{King Khan and the Shrines play at Neumos on Tuesday, April 13 with The Fresh and Onlys and Unnatural Helpers; 21+, $15 adv.}

When James Brown passed away a few Christmases ago, the title of “Hardest Working Man in Showbiz” had to have been passed to someone, if at all. For my money, the obvious choice would be the Montreal-born musician Arish Khan, better known as King Khan.

Khan has been one of the most prolific musicians over the past several years, constantly touring and working and recording with his projects King Khan and the Shrines and King Khan and BBQ Show, most notably. The rock band King Khan and BBQ Show is a collaboration with Mark Sultan, a musician from Montreal who has worked with Khan since their days in a mid-to-late 1990s band called The Spaceshits. There’s also Almighty Defenders, who released an album last fall on Vice Records, which was a gospel-inspired project between Khan, Sultan and Atlanta punk band The Black Lips, who found rock asylum at Khan’s Berlin home after an ill-advised tour of India where the band fled after learning the world’s largest democracy probably didn’t appreciate The Sex Pistols a generation before and still weren’t ready for their music. Khan is also planning on working with Wu-Tang Clan rapper GZA’s next album, when he can find the time.

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For the better part of this decade, The Raveonettes have projected a cool, sexy black and white style that has meshed perfectly with their music. “Cool as ice cream” is a lyric from “Bang!” a song on the latest Raveonettes album, In and Out of Control (Vice), and it sums up their aesthetic and music nicely: sugary pop music with a rougher component. As we were told by Andre 3000 a few years ago, being ice cold is cooler than being cool. In 2009, The Raveonettes are still cool as ice cream and have plenty of style to burn, but now they’re asking what that means.

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There are 17 Tuesdays left in 2008 and on 4 of those, The Raveonettes will be releasing a digital EP.

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They’ve never hidden their Red Light District impulses, but with Lust Lust Lust, it’s laid out perfectly on the table.

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Seems that Vice Records has a slew of Bloc Party live sessions, covers, mash ups and the like sitting around, so they've made them available on their Vice MP3 blog to all of us sitting around waiting for 'official' MP3s to be leaked to the public.

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They might not be able to make every song as infectious as they pulled off on Silent Alarm, but the release shows a maturity for the band that came with all the growing pains you might expect.

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When he expands out of the British garage sound and brings in aspects of that krunky* sound that meshes well with Skinner's loose style of rapping...

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If you're like me, this spring is rather exciting, with enough new music coming out to make a llama swallow with discomfort.

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