The Specials have begun announcing dates for the first leg of this year’s North American tour, confirming shows via their Twitter account in Chicago, Los Angeles, San Diego and San Francisco on either side of the band’s planned performances at the South By Southwest festival in March.

The Ocean Blue — best known for 1989’s Echo & The Bunnymen-like debut single “Between Something and Nothing” — will release ‘Ultramarine,’ the band’s first new album in 13 years, this March, then play “shows throughout the U.S. starting in April,” according to a post on the group’s Facebook page.

As Robert Smith first teased last summer, The Cure will return to South America for the first time in 17 years this April, mounting its first-ever large-scale tour of the continent, performing seven concerts in Brazil, Paraguay, Argentina, Chile and Colombia — followed by a one-off show in Mexico City to end the trek.

Bob Geldof will rejoin The Boomtown Rats for the first time since the band split in 1986 to play the U.K.’s Isle of Wight Festival this summer, saying in a statement on the fest’s website, “We were an amazing band and I just feel it’s the right time to re-Rat, to go back to Boomtown for a visit.”

Orchestral Manoeuvres in the Dark today unveiled plans to tour North America this spring and summer, hitting five western cities in April around the band’s two appearances at the Coachella Valley Music & Arts Festival, then returning in July for six more concerts in the east.

The reunited ‘Last Splash’-era lineup of The Breeders — Kim Deal, Kelley Deal, Josephine Wiggs, and Jim Macpherson — this morning announced it will make its debut with a concert March 29 at The Bellhouse in Brooklyn, N.Y., prior to already announced dates later this spring in Europe.

This week’s new releases include the digital debut of Depeche Mode’s new single “Heaven,” off the upcoming ‘Delta Machine,’ plus Sugar’s eight-record box set called, naturally, ‘A Box of Sugar,’ and featuring the first-ever vinyl pressings of the ‘Besides’ comp and the ‘Joke is Always On Us, Sometimes’ live album.

After announcing just before Christmas that their new album had just been mastered, My Bloody Valentine took the stage tonight in London for the first live date of the year, with Kevin Shields surprising fans by answering a heckler with news news that it could be released in “maybe two or three days.”

Morrissey has postponed six more U.S. concerts on top of the three already canceled or due to be rescheduled after he was hospitalized in Royal Oak, Mich., and diagnosed a bleeding ulcer — not the suspected bladder infection first reported by one of his reps — according to reports by Billboard and Brooklyn Vegan.

Welcome to the Week in Rock, where we round up all of the headlines posted on this site over the past week. This week featured posts about The Stone Roses, Depeche Mode, Morrissey, The Replacements, The Jesus and Mary Chain, The Names, They Might Be Giants, Husker Du, The House of Love and more.

The Replacements — namely Paul Westerberg, Tommy Stinson and Chris Mars — raised more than $100,000 to help pay medical expenses for their ailing former bandmate Slim Dunlap through the just-completed 10-day auction of 250 limited-edition, 10-inch vinyl copies of the band’s 5-song reunion EP.

With three U.S. tour dates already canceled or postponed due to unspecified “band illness,” a representative for Morrissey now tells Billboard.com that the ex-Smiths singer has been hospitalized at the William Beaumont Hospital in Royal Oak, Mich., “where he is undergoing tests for a suspected bladder infection.”

With bass legend Peter Hook set to embark on a U.S. book tour next week, publisher Harper Collins is hooking us up with copies of his memoir “Unknown Pleasures: Inside Joy Division” — each autographed by Hooky himself — to give away to 10 lucky Slicing Up Eyeballs readers.