If you hadn’t heard of this band, you’re in for a treat. Oregon folk-bluegrass-punk act Larry And His Flask have signed to Silver Sprocket Records and are hitting the road this spring.

To check out the band’s slew of U.S. and Canada tour dates, check out their website’s shows page. The band will be playing with the likes of ska punk legends Streetlight Manifesto and the young folk punk outfit Greenland Is Melting.

Boston punks Street Dogs have announced their tour, entitled the ‘Crooked Drunken Sons Tour,’ for this spring. Joining them will be Boston ska-punk outfit Have Nots, and Lenny Lashney (formerly of Darkbuster). Check out the dates here.

The latest Street Dogs release, a self-titled album, came out in 2010.

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Las Vegas punkers Last Call have announced a Western U.S. tour for the end of this winter. Check out the dates here.

At the moment, the band is on tour with A Phoenix Forever.

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AOL’s Noisecreep caught up with former Psychos bassist and Agnostic Front frontman Roger Miret for a track-by-track rundown of Roger Miret and the Disasters new release, “Gotta Get Up Now.”  The album was released this week through People Like You Records.

As an added bonus, AOL is streaming the album in its entirety here today.

Read Dying Scene’s review of the album here while you listen.

Just in time for Valentine’s Day,  Hopeless Records announced today that they are releasing a digital-only compilation entitled “Love Is Hopeless.”  The comp, which is available for purchase on February 8th, features Hopeless artists contributing unreleased rarities (including a few acoustic tracks and a few interesting covers), and pre-orders will score you a “Love Is Hopeless” bracelet and a Valentine’s Day card!  Who says romance is dead?  Check here for the tracklist.

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Get your passports ready, kiddoes.  NOFX are taking fellow Fat Wreck mates (and frequent touring partners) Teenage Bottlerocket and Old Man Markley on a European vacation this April.  The combination of festival dates and one-offs starts in Germany before making stops in France, Spain, Belgium and Switzerland.   Cash in all your frequent flier miles, and get all the dates here.

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Philadelphia pop-punk act The Wonder Years have posted a lengthy studio update regarding their upcoming album which is expected to be released in the summer. In the update the band discussed the song-writing process, influences and just about everything you’d want to know about the album except the release date and title.

Check it out here.

The Wonder Years last release was their 2010 No Sleep album, The Upsides.  The band has some shows scheduled in the UK this month before heading back stateside in February. Head to their Dying Scene Shows page for more information.

Hailing from the budding metropolis of Makanda, Illinois, (population roughly the size of a freshman English class at a mid-sized university) The Heat Tape are set to release their debut album, “Raccoon Valley Recordings,” on February 15th through Red Scare.  Fronted by Brett Hunter (The Copyrights, Dear Landlord), The Heat Tape were formed in a trailer park in Southern Illinois and tag themselves as “4-track garage lo-fi punk” on their bandcamp page.  “4-track,” “garage” and “lo-fi” all hit the nail on the head.  Punk? Certainly punk inspired (most songs hover around the two minute mark and are filled with fuzzed out, three-chord goodness), but they strike me as a good, old-fashioned, indie garage rock band.

The opening notes of the album’s opener, “Spend It,” are oozing with Titus Andronicus; pretty good company given that the latter has been a critical darling for the last couple years.  Subtract the Springsteen-y Civil War references and the similarities between this and last year’s “The Monitor” (one of my favorite albums of 2010) are everywhere.

But where Andronicus focused their songwriting on journeying away from their Jersey home and shipping up to Boston, The Heat Tape sound like the brain droppings or many a college grad who has been at that point of trying to forge their way through their twenties and the spectrum of emotions that that entails; themes like love (“Idle Man”), lust (“Skin”) and death (the morbidly direct “Grandma’s Guns”) are captured in catchy, sub-three-minute (and usually barely two minutes) therapy sessions. Top-notch songwriting that will punch you in the solar plexus on more than one occasion.

“21^st Century Turd” finds our self-deprecating protagonist coming to terms with being largely irrelevant, though the line about it being funny to wake on your birthday with nowhere to be comes across as more poignant than comical. “Quotes from an Unopened Letter” finds those disappointments getting a little more personal: “The more I try, the worser I get; I guess I just didn’t try hard enough.”  “Feel No Good” is a story that many a twenty-something has recited ad nauseum when those long nights of trying to hold on to the college party lifestyle  bleed a little too far into “real life.’  The realizations keep coming when “Four Track” has Hunter revealing that the “only thing left of (his) youth is the hiss in (his) four-track mind;” how many a failed singer/songwriter of our generation can echo that sentiment?!?  Perhaps nowhere are the lyrics more weighty and “real life” than in the album’s second-to-last track, “Crackin’ Up,” which repeats the line “I’m crackin’ up, fallin’ apart and I can’t stand the way that you keep smiling.”  The music sounds a little too sunny for the first couple of minutes, but eventually catches up to the desperation and the earnestness that such vocals would suggest.  Some people turn to booze, drugs or, worse yet, years of therapy to work through most of these issues, the album’s closer, “Idle Man,” finds Hunter “going crazy so (he) writes a million songs.”  We can only hope that this means Hunter and the boys will release a steady stream of material this catchy and relevant in short order!

**The Album Reviews published on Dying Scene are written and submitted by fans of punk music, just like you. If you disagree with an album’s rating, feel free to voice your opinion and give it your own rating in the comments. If you’d like to submit your own review do it here.

Canadian reggae rockers Bedouin Soundclash have posted the music video for their song “Elongo”.

You can watch the video here.

The song appears on their latest album “Light The Horizon” which was released September 28th on Pirates Blend Records.

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Yesterday Fearless Records released yet another comp for their ongoing “Punk Goes” series. This time it’s “Punk Goes X: Songs From the 2011 X-games” The comp features Sparks The Rescue, The Word Alive, Hit The Lights, Woe Is Me, Every Avenue and more.

You check out the tracklisting here.

You can also stream Spark The Rescue’s cover of Jane’s Addiction’s “Mountain Song” here and The Word Alive’s cover of the Ozzy Osbourne’s song “Over The Mountain” here. Both of which are on the eleven song comp.

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