The Jonas Brothers scored their second chart-topping album within a year with Lines, Vines and Trying Times, which sold just under 250,000 copies last week. A Little Bit Longer, which was released last August, sold 525,000 copies in its first week of release, at the peak of Jonas-mania. [Billboard.com]

After years of saying there would be no new Pixies albums, Black Francis said in an NME interview that he’d like the band to work closely with a film director on some new music: “The band needs to work with a film director. Quentin Tarantino or someone like that. It’d be like, ‘Make some music for our film, you guys [Pixies] be the sound of the film’.” [NME.com]

R.I.P. NME and Guardian writer Steven Wells — a.k.a. Swells — who died this week of Hodgkins lymphoma. Beginning as a punk-era poet, Swells took applied that principled vitriol to music journalism for over two decades. Check out his final column for the Philadelphia Weekly here. [Guardian.co.uk, NME.com, PhiladelphiaWeekly.com]

Though Pavement’s Scott Kannberg has already released several albums on Matador with Preston School of Industry, he’ll be making his solo debut on October 20 with The Real Feel. Collaborators include former Preston bandmates, Broken Social Scene’s Kevin Drew and members of the Posies (that band’s Jon Auer produced). [Pitchfork.com]

Casey Kasem’s Top 39: The legendary deejay will retire from announcing his “America’s Top 40″ spinoff programs “America’s Top 20″ and “America’s Top 10″ on July 4, 39 years to the day that he created the franchise. [TheDailySwarm.com]

Ludacris’ very own brand of Cognac, Conjure, will be available on shelves this fall. Luda and Cognac blender Philippe Braastad Tiffon tested over 40 different brandies during the process; “I wanted to learn as much as possible. It was great. It gave me a new appreciation for Cognac,” he said. [AllHipHop.com]

Need more summer jams? Idolator has a new MP3 from U.S.E., “K.I.S.S.I.N.G.” No word on whether or not the band is sitting in a tree. [Idolator.com]