Langhorne Slim saddles up for the inaugural Paste tour alongside Jason Isbell and the 400 Unit, Jesse Sykes and Phil Wandscher and Mimicking Birds for a 15-date run starting October 12.

Paste Magazine recently ceased print publication but assured fans the tour is still on, and most shows are all ages. The New York City date on October 20 takes place during the CMJ Music Marathon.

Slim and his band have a few California and Arizona shows prior to the tour, and they wrap things up on October 30 Fort Hamilton in Bermuda. Yep, that Bermuda. With any luck they’ll avoid past fiascos like this one:

Traveling musicians, make sure Chicago is on your next tour.

The Windy City, once hailed as the humble whipping boy of New York City, San Francisco and L.A., is busting–gloriously–out of its cultured little britches. Chicago is schoolin’ the coasts in all things gastro and sonic. Take, for instance, when Graham Elliot Bowles served as the first “culinary director” at this year’s sprawling Lollapalooza festival.

As if the coasts don’t suffer enough from Grant Aschatz envy (the chef-wundergenius behind Chi town’s Alinea, and widely considered the best chef in the country), covetous indie beat/grub heads have even more reasons to grumble: Guitarist/chef James Toland will soon open a restaurant devoted to punk rock and the perfect sous vide poussin.

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Andrew Bird sets out on a brief jaunt of Southern European churches next month before playing a few more Stateside in Boston, D.C. and Chicago in December. Churches, you say? It’s the second installment of his Gezelligheid shows, borrowed from the snuggly Dutch.

Fat Possum will also release Bird’s instrumental album, Useless Creatures, on October 25. The album formerly accompanied his recent full-length, Noble Beast, as bonus material.

Earlier this year Mr. Bird made a heroic appearance alongside UI’s own Margaret Cho in her video for “I’m Sorry.” More on how the love/hate/comedy album came about below.

Sacha Baron Cohen has been cast to play Freddie Mercury in an upcoming film based on British band Queen. Guitarist Brian Mays told the BBC “We have Sacha Baron Cohen, which will probably be a shock to a lot of people, but he’s been talking with us for a long time.”

The film will follow the band’s rise to fame and what many see as the pinnacle of their career, Queen’s performance at Live Aid in 1985. The event was held simultaneously at London’s Wembley stadium and Philadelphia’s John F. Kennedy stadium, and broadcast to over two billion viewers in 60 countries.

The currently untitled film is set to begin production next year, and British screenwriter Peter Morgan (The Queen, Frost/Nixon) is writing the script.

Maybe Cohen’s brother Erran will make a cameo, too.

Shootyz Groove (an aggressively zany rap rock band from da Bronx), reminds me of a frightening mash-up between “Big Pussy,” Bigfoot and a cigar-smoking Winnie the Pooh who constantly gets into jams involving broads, hotrods, hustlers and pimps named T-Bones and Tommy the Toe.

Unsurprisingly, in interviews with Uncensored, the boys had many thoughts on the fascinating manners in which the worlds of food and music collide.

Check out why their “whole dance thing”–you know that “dance shit”…”from big beats to trance”–is analogous to a giant buffet:

Still hungry? Wash it down with a giant glass of chocolate milk and find out why that innocuous-seeming, mom-approved quaff of pure indulgence led to veritable barfaramas on a recent tour:

Toro y Moi packs up the van for a fall tour split between the U.S. and Europe next month. The South Carolinian plays select dates with Foals, Nosaj Thing and Jogger, and gets some practice in at Miami’s Electric Pickle next week.

Toro y Moi also has a svelte new disco-inspired project called Les Sins out via Carpark Records on November 9. The singles “Lina” and “Youth Gone” are streaming here. We bet this will prompt a remix or two.

When Lady Gaga so much as flutters an eyelash she creates a tsunami of wild reactions and bizarre media analysis delivered with as much passion and as little logic as a declaration of war or a proposal of marriage.