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Cary Moskovitz of the Haw River Rounders just announced the band is playing at the Blue Bayou in Hillsborough     tonight at 8:30.

According to Moskovitz, the band will collect money to donate to Partners in Health, which has an office in Haiti    and has been providing medical and food aid for the last 10 years.

An ostensible mistake this morning on the venerable All Music Guide: Michael Jackson, dead since May 25, 2009.

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The pockmarked path of devoting your new band to a vintage sound rides bumpy at best. It’s often a process of osmosis, though, that leads one band to sound like a whole bunch of older bands—less looking directly in the rearview mirror for something to recreate and more just playing some variation on what’s funneled into your mind.

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• Just plain folks making records.

New York band The Pains of Being Pure at Heart has received an unusual amount of comparisons to its predecessors. Some have been fair, like early My Bloody Valentine or the Jesus and Mary Chain. Others, like Blink 182, have just been plain weird. It’s an interesting question: Does a band need to have an original sound to matter? And should the band be discounted if the sensors of past musical obscurity and good ol’ age are working to that band’s advantage? Maybe it shouldn’t be that simple, and usually, it’s not that simple.

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• Take the train to Humble Pie.

Not long after moving to town, I remember seeing a particularly great set from The Countdown Quartet at Humble Pie, the longtime Harrington St. restaurant in Raleigh. In fact, my roommate and I have talked about Ray Duffey's drumming that night—in particular, the flawless swing he pulled from his pockets that night—ever since. Lots of Raleigh favorites—Kenny Roby, The Rosebuds, Countdown—played a lot of gigs at Humble Pie early this decade, but music's been mostly absent at the place for several years.

Peter Lamb, who went on to play saxophone with The Countdown before the band played its farewell show in August of 2007, is looking to change that:

During South by (look, that's what the cool kids call it), news ripples through Austin like taco wrappers in the breeze: Who's scheduled to throw down at the Fader Fort with whom, who's pouring the strongest margaritas gratis, just which Vivian Girl just ducked into that Portajohn yonder. So what was on everybody's lips Wednesday, as the tech geeks from SXSWi said their farewells to Austin and the, uh, tech geeks from the music portion of the program were ushered in? "Man, Wednesday sucks."

Yep; in the middle of the single greatest gather of bands since, y'know South by Southwest 2008, there were a lotta folks wandering around without a plan, griping about the lack of luster in whatever showcase they "had" (this is groaned more than spoken) to go to. Legendary sorts like Roky Erickson and Echo and the Bunnymen took to the showcase stages last night, as did theater-fillers like the Decemberists and Camera Obscura, and just about every indie band under the sun who could catch an early morning flight popped in at a day party or two. And you know what? It did suck. Kinda.