New York City’s Baruch College played host Saturday night to a star-studded tribute to Big Star’s beloved ‘Third/Sister Lovers’ album, performed by R.E.M.’s Michael Stipe and Mike Mills, plus Matthew Sweet, members of Teenage Fanclub and Yo La Tengo, and surviving Big Star member Jody Stephens.

Duncan Sheik will reinterpret a dozen ’80s alternative and synthpop classics this June with the release of ‘Covers 80s,’ which will include new takes on old favorites by The Cure, Depeche Mode, New Order, Love and Rockets, The Smiths and more.

This week’s new releases include reissues of four late-’90s, early-’00s Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds titles, The Charlatans’ ‘Us and Us Only’ and The Icicle Works’ ‘The Small Price of a Bicycle’; plus new albums by Transvision Vamp’s Wendy James and Men at Work’s Colin Hay.

The playlist from tonight’s ‘Dark Wave’ — the weekly Sunday night ‘darker side of alternative’ show on Sirius XM’s 1st Wave — features tracks by Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds, Red Lorry Yellow Lorry, The Sisters of Mercy, Japan, Nitzer Ebb and more.

The first tease of Kate Bush’s upcoming ‘Director’s Cut’ album — which revisits tracks from ‘The Sensual World’ and ‘The Red Shoes’ — has surfaced online: a 30-second sample of the new version of ‘Deeper Understanding’ that finds Bush’s incomparable vocals run through Auto-Tune on the chorus.

With his new album ‘Several Shades of Why’ now in stores and a U.S. tour underway, Dinosaur Jr guitar slayer J Mascis today released a weird animated video for the record’s first single, ‘Not Enough.’

As a prelude to tonight’s Los Angeles tour stop, synthpop vets Orchestral Manoeuvres in the Dark played a half-hour in-store set at Amoeba Music in Hollywood yesterday afternoon — and you can watch the whole thing right here, thanks to the indie record chain.