The Foo Fighters played a surprise show last night with Queens Of The Stone Age, thrown together by Verizon to celebrate the release of the new Blackberry Storm. To get in, you had to play that game where you text some retarded phrase to some weird five digit number. If you got a reply and jumped through a couple hoops, you ‘won,’ but then you had to be one of the first 800 ‘winners’ to beat the traffic into Hollywood to be there by 7:30…

After the text message game, I expected the Avalon event to be a corporate whorehouse, but I’ve gotta admit, Verizon handled it pretty well.

Heart On is the upcoming third studio album from the Eagles Of Death Metal, known to their friends, families and victims as Jesse Hughes and Josh Homme- the latter, of course, being the nucleus and founder of the seminal gloomy sex rock outfit Queens Of The Stone Age. The Eagles’ garage-glam scuzz metal hops up a few rungs on the danceability scale this time around, as they dig into fuzzier blues leanings and deeper shades of chunk-riffage than their previous releases.

Clever, jagged percussion leads the parade more often than not on the album, leading one to believe that Josh Homme is, quite possibly, just as happy behind the kit as he is on the mic. Whatever the case, his playground relationship with Jesse Hughes has spawned three albums of solid sport-fuck rock joy all about chicks, man. And the world is a better place for it.

People In Planes are having a pretty good year so far. The five piece rock unit (Gareth Jones on vocals, Peter Roberts on guitar, Ian Russel on keys, Kris Blight on bass & John Maloney behind the kit) from Wales, UK have just released their second LP, Beyond The Horizon, to critical acclaim and rapidly widening audiences. Through raw talent and determination, these guys have come to possess the right kind of sound, style and blistering, brooding rock delivery that’s currently winning over American crowds as the band tours the country over the next two months with revived rock heroes the Toadies.

We tracked down PIP singer Gareth Jones to talk a bit about Neil Young, the addictive qualities of American politics and the sputtering state of the music industry today.

I discovered The Gutter Twins’ debut LP Saturnalia a month or two too late to give it a formal jerking off here, but I was pleasantly surprised to see a relatively substantial eight song EP hit shelves out of nowhere on Tuesday. Saturnalia is one of the best, most overlooked albums of the year so far, and this new one, Adorata, is close behind.

For those of you who don’t know, The Gutter Twins is a super-duo of sorts featuring Mark Lanegan (Screaming Trees, Queens Of The Stone Age, awesomeness) and Greg Dulli (of The Twilight Singers, and the Afghan Whigs, who were supposedly really great).

Queens Of The Stone Age lost a very close personal friend on July 2nd. Natasha Shneider, from the band Eleven, died of cancer. She had joined QOTSA along with partner Alain Johannes for most (if not all) of the Lullabies To Paralyze tours, and showed up on many a Queens song, and many a Desert Sessions song. She was a beautiful woman, and a talented musician, who likely appears on more than one album you consider among your favorites of all time if you’re a regular here.

So Homme and Queens Of The Stone Age organized a concert to celebrate her life, inviting all of her friends; All proceeds to go to the Natasha Shneider Memorial Fund. Tickets were $100 each, and the event sold out.