Can you imagine a world where Hulk Hogan plays bass for Metallica? [Buzzgrinder]

Chris Brown is a shoo-in for best album cover of the year. [Best Week Ever]

Paste counts down the best albums of the 2000s. [Paste]

Why swine flu is the new rock 'n' roll. [Guardian]

Port O'Brien rock out in KCRW's studio. [KCRW]

When the Fiery Furnaces -- the sibling duo of Matthew and Eleanor Friedberger -- recorded 'I'm Going Away,' they adjusted their usual penchant for mad rhythms, inscrutable vocals and dizzily complex arrangements to create an album Matthew calls "more casual than our past records."

"The records in the past were made up of simple rock songs," he tells Spinner. "But the simple songs on 'I'm Going Away' are kept within the most obvious genre confines. Hopefully, for people who know the band, that's different and amusing. For people who don't know the band, they can relate to it how they would any song. In the future we will have our simple rock songs be less simply disposed of, but for this record we wanted the songs to be as casually arranged as possible. Well, maybe, almost."

In the mid-'70s, Barry Manilow wrote the songs that made the whole world swoon. With tunes like 'Looks Like We Made It,' 'Weekend in New England,' 'Could It Be Magic' and 'Ready to Take a Chance Again,' Manilow was a maestro of the make-out session.

Now, three decades after his crooning heyday, Manilow is returning to romance at the suggestion of music industry titan Clive Davis. "I'm making [a record] he asked me to do called 'The Greatest Love Songs of All Time,'" Manilow tells Spinner. "It's the make-out album of all time."

"I'm now enchanted with life -- and have forgotten about death."

That's a pretty noteworthy remark from anyone, but especially from an 86-year-old who has seen a lot of life. But then how many octogenarians get to have the kind of fresh start that was given to Puerto Plata? The Dominican Republic-native singer-guitarist just two years ago made what by any measures would qualify as a belated debut album, 'Mujer de Cabaret.' And the new acclaim and attention brought to his talents and to his style of music -- a lively, lilting mix of meringues and boleros that came to be known as bachata after having been suppressed during the brutal rule of Gen. Rafael Trujillo from 1930 until his 1961 assassination -- is what's behind his refreshed attitude.

That sense of renewal he's experienced simply sparkles in his new second album, 'Casitas de Campo,' a collection putting the spotlight on fellow Dominican songwriters with energy gained from his unlikely acclaim of the past two years. It's a direct line back to his childhood, something that without these opportunities would have probably just slipped away. Somehow he makes the wistful nostalgia of such songs as 'Brisa de la Tarde' sound like they evoke something that happened to him last week, not decades ago.

Puerto Plata, 'Brisa de la Tarde'

For years, Stephen Stills wasn't feeling like himself. "I was really out of sorts and I didn't know why I was in such a funk," he tells Spinner. "I let myself get so fat." In 2008, he found out why. "I didn't realize for the previous five years I had been dragging a cancer around in there," he says. "When that stuff starts getting in there, it sort of f---s with your whole system, your mentality, your whole neurological system."

In June of 2008, the Rock and Roll Hall of Famer had successful surgery for prostate cancer and a now he says the experience has given him a new appreciation for life and music. "Yes, there's an 'oh s---' factor to it that'll wake you up," he says of the harrowing experience. "But mainly I was just revitalized."

Viv Albertine, the former guitarist of the British punk band the Slits, went on a long hiatus from music after the group's split in the early '80s. Working in film and raising a daughter, she never thought she would play music again. "After the Slits, I was so traumatized by it," Albertine tells Spinner. "I couldn't even listen to music for about three years. I auctioned off all my punk gear. It was like being in denial almost."

But after 25 years, Albertine took up her guitar again, which happened when she was invited to play some shows with the reunited Slits in 2008. In October, Albertine embarked on an American solo tour and is presently working on material for a new album next year.

"The strangest thing happened when I picked up the guitar. All these songs came rushing out," says Albertine. "I just can't stop playing now. It's a huge release for me. It almost means more than it did the first time around."

"[Oasis] remind us of ourselves, but on a more physically violent level." --Barry Gibb

In a recent interview, the singer admitted that like Noel and Liam Gallagher, he and his bandmates have been through their share of fights. The difference? The Bee Gees brothers are still on speaking terms.