Simply awful news out of New Orleans tonight, as word emerges that Alex Chilton of the peerless power-pop act Big Star has died of an apparent heart attack just days before he was scheduled to perform with the reconstituted band at the South By Southwest music festival in Austin, Texas.

Patience, Duran Duran fans: U.S. release dates continue to shift for the band’s upcoming reissues, as the expanded editions of 1981 debut ‘Duran Duran’ and 1983’s ‘Seven and the Ragged Tiger’ this week were bumped to April 20, while the remastered editions of 1986’s ‘Notorious’ and 1988’s ‘Big Thing’ were pushed back to to July 6.

The reformatted Public Image Ltd. will kick off its upcoming North American tour with a special pre-Coachella concert on April 13 at Los Angeles’ Club Nokia, the band announced tonight.

Ted Leo and the Pharmacists cover Tears for Fears’ ‘Everybody Wants to Rule the World’ in the debut of the A.V. Club’s new ‘Undercover’ series, which will feature bands covering tunes by The Smiths, The Cure, Depeche Mode, R.E.M. and more.

Spin magazine recently dropped a goldmine into Google Books: scans of nearly every issue of the music mag, from its May 1985 debut up through October 2009. We’ve flipped through the ’85 to ’90 issues, creating links to stories about The Cure, R.E.M., The Replacements, Morrissey, New Order and many, many more.

Drummer Martin Atkins — who manned the kit in Public Image Ltd., Ministry, Pigface and Killing Joke, among other groups — today posted this absolutely brilliant video in which he uses one of the replica film canisters that housed PiL’s ‘Metal Box’ to bake fudge brownies.

This week’s new releases include ‘Purity of Essence,’ a new studio album from the Hoodoo Gurus (out in Australia, anyway); ‘Sunflower Stories,’ a four-track EP from the Cocteau Twins’ Robin Guthrie; and an Audio Fidelity gold-disc reissue of The B-52s’ ‘Cosmic Thing.’