The Primitives today announced the release of their first full-length record in 21 years, a 14-track ‘concept covers album’ called ‘Echoes and Rhymes’ that will ‘revisit songs from semi-obscure bands from the ’60s with women lead singers’ in a variety of sonic styles.

Echo & The Bunnymen frontman Ian McCulloch has scrubbed a short U.S. solo tour planned for late March — which was to have featured just six concerts in San Francisco, Los Angeles, Chicago and New York — although his management told at least one of the clubs that the dates could be rescheduled for May.

Slim Dunlap, who joined The Replacements following the expulsion of Bob Stinson and played guitar on the band’s last two albums, was hospitalized this week after suffering a “severe” stroke that has, according to his wife, left the 60-year-old partially paralyzed, but still ‘sharp and aware.’

Erasure recently began taking orders for a new 2CD, 21-track concert album ‘Tomorrow’s World: Live at the Roundhouse,’ and the group is previewing four of the set’s tracks: “Fill Us With Fire” and “A Whole Lotta Love Run Riot,” both off last year’s ‘Tomorrow’s World’ LP, and the classics “Blue Savannah” and “Chorus.”

This week’s installment of Slicing Up Eyeballs on Strangeways Radio featured brand-new music from The Church’s Steve Kilbey, Lee Ranaldo of Sonic Youth and Pixies’ Black Francis, plus old favorites from Renegade Soundwave, The Smiths, XTC, The Soup Dragons, The Stone Roses and The Sisters of Mercy.

John Lydon’s resurrected Public Image Ltd. today announced a May 28 release date for ‘This is PiL,’ the post-punk act’s first new album in 20 years, and also unveiled the tracklist for the four-song Record Store Day EP that’s culled from the new record and which will hit shops a full month earlier.

Late-’80s Atlanta college rockers Uncle Green — who rechristened themselves 3 lb. Thrill during a major-label stint in the ’90s — will take the stage this weekend to celebrate a somewhat improbable feat: the release of their once-lost seventh album, a 32-song, double-disc set that’s been tied up in record-label limbo for 14 years.