As promised last week, COACHELLA made its "big announcement for 2012" this morning, and no, it's not a Smiths reunion. California's already-massive spring music and arts festival will double in size next year, expanding across two weekends under the blazing Indio sun to accomodate increasing ticket demand.

We're handing out the 2011 BMP Awards -- No shit! Actual handmade craptastic trophies! Announced by people you may recognize! It all goes down at Brighton Music Hall on June 15. (Our annual Best Music Poll issue hits the stands hours later, and the results will be available for posterity at bestmusicpoll.

I'm heading to Detroit tonight. In fact, by the time you read this, it's likely that I'll be en route. While you're lounging about this Memorial Day weekend, drinking all the beers and surely enjoying some ace tunes, I'll be doing the same, except the tunes that I'm ingesting will have a much lower bass resonance and will be moving to a 4/4 drum kick.

So you’re sitting at your desk, looking at the clock. Not even noon. More than five hours before you can ghost-town that drab-ass fluorescent-bulb office, breaking out through the front doors of doom like some pale-faced Boo Radley motherfucker finally allowed to see the light of a beautiful summer day.

It was a awesome sight a week ago last Monday night at O’Brien’s Pub in Allston, where a punk bar once famous for a guy taking a shit in the middle of the floor during a show was host to a boisterous queer dance party where drag queens hit the stage to belt out Cher and Rihanna jams. But just as tight as a tuck between the legs was the bizarre live performance from HUNNIE BUNNIES, a sort-of Peaches-on-crack electro-noise duo that threw down a kamikaze of beats, screams, and loops while draped in ratty old gowns and covered in some sort of weird lubricant.

GA'AN, Skimask, and Fat History Month tore up Allston’s Problem House last night. In between fits of allergic sneezing in a dusty basement, I stood at the front of the room, next to the only light bulb, soaking up every second of it.

The set from Chicago trio Ga'an consisted of jams that swayed nimbly across a psychedelic progressive soundscape, very reminiscent of Manhattan’s electro psych band Gang Gang Dance.

Ellie Goulding is at the HoB on July 27

On Sale Today

Ellie Goulding | July 27 at the House of Blues, Boston | $25-$35 | On sale at 8 pm @ livenation.com

On Sale Thursday, May 26

Stephen Marley: "Revelation Part 1: The Roots of Life Tour" | July 15 at the House of Blues, Boston | $25-$35 | On sale at 10 am @ livenation.

Columbus, Ohio trio TIMES NEW VIKING started making distortion-heavy, home-recorded noise pop in 2005, later releasing records with Siltbreeze, Matador, Wichita, and, last month, Merge. Their new album, Dancer Equired!, is their first studio recording -- it loses much of the gritty, lo-fi hiss previously pinned as the band’s defining quality (Editor's note: we gave it 2.

Let this be a lesson to all -- you lose in the finals of the Rock And Roll Rumble and your next video will be shot on a giant 1991 Sears Roebuck solid state camcorder.

Ahh, oh well, this new SPIRIT KID video still looks rad. "The Wrong Kind Of Money" was directed by the talented Avi Paul Weinstein, apparently a stealth garage-sale hawk and the man responsible for Spirit Kid's insanely cool stop-motion video for last year's "My Imagination."

If you need evidence that time heals all wounds, look no further than Saturday's UNITY FEST, arriving a bit more than a year following Guru's tragic passing, and marking the first Boston appearance since his death by Gang Starr brethren DJ PREMIER. Whereas last May's tribute show at the Middle East was understandably bogged down with some weighty connotations (both mourning his death and calling for Solar's head), Saturday felt more like a straight up celebration of the man's life.

At last night’s CONVERGE show at the Middle East in Cambridge, it was evident the single clenched fist has replaced the double “devil horns” as the new symbol of metal solidarity.

The CQ Presents gig sold out a week in advance, it was obvious that no one decided to stay home, with each attending patron sporting either a dirty Sox hat, a neck tattoo, a neatly trimmed beard, or a combination of the three.

CSArt is an inspiring new community art project based at the Cambridge Center for Adult Education, taking the model of community-supported agriculture and applying it to a program that supports local visual artists, ranging from painters and photographers to printmakers and sculptors. For the program’s first season, shareholders can pay $300 to receive artworks from nine different artists.

Jamaica Plain resident MARISSA NADLER has offered up a second free single from her forthcoming self-titled record, out June 14 on her own newly-established Box of Cedar Records. “The Sun Always Reminds Me Of You” is a twangier take on her signature hazy dream-folk sound; a crisper and more expansive version of its lo-fi demo that surfaced in November