Wire will embark on a short nine-date North American tour this April in support of their 12th studio album — the 11-track ‘Red Barked Tree’ — which is due out on Tuesday, although you can now stream the record in its entirety on NPR’s website.

Fans of Social Distortion today got another taste of the L.A. punk warriors’ forthcoming ‘Hard Times and Nursery Rhymes’ this week with the premiere of the track ‘California (Hustle and Flow)’ on the L.A. Times’ Pop & Hiss blog.

Mike Watt will release his third punk opera in March — the 30-track, Minutemen-inspired ‘Hyphenated-Man’ — and then embark on a massive North American tour in which he and his band The Missingmen will play the album ’51 times in 52 days.’

R.E.M. has posted a ‘lyric video’ to the song ‘Oh My Heart,’ the third track off the forthcoming ‘Collapse Into Now’ to make its way onto the web in the last three weeks.

Tonight’s episode of Slicing Up Eyeballs on Strangeways Radio featured music by The Smiths, Recoil, The Lucy Show, John Foxx, The Specials, Vision, Joe Strummer and more. Hear the replay at 2 p.m. EST Friday.

Mick Karn — who played bass in the acclaimed art-rock act Japan from the mid-’70s through the early ’80s and teamed up with Peter Murphy for the singer’s post-Bauhaus project Dalis Car — died today following a six-month battle with cancer. He was 52.

It’s Bernard Sumner’s birthday today — he’s turning 55 — and to celebrate, we present this somewhat rare New Order concert film called ‘Pumped Full of Drugs’ that was released on VHS in the U.K. in 1986.

Check out Dave Navarro of Jane’s Addiction in the full, unaired pilot for a proposed MTV reality show called ‘Grounded’ that apparently was going to follow different celebrities each week as they moved back home with their parents.

Another slow new-release week, but we do have Some Bizarre reissuing five ’80s titles from ex-Soft Cell leader Marc Almond.

Haven’t run across this one before: It’s a promo clip of U2 performing along to what sounds like the album version of ‘New Year’s Day’ in a recording studio, circa 1983. Apparently it was included in a French TV documentary on the band.

Three weeks ago, we launched the inaugural Slicing Up Eyeballs Readers Poll in an effort to gauge what this site’s frequenters think are the year’s best new albums and reissues. Now, with hundreds of ballots cast, the results are in.

Three weeks ago, we launched the inaugural Slicing Up Eyeballs Readers Poll in an effort to gauge what this site’s frequenters think are the year’s best new albums and reissues. Now, with hundreds of ballots cast, the results are in.

The Cure dominates this year’s list of most-viewed stories, claiming five of the top 10 spots — including the No. 1 position, occupied for the second year in a row by our initial 2009 report on this year’s 3CD deluxe reissue of ‘Disintegration.’