The Specials finally are making good on a promise to tour the U.S., today announcing they’ll play two dates at the South By Southwest festival in March as part of the first leg of a larger North American visit — but the shows will not feature co-vocalist Neville Staple, who is leaving the band due to “ill health.”

As we reported last week, genre-straddling hard-rock act Living Colour will celebrate the 25th anniversary of their groundbreaking debut album ‘Vivid’ with a new reissue and a tour centered around the 1988 album — and the band has now begun rolling out North American dates on that planned spring trek.

Once and future(?) Sonic Youth frontman Thurston Moore will release the self-titled debut album from his new band Chelsea Light Moving on March 5, Matador Records announced this morning, and will follow that release with a 20-date U.S. tour that has a conspicuous South By Southwest-sized gap in the schedule.

Echo & The Bunnymen spinoff Poltergeist — an instrumental trio that reunites guitarist Will Sergeant with former bassist and founding member Les Pattinson — today announced it will release a debut album titled ‘Your Mind Is A Box (Let Us Fill It With Wonder)’ in March then perform a series of U.K. dates later that month.

With Morrissey’s rescheduled U.S. tour set to open Wednesday, the singer today announced the addition of two more shows to the two-month trek: a Feb. 27 concert at the Balboa Theatre in San Diego, and a tour-ending show on March 9 at San Francisco’s Regency Ballroom.

Morrissey will kick off his rescheduled U.S. tour next week with a live performance on “The Late Show with David Letterman,” stopping by the talk show on Tuesday, according to CBS, before opening the two-month, coast-to-coast trek the following night in Long Island, New York.

Genre-straddling hard rockers Living Colour will celebrate the 25th anniversary of their hit debut album Vivid with a new reissue and a tour centered around the 1988 album, with initial European dates in the Netherlands, France, Switzerland, Austria and Germany already announced for mid-March.

Two years after the release of ‘Hard Times and Nursery Rhymes,’ Los Angeles punk warriors Social Distortion are still on the road — and they managed a nice surprise for fans at a Dec. 15 show in Los Angeles, when bearded guitar legend Billy Gibbons of ZZ Top joined the Mike Ness and Co. on stage to play “Drug Train.”

Fans in the Los Angeles area will get yet another chance to see Peter Murphy in concert this year as the singer caps off 2012 with a pair of special, just-announced concerts at The Observatory in Santa Ana at which he will perform his 1989 album ‘Deep’ one night and a full set of Bauhaus material the next night.

The Psychedelic Furs this evening announced the cancellation of the band’s short run of New Year’s dates in Las Vegas and California as frontman Richard Butler recovers from spinal surgery, but added, in a note posted on the band’s official Facebook page, that the group hopes to reschedule the five concerts in the future.

Brooklyn’s They Might Be Giants will release their 16th studio album, ‘Nanobots,’ on March 5, and will follow its upcoming three-night hometown New Year’s stand with a 31-date U.S. tour in the spring. The two Johns recently premiered the first track off the album at Rolling Stone, and you can now download the MP3 right here.

The Godfathers announced this weekend that they will release the long-in-the-works ‘Jukebox Fury’ — the reunited rockers’ first new album in 18 years — in late February or early March to coincide with the band’s upcoming support slot on a month-long, 22-date U.K. tour with The Stranglers.

Since we last checked in with former Orange Juice frontman Edwyn Collins, his follow-up to 2010′s acclaimed Losing Sleep has been bumped from January to late March, but that’s OK, since we can at least get a taste of the upcoming ‘Understated’ LP via the track “Too Bad (That’s Sad),” which debuted at The Quietus.