Today's Hotness: The Replacements, The Feelies, The A-Sides

>> We devoted a portion of the weekend to cruising ecommerce sites to see if anyone is offering a bundled deal on the forthcoming reissues of The Replacements' Twin/Tone releases. While no one is offering a package deal, the best price we saw was at Newbury Comics, which will sell you the full-lengths for $13.25 and the EP Stink for $11.85 (which still seems absurdly high, since we recall getting this new on CD for like $6.99 at Repo Records back in the day). At least one place was charging list price of $18.98 for the full-lengths. Think it was Amazon. Our point is, why is no one offering a bundle deal like Matador just did with the Mission Of Burma stuff? We came very close to buying the discs off of NewburyComics.com, but then we figured we'd try our luck at the store on release day -- which is 4/22 -- to see if we can't get the discs for $12.99-ish or something. And we just discovered one more incentive via the Man Without Ties blog. Apparently certain stores will have (either for sale or as some sort of premium) a limited edition 7" on offer containing perhaps the two greatest Replacements songs, "I Will Dare" b/w "Color Me Impressed." So we're hoping like hell Newbury Comics has some of those next week, and we're going to try to duck out to the store prior to lunch to ensure we get a shot at it. Read more at the Man Without Ties post here.

>> Speaking of reissues -- here's something that hadn't been apparent to us: readers will recall we first pined for and then briskly reported on the impending reunion of seminal Jersey indie act The Feelies. Well, according to the good people over at 30 Milkshakes, there are also Feelies reissues in the offing. These will apparently be released by Bar/None. The Bar/None web site has nothing to offer on this subject, but we will watch eagerly for more news.

>> Philadelphia indie rockers The A-Sides have three tour dates lined up next week before they go into hiding to create their third set, the follow-up to last year's sophomore set Silver Storms, which was released by Vagrant. The first show is at the Middle East Upstairs in Cambridge, Mass., i.e. right down the street. We're going to make a concerted effort to finally catch The A-Sides live, and if we do go, we're hoping that the quintet plays "Here Or There," a spacey, shoegazey jam that closed out the band's stellar 2005 full-length debut Hello, Hello. Here's an MP3.

The A-Sides -- "Here Or There" -- Hello, Hello
[right click and save as]
[buy A-Sides recordings from Newbury Comics here]

>> So we got hip to 2008 and made a Muxtape. You can rock all 37:26 of it right here. We may make another Thursday night to tide readers over, as we expect to be off-line for the majority of what is a long weekend here in Massachusetts, USA. As of the other night we are also rocking Twitter, if that sort of thing interests you.