The Grapevine: Fri Feb 5

Find out what's been happening in the music world this week.

Feeling Yellow

English soft rock stalwarts Coldplay have made a long-awaited cameo appearance on The Simpsons this week. The band appear after Homer wins the lottery and gets the guys in for a private show. The episode screened in the US last Sunday and will make its way down under later in the year.

The final cut is pretty amusing but Chris Martin's ad-libbing with the voice of Homer Dan Castelleneta is way funnier. Check it out below:

Super bands super busy

Jack White has never been one to sit on his arse for too long. That's why this week he announced to Triple J that The Dead Weather, one of his many musical projects, are putting the finishing touches on the follow-up to 2009's Horehound.

"The Dead Weather are finishing recording the last couple of songs," White said. "I'm going to start mixing in the next two weeks, so yeah, it should be out in April."

Wow, that didn't take long.

Meanwhile, fellow super group Them Crooked Vultures have confirmed they will start work on the follow-up to their debut, released late last year!

"We'll do a second album this year," John Paul Jones said to Stuff.co.nz this week. "By the end of summer, something like that."

Jay Reatard-ead

In January we were all saddened by the untimely passing of American punk rock prodigy Jay Reatard. The autopsy reports have just been filed and they confirm the singer, aged 29, died from a overdose of cocaine and alcohol.

CommercialAppeal.com reported that Reatard, real name Jimmy Lee Lindsey Jr, died from "cocaine toxicity, and that alcohol was a contributing factor in his death".

RIP Jimmy Lee

Welcome to the Freak Show

Eccentric "goth-caberet star" and leading lady of The Dresden Dolls Amanda Palmer has dipped her pen into yet another beyond-belief side project. Palmer has supposedly uncovered a pair of conjoined twin entertainers by the name of Evelyn Evelyn and will put out their debut album in late March.

Apparently, the real story is that Palmer has teamed up with punk professor Jason Webley and the pair make up the true identity of Evelyn Evelyn. Whatever the case, their debut album looks like it'll be somewhat of a spectacle, with the likes of Weird Al Yankovic, Andrew W.K., Tegan & Sara, Gerard Way from My Chemical Romance and even Frances Bean Cobain (daughter of Kurt and Courtney) making guest appearances on it.

Amanda Palmer plays The Spiegel Tent at the Adelaide Fringe on Thu Mar 4.

Trash bags

Ending on some news that's sure to thrill dozens of people around the world, Shirley Manson hinted this week that the members of Garbage have returned to the studio to start work on a new album.

"Guess who I just spent a week in the studio with?” the singer wrote on her Facebook. “Would you be pleased if I said one of them was called Steve and one of them was called Duke and another was a Grammy-winning producer?”

Garbage haven't released an album since 2005's Bleed Like Me, and we'reall thankful for that.

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