Pittsburgh pop-punk act Punchline are streaming their upcoming album, Delightfully Pleased, in its entirety right here.  The album is being officially released tomorrow (August 10th) on Modern Short Stories and TDR Records.

The band released their last album, Just Say Yes, on Modern Short Stories in 2008.

Post hardcore act, This Romantic Tragedy, will be heading to Florida late August to record their first full length CD for Tragic Hero Records with producer Tom Denney at the controls and producing the album and producer Andrew Wade mixing the production.  The band will spend one month in Ocala, Florida writing, recording, editing, engineering with the former guitarist of A Day To Remember, Tom Denney before sending the recordings off to be mixed by Andrew Wade who will be recording the new ADTR CD during the same time period. The CD will then be sent off to West Westside Music to be mastered. The new This Romantic Tragedy CD has a projected release date of late 2010.

The band is streaming a new song (in demo form) on their MySpace page titled The Lies We Live which will most likely appear on the full length

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To be honest, I had never heard of Mall’d to Death before picking up their CD at an Off With Their Heads show from In Defence’s merch table. But from what I gather they’re one of the newest additions to the crowded list of formidable Minneapolis pop-punk bands.

Although they don’t sound all that unlike Dillinger Four or Banner Pilot, the twist comes in their “econopunk” style according to their Myspace. I guess by econopunk they mean that everything is short and efficient, from their songs to their CD as a whole. You could blink and miss a whole tribute to Lance Hahn (RIP) on the 58-second “The Hymns of J Church” or the ode to making use of junk that people throw out on the 59-second “Live in a Dumpster Dive.”

A lot of the songs almost seem like pop-punk meets hardcore, which makes sense when you consider the band’s members have played both for pop-punk bands as well as hardcore bands. Some of the songs don’t even have choruses, which is unusual for pop-punk but fairly normal for hardcore. “Young Man on a Downloading Spree” has really gravelly hardcore vocals while it humorously lists off a bunch of 80’s hardcore acronyms like SOA, DYS, DRI, TSOL, and such. Sometimes the songs seem like they would be funny from the titles but end up rather serious. “Bomb the Defense Industry!” (obviously a reference to Bomb the Music Industry!) ponders war profiteering as an option to make end’s meet and references the album’s title: “I can’t make a living if I’m making a killing.” On somewhat of a similar note, the singer contemplates selling plasma to pay bills on “Blood For Gas Money” shouting “It’s not the saline causing pain/But all the thoughts inside my brain/That there’s not more to life than this/Lying down and clenching fists.”

The only real bad thing about this CD is how short it is. But it’s short and sweet and it will leave you coming back for more.

Wow, now here’s some interesting news.  Apparently after the Denver Warped Tour a couple drunken members of Pennywise allegedly attacked members of North Carolina screamo act Alesana and trashed their bus.  Police were called and Alesana frontman Shawn Milke  provided this statement to Altpress:

“Just to clear the air of any rumors, last night upon returning to our bus after a night out with friends, both our band and our tour manager were attacked blindly by by two very drunk members of Pennywise. Alesana is a non-violent band and always has been.  We do not encourage or willingly participate in any violent activities.  The two guys entered our bus and, without any instigating on our part, began punching us and trashing our bus.  We are eternally sorry that this event took place and had it not been for the Denver police showing up and restraining our assailants, the night could have been tragic.  Luckily, no one in our camp was injured.”

It’s unclear which members of Pennywise did the alleged ass kicking (Fletcher? new singer Zoli Teglas?) but we’ll keep you posted as details unfold.

Sundowner, the side project of Chris McCaughan of The Lawrence Arms, is streaming their entire new album, We Chase the Waves, right here.  The album is being officially released tomorrow (August 10th) on Asian Man Records.

Sundowner’s debut album, Four One Five Two, was released on Red Scare Records on March 13, 2007.

News about the upcoming Weezer release just keeps getting weirder.  First, we find out they’ve signed with Epitaph Records, and now this.  The band has decided to name their new album “Hurley” and use a picture of the former Lost star Jorge Garcia (he played Hurley on the show) as the cover art.  And that’s it.  They’re not even putting “Weezer” on the cover; just a picture of Jorge’s face. Here’s singer Rivers Cuomo’s explanation for why:

“We struggled super hard trying to come up with an album title, trying to find some kind of phrase that summed up the whole aesthetic behind the album: ‘Heavy Mental,’ ‘Smaller Than Life,'” Cuomo says. “I was coming up with all kinds of stuff, but ultimately, we just went with some random word that doesn’t really have anything to do with anything. I just loved this photo of Jorge Garcia — it just had this amazing vibe. We didn’t want to do a fourth self-titled record and we knew people would refer to it as ‘the Hurley record’ even if left it without that title, so we just called it ‘Hurley.’ No words are on the cover because all we wanted was his amazing face.”

Hurley will be released September 14th.

Taking Back Sunday have released a video of Carpathia off their upcoming CD/DVD Live From Orensanz.  Check it out here.

The album is taken from the two acoustic shows they filmed and recorded in December ‘09 at Angel Orensanz in New York City and will be available for purchase on August 17th.

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Ontario’s progressive metal-punk act, Protest The Hero, will be heading into the studio on August 30th to record their newest album.  They haven’t leaked any info yet about the coming release other than it will contain more than 10 songs, but we’ll keep you posted as details surface.

Vagrant released the band’s last album, Fortress in 2008.

The Word Alive are streaming a brand new song on their purevolume page.  It’s titled The Wretched and it will appear on the band’s upcoming album, Deceiver, out August 31st on Fearless Records.

The band’s last album, Empire, was also released on Fearless Records in 2009.

Bummer.  Another great band bites the dust.  According to facebook, twitter and myspace updates from the band’s profiles it looks like Crime In Stereo is no more.  The announcements don’t say much more than “R.I.P. Crime In Stereo… (2002 – 2010)” but if we hear any additional info we’ll let you know.

Their latest album album, I Was Trying To Describe You To Someone released February 23 on Bridge Nine Records.