Important announcement from Them Crooked Vultures coming today

Anyone who's been closely following developments related to the band project involving John Paul Jones knows that the group has now performed a slew of club and festival dates. Eight shows in all so far, with the Leeds and Reading festivals in England capping the London club debut last week, and Sunday's Rock en Seine appearance to close out the weekend.

One inevitable result of touring the festival circuit in Europe over the past several weeks was the spread of music by Them Crooked Vultures via the Internet. As unstoppable as this was, it was ultimately something the secretive lot behind the new band now embrace. Them Crooked Vultures videos were all over YouTube, so the band smartly assembled the best of those videos and made them all accessible on its official channel.

Yet there is so much that the videos cannot tell us, even as fans clamor to ensure that the song titles are all properly named. There is no question the band has succeeded in its quest to be its own gatekeeper.

And that's what makes today so special, it would seem.

All eyes will be on our e-mail accounts today as an official notification is expected that the band assures us "will include very important news." The quotation, for those who weren't plugged into the Internet last evening, came from the group's Twitter feed. It begs us all, one more time, to "deserve the future" by registering to receive their e-mail updates at http://vultur.es using the form marked "consort."

(It also encourages users to tell a friend. I just hope somebody reads this so I can say I did my part.)

What is this nebulous future that is ours to deserve? Will it be an album release date? Will it be a broad announcement of tour dates? While that's what conventional wisdom suggests, there's also a sense that this band may unleash yet another elaborate and unprecedented scheme akin to its secret bookings last month under a coded name and a foreign-language pseudonym.

For all we know, Them Crooked Vultures may forego an in-store physical album release altogether. Too passé!

Why not drop the entire album free of charge over the course of a month, hiding uncompressed digital files on different Web sites. We'd have to follow the social networking accounts of a couple dozen different henchmen affiliated with the marketing scheme and click incessantly on suspect links to various indistinguishable vultur.es URLs. Most would reveal comical images of crooked vultures, while only a handful would be those proverbial needles in the haystack, unleashing track by track the powerful music created for fans of loud rock.

Truly, then, only the most patient and ardent fans would deserve the future.

Sure. That's all well and good.

I'm really just hoping for an old-school CD release date -- as well as my old-school promo copy to review online for all you crooked vultures out there to be jealous of.

It worked in the days of The Thunderthief!

Bring on the next edition of The Crooked Times. We await your word.