The best-selling boy band has dusted off the cobwebs and re-emerged as a fully fledged man band, bearing the battle scars of climbing the charts and then fending for themselves when suddenly no one gave a shit.

One of the grunge-eras most loved and hated acts played the part of rock stars at Saturday night’s performance at GM Place but failed to get more than cued claps and whistles out of a sparse crowd.

The punk rockers' latest release, The Bright Lights of America, is a hodgepodge of steel-toed moshers, arena-ready scorchers, and unpunky pop diversions. Musical eccentricities aside, the band’s focus on political and social activism hasn’t changed.

Growing up in a double-wide in the Deep South while watching the comedic and criminal comings and goings of trailer-park denizens sounds like the perfect rock ’n’ roll boot camp for any all-American, guitar-strumming, longhaired dude.

For any new band, getting pegged early on as being at the forefront of an important underground movement can quickly overshadow the music itself.

The celebrity titan and pussy powerhouse has seamlessly transitioned from pop provocateur to bridging the gap between the PTA and the trend of the day.

Dean Wareham comes across as a nostalgic kind of guy, which is understandable considering that after more than 20 years in the game he’s perhaps best known as the guy who built and then broke up Galaxie 500, one of the most loved 1980s indie bands.

According to Campbell, there is also less and less to be excited about when it comes to indie rock music in general. The singer, who formed Stars in Toronto but is now based in Vancouver, says today's hipsters are being shortchanged by a scene where sticky angst and sweaty exuberance are being replaced by cautious moves and calculated career paths.

You charge the music section $20 for a copy of the new Radiohead album, and we reward you with a Payback Time T-shirt, two CDs off the Straight 's Top 50, and two tickets to a LiveNation club show taking place in Vancouver within the next four weeks. Here's this week's winning whine.

Even with pink-snapper shots, holidays in rehab, and coke-fuelled DUIs dominating the $1.99 supermarket-tabloid headlines these days, there's still one sure-fire way for movie and music stars to grab the public's fickle, yet eternally perverted, attention: the celebrity sex tape.

At Deer Lake Park on Wednesday, May 23

Volta (Warner)

Björk is a pop-culture conundrum. At once demure and demented, she is part creative control freak and part super-flaky garden gnome. Known best to the masses for an outer-space aesthetic that teeters somewhere between pagan, peculiar, and Pluto, the princess of problematic prose is arguably as inanely insane as she is a whip-smart genius–or is she?

With all the swapping that goes on between bands like Stars, Broken Social Scene, the Weakerthans, and the Dears, the Canadian indie-rock scene features more one-offs and guest spots than a karaoke jam at Timbaland's house. Among the many blatant band hoppers is Andrew Whiteman.

At a Metric gig last year in Calgary, the Canadian indie-rock band’s frontwoman, Emily Haines, stopped the show cold to scold a young hipster sandwiched between the annoying all-ages crowd and the front-of-stage bouncers. The music silenced, Haines singled out the girl for her egregious use of a cellphone camera during the show. The svelte singer implored the mortified wannabe mod to live in the moment and stop trying so hard to capture it.

The Mom I’d Like to Fuck is the paradox of poon. The MILF is both a giver of life and a giver of killer blow jobs. She knows how to make great muffins and has a fantastically well groomed muff herself. The MILF is part nurturer, part nympho, and is all about getting her rubber-band body back in shape six weeks postpop.

A band’s bio is usually heavy on slick, market-focused, label-driven drivel; beyond childhood inspirations and awards, such glorified press releases tend to provide very little interesting information. The bio for New York punk-funk four-piece the Rapture, however, is completely different. In a dot matrix–style font, the Rapture’s story is summed up in four simple sentence fragments: “ORIGIN OF THE BAND. The Rapture. Formed in San Diego, moved to New York, slept under bridge.

With so many newfound fans, Paul Oakenfold has taken steps to ensure mass confusion doesn't break out in the record shops.

More than just another girl from the O.C., the singer is a cultural touchstone

Stockholm pop-rockers the Shout Out Louds describe their music as drunken, lovesick, inspired, and electrified. For the members of this quintessentially Scandinavian five-piece, who were raised listening to British and American rock music, wearing woollen sweaters, and forgetting to brush their hair, it seems life imitates art, at least when they're out on tour.

Harmonies for the Haunted (RCA)

Two decades after their 1982 album Geography fused industrial and electronic music to create something groundbreaking, the members of Front 242 are widely regarded as genuine legends by DJs, producers, and punters alike. If you're looking for the origins of microchip-generated music and its countless offshoots, a key strand starts in early-'80s Belgium with four lads who were more interested in the manipulation of sound for art's sake than they were in becoming big-time stars.

Sitting on the inside ledge of an open window in his New York City apartment, Christopher Milo watches the elevated subway trains trundle past every few minutes. For a guy who spent most of his life in small-town central Florida, the nonstop noise and poorly ventilated lodgings are all part of the quintessential DJ-in-New York experience.

At Club 340 on Saturday, October 29

Dangerous and Moving (Interscope/Universal)

Clay Aiken talks like Dr. Phil, acts like Mister Rogers, and looks like Alfred E. Neuman.

Behrouz Nazari figures he's travelled in excess of 300,000 miles in his 20 years as a globetrotting DJ and producer. Fresh off a nonstop stint of gigs that in less than two weeks took him from Portugal to Athens, Barcelona to Valencia, Switzerland to Washington, D.C., DJ Behrouz is taking a quick break to sort out a new studio in the Bay Area before heading out on another dizzying spin around the world, which will include stops in Tunisia, Egypt, and Mexico.

Reached at the slick New York City hipster hotel, the Rivington, Metric frontwoman Emily Haines is doing her best to sleep off her previous evening's performance at Gotham's famed Bowery Ballroom. Sounding like she's swallowed a bucket of nails, Haines asks for a five-minute reprieve to go pee and get some water. It's noon, and another day of press, sound checks, and singing begins for the Toronto-based musician.

The hardware has been handed out at the third annual Western Canadian Music Awards, held this past Sunday (October 23) at the Commodore Ballroom.

Rain Check Jogging is a year-round obsession in Vancouver. Rain or shine, the sea wall and city sidewalks are prone to the pitterpatter of cross-trainers as our city's notoriously health-conscious residents maintain their outdoor aerobic routines through the fall and winter months. The Running Room Workout Duffle-$49.99 at the Running Room (various locations)-is ideal for wet-weather exercise.

The Western Canadian Music Awards have finally crossed the Prairies, hopped the Rockies, and landed in Vancouver. Today until Sunday (October 20 to 23) will see the third installment of the event, which has previously been held in Regina and Calgary. This year, the WCMAs include a music-industry conference, a multivenue, multigenre music festival, and two awards shows.

Los Angeles rap trio Time Machine specializes in the kind of socially aware, pre-bling-and-bitches rhymes associated with early-'90s hip-hop outfits like A Tribe Called Quest and De La Soul. With a sound that is linked so closely with the past, however, the group has been pegged by some critics as a revival act with nothing new to offer.

At GM Place on Thursday, September 29

If hanging out in a North London cemetery late at night wearing white robes and ivy crowns to sing olde worlde songs in long-forgotten languages seems kind of strange and morbid to you, you're not the only one. For the eight ladies of the Mediaeval Baebes, this was the scene of their first show nearly 10 years ago, and since then they've moved from crooning over coffins to singing centre-stage in venues around the world.

Thanks to a generation of health- and safety-conscious parents, kids just aren't trick-or-treating like they used to. For most households, long gone are the days of doorbells ringing nonstop from early until late on October 31; heading out dressed as ghouls, ghosts, and princesses to collect pillowcases full of sugary treats is not on the Halloween agenda for many children.

From the age of 15, Sydney-raised songstress Sally Seltmann indulged in old musicals and movies starring the likes of Marilyn Monroe and Audrey Hepburn. Today, those influences reverberate under the surface of her first full-length release, The Last Beautiful Day. The album's sweet, shimmering pop tunes are padded with strings, organs, horns, and samples, all layered in dizzying arrangements that complement Seltmann's wispy vocals.

At first pass, the seemingly boundless, disjointed, tinnitus-inducing soundscapes of Black Dice can be challenging for even the most open-minded noiseheads. It's not unusual to see people walk out of the band's live shows, confused and muttering something about bleeding eardrums as they stumble, disoriented, into the night.

The south Main Street neighbourhood of East Vancouver is a study in harmonious contrasts. The turn-of-the-century brick buildings still standing strong are squeezed between the contemporary sheet-metal exteriors of live/work artists lofts; the wafts of various ethnic cuisines intermingle in competition for passersby; and the indie coffeehouses all have lineups.

At GM Place on Tuesday, September 27

The Last Beautiful Day (Arts & Crafts)

Army of Me-Remixes and Covers (One Little Indian)

Psychic Pilots Union (Independent)

At GM Place on Friday, September 2

At the Vancouver Art Gallery on Friday, August 26. Continues every fourth Friday of the month through November

With its rim of evergreen magnolia trees and prickly malnourished lawns, Cathedral Park appears to be little more than an unremarkable square at the corner of Dunsmuir and Richards streets. Though on the surface this inner-city green space resembles so many others-an aging water feature with chipped blue paint and three low-pressure spouts, too much cement, and circa-Expo 86 metalwork-its Bruno Freschi-designed elements serve a dual purpose.

At Deer Lake Park on Saturday, August 20

At Deer Lake Park on Sunday, August 14