Most bands put out vinyl for today’s Record Store Day, but HT faves MGMT aren’t most bands. They psych-rockers decided to put out a cassette single featuring the first single, Alien Days, from their forthcoming third studio album. While little is known about MGMT’s third album, the band did expect that it will come out in June when discussing the LP with Rolling Stone.

[Photo via MothMessage]

Alien Days has an electronic extraterrestrial feel with lyrics that MGMT’s Andrew VanWyngarden says is “about that feeling when a parasitic alien is in your head, controlling things.” That’s totally the first thought we had when listening to the tune, which the band shared on SoundCloud. Take a listen…

MGMT hits the road later this week for a three-week Spring Tour.

[via Consequence of Sound]

After an extremely quiet 2012, electro-rockers MGMT will get back at it in 2013 as they prep for the release of a new album. MGMT will hit the road on April 26th for a three-week cross-country tour. The jaunt kicks off on April 26th will a free show at Penn State in State College, Pennsylvania and runs through a May 18th gig at Stanford University’s Frost Amphitheatre.

Tickets will first be available through the band’s ticketing site on Wednesday at noon local times.

Here’s the full list of announced MGMT tour dates thus far…

READ ON

HT faves MGMT returned to the stage last night for the first time in four months for a headlining set at Montreal’s Osheaga Festival. Along with original material from Oracular Spectacular and Congratulations, as well as one unreleased “new” song, Alien Days, MGMT debuted a surprisingly faithful-to-the-original rendition of Angie by The Rolling Stones. A decent video, with pretty good audio, has surfaced…

MGMT – Angie

[via Consequence of Sound]

I’ll be the first to admit it – I never gave Jimmy Fallon’s talk show career much of a chance. Boy was I wrong, Fallon puts out the best late night show on a nightly basis and his master stroke was hiring former Billboard writer Jonathan Cohen to book musical acts. This week on Late Night with Jimmy Fallon has been Pink Floyd Week. On Monday, Jimmy welcomed Nick Mason and The Shins for Breathe, on Tuesday Roger Waters performed In The Flesh with the Foo Fighters and last night MGMT were augmented by Bradford Cox for the early Floyd track Lucifer Sam.

MGMT w/ Bradford Cox – Lucifer Sam

READ ON for the other Pink Floyd Week videos…

Armed with a semi-planned out schedule and a list of bands I absolutely could not miss, this past weekend I took to Golden Gate Park in San Francisco for my first Outside Lands with 60,000 other fans of live music. From what I have heard, getting to the park was not as difficult as in years past thanks in part to a paid shuttle being run all day from SF’s Civic Center straight to the festival grounds. Enough with the background, let’s get right into it.

Friday, August 12th

The first set I was able to catch was Phantogram who performed at Sutro Stage (the best stage of the festival, sunken down a little, a great place to catch a sunset act), whose material from their album Eyelid Moves translates very well to the live stage. In my biggest regret of the weekend, I opted out of seeing Foster The People to go check out the original lineup of The Meters. Unfortunately, The Meters spent a lot of time complaining about the gear they were provided, with guitarist Leo Nocentelli having the most issues. I don’t know if it was the trouble hearing or not, but the quartet seemed pretty confused and shockingly sloppy throughout their set – not what you expect from the godfathers of New Orleans. MGMT then delivered a tight set on the mainstage that included a cover of English Glory’s Broken Arrows. Their performance of the epic 11+ minute Siberian Breaks impressed me. The omission of their hit Kids from the setlist kept us all in hopes that somehow that it would be incorporated into one of Phish’s two sets, but it was not to be.

Phish delivered two safe sets filled with choice cover selections (this blogger’s first time seeing Frank Zappa’s Peaches en Regalia in 115+ shows), repertoire staples and a welcome performance of the band’s newest original, Steam, which segued nicely out of Velvet Underground’s Rock and Roll. One thing is for sure, Phish playing inside Golden Gate Park is a welcome upgrade over the Shoreline Amphitheater in Mountain View.

READ ON for more of Dave’s Outside Lands 2011 Journal…

For the second consecutive year, we concocted an innovative little experiment for our year-end Best Albums list. Instead of picking the old fashioned way, we opted for something a little different: a collaborative, collective list that incorporates the opinions of everybody here at HT.

To begin, we devised an all-encompassing list of well over 100 nominees, whereby most everything our contributors recommended made this list. Then, we invited our crew of writers to independently and blindly vote on each album within the list on a scale of 1 to 20 (20 = epic). We ended up with varying degrees of familiarity for the nominees as some folks voted on just about everything, while some ranked just a few. From there, we deployed our egghead algorithm for rating albums: (two times the average rating) + (the total number of votes). At that point, we took the top 25 highest scores and presto: Hidden Track’s 25 Best Albums of 2010. No bullshit, no big opinions; just the results.

Let’s kick off our week long countdown of our favorite albums of 2010 with numbers 25 through 21…

25) Sleigh Bells – Treats

Key Tracks: Tell ‘Em, Infinity Guitars

Sounds Like: Electric Guitars and Cheerleaders

The Skinny: Sleigh Bells came out of nowhere in 2010 to emerge as a break out of the highest order. Despite being a just a duo, the boy-girl tandem of Derek Miller and Alexis Krauss manage to slug out bombs with their stomping beats, cutting guitar attacks and anthemic vocal hooks. With Treats, Sleigh Bells have created a genuinely unique twist on amped-up party music.

READ ON for the next four albums in our countdown…

The Beastie Boys’ latest LP, Hot Sauce Committee Pt. 1, was originally due for release in September of ’09, but that date was delayed indefinitely after Adam “MCA” Yauch was diagnosed with cancer. Today, the band’s website has been updated with news about the album…

ALTHOUGH WE REGRET TO INFORM YOU THAT “HOT SAUCE COMMITTEE PART 1″ WILL CONTINUE TO BE DELAYED INDEFINITELY, “HOT SAUCE COMMITTEE PART 2″ WILL BE RELEASED ON TIME AS ORIGINALLY PLANNED IN SPRING OF 2011.

We love that they’ve kept a sense of humor about the situation.

Here’s six other stories to keep you entertained this morning…

• U2′s manager says the band will release a new LP in early ’11
• The All Good Music Festival sets dates for the 2011 edition
• Pearl Jam’s bassist builds a skate park in his hometown
• New York Magazine finds Evan Dando living in squalor
• The Las Vegas Review-Journal profiles local band Moksha
• Elliott Landy captured the spirit of  the Woodstock generation

Finally, the PS22 Chorus of 2011 has been assembled and put out their first video of the year as the middle schoolers perform MGMT’s Kids. Despite only being together for a few weeks, the latest incarnation of the choir picks up where last year’s group left off. Check it out…

PS22 Chorus – Kids (MGMT)

While a few of us on the HT staff love MGMT’s latest album, Congratulations, the band’s label – Sony/Columbia – aren’t big fans of the psychedelic LP’s sales figures. There’s no catchy single a la Kids or Electric Feel or Time To Pretend on Congratulations and we all know that label heads aren’t as interested in a band growing as an artist as they are in a band producing hits. Sony gave the band creative freedom for Congratulations, but according to an interview with MGMT’s Andrew Van-Wyngarden in the Daily Record the label will be much more involved with the creation of the third album.

“We’ve been looking at relationships with the label during the recording process and it’s quite different this time. They’ll be more involved and not give us as much freedom,” Van-Wyngarden told the paper before a recent gig in Glasgow. The singer/guitarist feels the band is in a completely different place, “I definitely think our music will change in the future because Congratulations is almost two years old now. We have some ideas and have been talking about possible directions of where to go next. We are just in much more positive mental states than when we wrote Congratulations.” No word yet on when the group will enter the studio, we can’t wait to see where their career goes from here.

In other MGMT news, the band’s touring drummer – Will Berman – left the stage with just two songs left in the group’s set last night in Manchester after getting hit with “an object from the crowd” according to a Spinner report. Berman’s band mates didn’t even realize he was gone until after the next tune, Kids, and pleaded for his return to no avail.

When a musical act has a rabid fanbase, it becomes tough for said act to keep the inner workings of their organization from the fans. Many times this leads to all kinds of speculation about what goes on “behind the curtain,” especially when something particularly controversial happens without much of an explanation from the band.

For this week’s B List we put together a list of five questions for which we’d love to know the answers. In many cases, the answers may never be known or can only be answered by the people involved – who aren’t talking. Yet, for conversation’s sake we’re going to put these questions out there…

1. What did the fax that the Allman Brothers Band sent to Dickey Betts say?

Back in May 2000, the Allman Brothers Band – supposedly – sent a fax to founding member Dickey Betts informing him that he had been replaced by Jimmy Herring. According to an Entertainment Weekly article, the fax implied he needed help with a substance abuse problem. We’ve always wondered exactly what the fax said. Was there small talk before the deed was done? “Hey Dickey, How’s the weather in Sarasota? Oh, by the way, we went another direction after 30 years, give our best to the fam.”

2. What was in Trey Anastasio’s backpack?

While promoting 2005′s Shine LP, 70 Volt Parade lead singer Trey Anastasio repeatedly referred to a backpack he took with him to visit producer Brendan O’Brien. We’ve always wondered what was in said backpack. A copy of The Phish Companion? Some Clif Bars and some cold green tea? The moments from Page’s day he received in the mail?

READ ON for three more unanswered questions…

Brooklyn’s MGMT put out an official video for the title track of the group’s sophomore effort, Congratulations. The video finds Andrew VanWyngarden and Ben Goldwasser wandering through the desert and is trippy as hell, which is to be expected from the psychedelic-rock act. Take a look…

MGMT – Congratulations

Last week we alerted our readers about a post on MGMT’s website detailing the band’s new taping policy which established a Taper’s Section and opened up the recording of MGMT shows to anyone within that section. Subsequently, the post disappeared from the website without explanation.

Today, the band’s Facebook Page updated the status of the policy…

Sorry everyone, we jumped the gun and are in the midst of finalizing all the details of our taping policy, which will be up shortly but in the meantime we are not restricting audio recording all all [sic] current shows. Stay tuned for info and have fun

According to the band’s label, an updated taping policy will be posted to the band’s website sometime this week. We’ll keep you posted.

MGMT’s roots in the jamband world have been well-documented. That connection continues to show with a change in MGMT’s taping policy that establishes a taping section at all of the band’s headlining shows.

Take a look at this f’awesome announcement from the band’s website…

Audio recording is allowed at shows. In each venue there will be a taping section. You must record the show from this section and not outside of it. This section in most situations will be located by the soundboard. In reserved seating and other unique situations you will be asked to keep your microphones at head level. There is no special taper ticket needed. We do NOT allow videotaping only audio.

The Brooklyn-based band’s live show has improved by leaps and bounds over the past few years, so why not let more people hear what they are doing on stage these days? While MGMT will surely be performing Time to Pretend and Electric Feel at nearly every show for the next few years, the group’s newer material offers plenty of room for exploration. We’re psyched that we’ll get to hear it develop. Now let’s get MGMT on the Live Music Archive!

Remember when Ticketmaster and Live Nation promised that a merger of the two companies would lead to lower ticket prices? We’re only one quarter into LN/TM’s reign of terror & already the company’s CEO, Michael Rapino, has hinted in a conference call yesterday that increasing the face value of tickets is part of the company’s plan for the future. Anybody surprised?

Apparently, TicketsNow has lost tons of business because LN/TM can’t link to the ticket reselling site leading Rapino to try to get the artists themselves to increase the price of premium tickets moving forward.

Let’s take a quick peek at what else is goin’ on this hump day…

• List Time: Urlesque’s Top 11 Bluegrass Covers on YouTube
• Pitchfork shares pics of the Groening-curated ATP festival
• Gov’t Mule announces plans for its first-ever show in Israel
• The 2010 lineup for the XPoNential fest in Camden, NJ is out
• UM’s Andy Farag releases hip hop CD and barbecue rub
• Check out the comprehensive 2010 WSP Spring Tour Stats

Finally, we’ve been keeping tabs on Stones Week, but Jimmy Fallon isn’t the only late night host to book great bands this week. Last night, MGMT played a set at the Ed Sullivan Theatre as part of the Live on Letterman series. You can watch the entire performance below…

Tickets for psych-pop act MGMT’s Radio City Music Hall debut – set for August 17 – went onsale this morning and although tickets for that show are still available, a second show – set for August 18 – has been added.

• MGMT Tickets: August 17 / August 18

Yesterday was a big day for news about late night shows and hosts as we found out that MGMT will appear as part of the Live On Letterman series on May 11, Green Day has been tabbed to perform on Late Night with Jimmy Fallon as part of Stones Week and Conan O’Brien will make his long-awaited return to television on 60 Minutes this Sunday.

As far as MGMT, the psychedelic rockers will perform a number of tunes at the Ed Sullivan Theater on May 11 that will be webcast at 8pm EST via CBS.com, and will air before the group’s appearance on the Late Show with David Letterman later that same night. The group also added a few dates to their seemingly massive summer tour. You can see a complete list of dates at the band’s website.

We had previously told you that Phish will rock a tune from Exile on Main Street as part of Stones Week on Late Night With Jimmy Fallon, but now we know the rest of the lineup for the week. Punk pop act Green Day will kick things off on May 10 followed by country star Keith Urban on the 11th. Sheryl Crow takes a stab at the Stones on the 12th before Phish returns to Late Night on the 13th. Finally, the documentary Stones In Exile about the recording of the legendary LP will premiere on the show to end the week on the 14th.

Speaking of exiles, Conan O’Brien will finally return to the boob tune this Sunday for an interview and profile on CBS’ 60 Minutes. Conan, who is currently on tour, risks losing his severance package if he talks shit about NBC, so it will be quite interesting to see what he has to say.