discussed memories from the road, critical road-trip food, and of course, the art of the jam. Click here to watch a series of videos as Rock Daily boards their tour bus for some intimate chats with Widespread Panic.

Britney Spears discovered Radiohead’s In Rainbows, Jack White got gussied up for the Met’s fancy costume gala and Pete Doherty got sprung from jail. Click here to check out those photos and others, including John Mayer, the Edge, Devendra Banhart and more.

[Photo: WENN]

Three bands, three new albums to promote: Spiritualized take Songs in A&E on the road, Stereolab return with Chemical Chords and My Brightest Diamond ready their second set A Thousand Shark’s Teeth. Full tour dates for the trio of treks, after the jump. (more…)