According to a recent story in The New York Times, the latest craze in making money on the road for musicians is the "VIP Package," a pricey gouging of concertgoers that offers questionable "perks." Take the VIP route for a Bon Jovi concert and you'll get a Jovi metal folding chair, a leather bag and a meal ... all for only $1,750 a pop!  

We're slowly inching our way toward the bleakest of release months, and so, if the sheets prove to be as sparsely populated as they seem to be now, I will be perusing the back stock (i.e., the piles of unreviewed material that teeter precariously in the Bunker) to find some things to talk about in the absence of actual new releases in December. In the meantime, let's see what the mailman (or the Internet) brought this week.