Minnesota’s Tapes ’N Tapes follow The Loon this spring with help from Flaming Lips/Mercury Rev architect Dave Fridmann, but does this mean that the affable indie-rock outfit is getting all weird and droney? “The main reason I was interested in him was that he gets amazing drum sounds,” says singer/guitarist Josh Grier. “It’s much more a representation of how we sound live.” “Hang Them All”

has already been played on tour, while Grier calls “Demon Apple” a “rockin’ good time.”...Here Are Many Wild Animals, the second album from ex-Cardigan Nina Persson’s A Camp, is being recorded in New York this winter in the hopes of a summer release.…Unable to pare down a double album’s worth of material, at least Robert Smith of the Cure is willing to only charge for a single album when

their 13th studio opus lands this summer.…April brings Stephen Malkmus and the Jicks’ fourth post-Pavement album, Real Emotional Trash—as song titles “Elmo Delmo” and “Wicked Wanda” may suggest, he also just had a second kid.…Recently re-formed goth legends Bauhaus have broken up again, but not before finishing the now aptly titled Going Away White, out in March....

> It may seem like WOLF
PARADE have been
around forever—what
with the 32 side proj-
ects—but they’ve only released
one full-length, 2005’s Apologies to
the Queen Mary. This will change
come June, when the follow-up
(recorded last summer largely at
Arcade Fire’s church turned
studio in the Quebec hinterland)
becomes a reality. “It’s desolate
out there,” says guitarist/singer

Dan Boeckner. “We didn’t really wear pants or shirts.” Whether this blasphemous sexiness is evident in the 11 new songs—five sung by Boeckner, five by coleader and keyboardist Spencer Krug, and one featuring both—remains to be seen. But they definitely benefit from the other projects the band members have tackled since Apologies. Boeckner’s sparse HANDSOME FURS, which will also have a second album out before year’s end, taught him how to step up. “In Wolf Parade we have this term called the ‘wall of shit,’ ” he explains, “which is when we go balls-out. But there’s less of that on this record, so learning how to sing with barely anything going on behind me helped a lot.”

When we last saw PANIC! AT THE DISCO touring last summer, they’d traded their arm garters for western shirts and their dwarves for, well, songs, including a cover of the Band’s “The Weight.” Turns out this Killers-esque shift toward classic American rock hints at what’s in store for PRETTY ODD, the follow-up to 2005’s A Fever You Can’t Sweat Out. So much so that the band threw out an entire album’s worth of material. “They were the wrong songs for this record,” says guitarist Ryan Ross from the band’s hometown of Las Vegas. “It sounded like a musical.” Listening to older bands pushed them to record songs like first single “Nine in the Afternoon” live in the studio, just like the geezers did. But that’s not the only change, Ross says. “The titles won’t be as confusing.”