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Dave Matthews Band will likely bow at No. 1 on the
Billboard 200 chart next week with "Big Whiskey and the GrooGrux King," which
industry prognosticators are suggesting could sell as much as 390,000 in its
first week. If it debuts at No. 1, the RCA set will be the band's fifth straight
studio album to do so.

(The band celebrated the album's release with a
concert at the relatively intimate Beacon Theater in New York. Be sure to check
out Billboard's extensive interview with Dave Matthews.)

The act's last
studio release, 2005's "Stand Up," entered with 465,000. Its three earlier
offerings -- 2002's "Busted Stuff," 2001's "Everyday" and 1998's "Before These
Crowded Streets" -- all also started with more than 400,000 in their debut
weeks.

"GrooGrux" also leads the Nielsen SoundScan Building Chart that
was released on June 3, which reflected unweighted sales through the close of
business on Tuesday, June 2. Billboard estimates the seven merchants who report
to Nielsen SoundScan's Building chart -- Trans World Entertainment, Best Buy,
iTunes, Starbucks, Borders, Target and Anderson Merchandisers -- comprise about
60% of all U.S. album sales.

Other albums in the hunt for high debuts
next week include 311's "Uplifter" (Volcano) and Taking Back Sunday's "New
Again" (Warner Bros.), which both look good for bows within the top 10. Rancid's
"Let The Dominoes Fall" (Hellcat/Epitaph) and Elvis Costello's "Secret, Profane
& Sugarcane" (Hear/CMG) also seem headed for top 20 entries.

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The Dirty Projectors' last two releases, "The Getty Address"
and "Rise Above," were lo-fi concept albums built around inscrutable song
structures. Given the Brooklyn-based indie band's track record, "Stillness Is
the Move" -- the group's pop-confection first single from the forthcoming album
"Bitte Orca" -- represents a jarring departure.

Over a shimmering guitar
loop and playful backing beat, guitarist Amber Coffman sings about the fear and
comfort of settling down, something the band may be experiencing stylistically.

"I've never identified with that idea of 'experimental.' I like music
that takes risks and tries new things," singer/guitarist Dave Longstreth said.
"But I like music that is assured and resolved too."

Slated for release
June 9 on Domino Records, "Bitte Orca" contains arrangements as intricate as
those on the band's previous albums. But tracks like "Cannibal Resource" and
"Two Doves" offer a more immediate approach.

The set was recorded in
Brooklyn and Portland, Oregon, and it's a departure from the band's previous
album-spanning concepts. "Rise Above," for instance, was a song-for-song
reinterpretation of punk band Black Flag's 1981 album "Damaged."

"The
restrictions of 'Rise Above' ... were just a means to a greater freedom," says
Longstreth, the band's principal songwriter. "'Bitte Orca' was crazy because
everything was permitted."

The new album is the Dirty Projectors' first
for Domino, which signed the six-member outfit in April 2008. In addition to
Coffman and Longstreth, the members are Angel Deradoorian, Brian Mcomber, Nat
Baldwin and Haley Dekle.

After releasing albums on the independent
labels Marriage, Western Vinyl and Dead Oceans, Longstreth is pleased to be part
of an imprint with "a history of bringing difficult, uncompromising music to the
center of the culture." (Among the label's releases are work by Franz Ferdinand,
Arctic Monkeys and The Kills.)

Even without the impending Domino debut,
2009 has been an eventful year for the Projectors. They collaborated with former
Talking Heads frontman David Byrne on "Knotty Pine," the lead track from Red Hot
Organization's star-studded "Dark Was the Night" compilation, released in
February. The band later performed alongside Byrne and other indie breakouts
like Feist and Bon Iver at a special "Dark Was the Night" concert event May 3 at
New York's Radio City Music Hall.

Five days later, the band played an
intimate show with Bjork at Manhattan's Housing Works Bookstore Cafe to an
audience of 300. The collaborations have helped raise the band's profile and
whet anticipation for the new CD.

The Dirty Projectors are on the road
in North America, opening for fellow Brooklyn band TV on the Radio, and perform
Friday (June 12) at the Bonnaroo festival in Tennessee. The act has also lined
up a brief U.S. headlining tour, beginning June 17 in Philadelphia.

Cameron Sharpe
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In between gigs with the Cult and
recent studio collaborations with the likes of Lupe Fiasco, the Cult's Ian
Astbury is in the process of adding the titles of theater producer and filmmaker
to his resume.

The singer is donating his time and talents to help raise
funds for a production of John Patrick Shanley's "Savage in Limbo" at downtown
Manhattan nightclub/venue The Bowery Electric. On June 12, the club will host an
acoustic performance by his new ensemble the Soft Revolt.

"We're really
a shop front, a guerilla-styled acoustic incarnation," he tells Billboard.com.
"It's not like a fully blown production, with a four-piece band and lights. It's
really just acoustic guitars—every now and then we'll bring an amp. It's just a
floating group of musicians, whoever's around at the time. We'll play seven to
nine songs, whatever we want to play, we might play a Television song, a Led
Zeppelin song, Patti Smith, Bowie, Doors songs, Cult songs, whatever we feel
like playing." The show will be the band's second for the production; the first
was in April.

"I think one of the last bastions of real craft is in the
theater, and writers like Shanley," explained Astbury, who notes that a recent
return to New York helped inspire him to get involved: "New York just kicks you
in the ass. You see these things and you just want to do something. Even though
the city has become gentrified, there's still a lot of diversity and progressive
culture in NY. It's about the only place I could live right now."

Also
keeping him busy are a string of independent film projects, including a
documentary based on Nobel Peace Prize-nominated author Andrea Smith's
"Conquest: Sexual Violence and American Indian Genocide." "It's to do with
matricide," Astbury said, "and how our culture destroys women, and how society
still isn't working for the woman.

"We haven't been in a place where
women have been in charge for thousands of years. That's one of the underlying
things of the documentary. It's great that Obama is the president, but he's not
a woman. I think Michelle would make a much better president, personally. It's
amazing that he's the president, but I think his wife could do a much better
job. I think a woman could do a much better job. Men just fuck things up."

Currently "in development," Astbury is working on the film with Mona
Lavelle, wife of James Lavelle of UNKLE, with whom the singer has collaborated.
It was through Lavelle that he recently teamed up with Lupe Fiasco, a fellow
UNKLE collaborator. "It's a work in progress based on a mutual affection of
Japanese street culture."

Long fascinated and moved by Native American
culture, Astbury is also working on two shorts films called "We Defy" and
"Ruins," the latter of which he describes as "almost a ‘Romeo and Juliet' story
set on a reservation."

"I'm finding myself more in a role as a
producer/writer/behind-the-scenes kind of guy, more like a cultural savant as
opposed to a frontman, although I still enjoy getting up onstage and
performing," he says.

Astbury will do just that when he rejoins Cult
partner Billy Duffy in July to kick off an international tour on which the band
will play its seminal, 1985 "Love" album from start to finish.

Featuring
modern rock staples "She Sells Sanctuary" and "Rain," the album, Astbury says,
"came off the back end of punk rock, and was one of the first MTV generation
records—1985, it was on point. The Cult got away from the post-modern thing a
little bit, when we got sort of lost in production, and made records like ‘Sonic
Temple' and ‘Ceremony,' but the ‘Love' album was made with 100 percent pure
earnestness. It's a pure album and it's so much more in harmony with where I'm
at right now. I feel more connected to that record than probably any other
record the Cult made.

"[Playing the album live] gives some context to
what the Cult are, in terms of what we do have a claim to—building this
post-modern world. We're one of the principal architects to that world, in a
way. For me, it's kind of like, ‘Hey, wait a minute, I don't want my legacy to
be ‘Sonic Temple.' It's amazing how many people come up and say, ‘Hey dude,
where's the cowboy hat and long hair?' I haven't looked like that in like 16
years," he said.

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