Five years after splitting up, New Order will reunite — with a lineup featuring keyboardist Gillian Gilbert, but not bassist Peter Hook — for a pair of live shows this October in Paris and Brussels to benefit ailing artist and film producer Michael Shamberg.

Al Jourgensen today announced the brief U.S. leg of the reactivated Ministry’s upcoming Relapse Tour 2012, five concerts in just four cities — Denver, Los Angeles, New York and Chicago — with no plans to add additional American destinations to the trek.

Madchester veterans Inspiral Carpets today announced they are reuniting with their original, ’80s-era lead singer Stephen Holt and plan to record their first new material in 15 years and embark on a world tour that’s likely to open in South America this November.

Al Jourgensen has reunited Ministry three years after vowing he was finished with the industrial-metal juggernaut, and says he’ll record and release a new album dubbed ‘Relapse’ before the end of the year and play a limited run of U.S. and European concerts in 2012.

Just eight months after a-ha’s farewell concert in Oslo, the Norwegian pop trio — saying they were ‘shaken to the soul’ — have announced they will reunite later this month to perform at the national memorial service honoring the victims of last month’s mass killings in that country.

Members of long-lost Boston college-radio favorites Scruffy the Cat — part of the so-called late-’80s cowpunk scene that helped spawn the alt-country movement — have reunited around cancer-stricken frontman Charlie Chesterman after two decades apart and will play two headlining shows in their hometown this October.

The briefly reunited Dalis Car — Peter Murphy and late Japan bassist Mick Karn — today released its first new music in 27 years in the form of a newly reworked version of the instrumental ‘Artemis’ with new vocals and lyrics by the former Bauhaus singer.