The all-new LEO website, running on Joomla!, looks much better than the old one and is faster as well. This week, they have reviews of the new Lords CD, Fuck All Y’all Motherfuckers; My Darling Asleep’s eponymous release; Broadfield Marchers The Inevitable Continuing; OK Zombie Do The Zombie; the Villiebillies’s newest From the Belly of the Beast; The Muckrakers’ The Concorde Fallacy; Ben Purdom’s Meets the Morning and Scott Mertz and His Panel Of Experts‘ You Wish.

The October cover story for Louisville Music News is the Troubadours of Divine Bliss. Check that out, along with all the latest columns, performance and CD reviews in the print edition.

The deadtree copies will be on the street beginning today - later than usual, due to the problems caused by Hurricane Ike.

It’s dueling weekly pubs on music time - LEO’s Music issue is out and Velocity has a sampler for the cover. LEO gets the call, though, as they have a cover story on none other than Travis Meeks, a feature certain to cause some disturbances in the ether. Seems Meeks’ has Asperger’s Syndrome. It’s in-n-n-n-terresting reading.

There’s a lot more about music in the town - LEO devotes the whole issue to various aspects, so pick up a copy on read it at leoweekly.com

Are you a fan of Celtic Woman? If so, get out your wallet for EMI/Manhattan Records recording artists The High Kings, an all-male Celtic group. The quartet is the real deal, in that they are all Irishmen. Tickets go on sale March 17, at $42 and $57.

Your friendly editor has been busy, busy this weekend, putting together the March issue of Louisville Music News, which will feature the Celtic group My Darling Asleep. More posts later…

J. L. Puckett has the story of another benefit for the victims of the LAVA House fire, this one on Thursday at Flanagan’s Ale House on Baxter. It’ll be a Celtic night, with My Darling Asleep and Guilderoy Byrne doing the entertainment honors. Tix at $5, showtime is 6 p.m.

The ongoing ‘discussion’ about the effects of the internet on music has been primarily dominated by the corporations and their PR machine, backed by their lawyers. Bob Ostertag, a working musician in San Francisco has a different take on the matter, both in the long term and the short term:

Humans have walked this earth for about 195,000 years. We don’t know exactly when music emerged, but it was certainly a very long time ago, long before recorded history. There is evidence that music may have been integral to the evolution of the human brain, that music and language developed in tandem. The first recording device was invented just 129 years ago. The first mass-produced record appeared just 110 years ago. The idea that selling permission to listen to recorded music is the foundation of the possibility of earning one’s livelihood from music is at most 50 years old, and it is a myth. The fact that most musicians today believe in this myth is an ideological triumph for corporate power of breathtaking proportions.

There’s a lot more in this essay. Read it at www.questioncopyright.org and rethink your position about ‘da muzic bidness’.

— PMM

Over at the C-J, J. L. Puckett has his usual Tuesday listing of recent releases.

—PMM

Bob Lefsetz has a particularly snippy reaction to the recent announcement of changes in the cost of online music. Lefsetz rants that the labels still don’t get the digital distribution thing and are going to fly themselves into the ground if they continue thinking that it’s still ‘the business as usual’ of making CDs and selling them via radio and retail stores. Read his whole rant here.

Apple iTunes has made another step into the new music marketing model with the introduction of “Complete My Album,” whereby a customer who has previously bought on or more singles for 99 cents can buy the complete album, with the cost of those previous purchases deducted from the total cost of the album. Everybody is commenting on it; you can get the straight scoop at iTunes.com