With its proceeds split between Doctors Without Borders, Human Rights Watch, and Oxfam America, next week's release of Waxploitation Records' Darfur benefit CD is worth searching for. Causes 1 is the first of a proposed series of CDs, available on iTunes for 90 days and available as a limited-edition physical CD directly from the label's site.

Almost as weird as when kids' TV star Steve from Blue's Clues turned up collaborating with the Flaming Lips back in 2003, sweet and smarmy Hal Sparks, former host of E's Talk Soup, winds up with an A-list lineup of guitarists on a blistering metal release. This coming Tuesday, Doug Pinnick of King's X takes his cosmic blaze to new landscapes of sludgy soul as "Dug" Pinnick. An air guitarist's fantasy album of sizzling leads, the Magna Carta Records' release, Strum Sum Up, is Viagra for aging headbangers. The album features Wally Farkis of Galactic Cowboys, Alain Johannes of Eleven, and the ever-devastating Steve Stevens of Billy Idol fame. Sparks holds his own with the big boys, fronting his own top-notch band, Zero 1. Other players in on the fun include Natasha Shneider of Queens of the Stone Age, Ray Luzier of Army of Anyone, Kellii Scott of Failure, and David Henning of Big Wreck.

Like a time machine back to the Wild West days of New York City's art and music worlds colliding in 1980, Recall Records is releasing the soundtrack to the documentary film Downtown 81, staring the young, wildly talented artist Jean-Michel Basquiat. Featuring 21 strobe-light and avant-garde memories, highlights include the wet and stinky "I'm a Doggy" by The Lounge Lizards, Liquid Liquid's influential hip-hop seed of "Cavern," and James Chance, Tuxedomoon, Lydia Lunch, Melle Mel, and Kid Creole & the Coconuts.

For a band that's had its current lineup for five years, the Cincinnati, Ohio-based Pike is maddeningly difficult to get a handle on.