Over the last eight years Band of Horses has built an endearing discography which is soon to be augmented by new album, Mirage Rock.  Each of their albums has taken a good amount of time to register with us, but each time the wait has been worth it.  2010’s Infinite Arms was one of our favorite albums of that year.  Last week the band released the official video for uplifting rocker Knock Knock off the new album.  Knock Knock immediately grabs you sonically, and the video takes you on a GoPro wilderness foray that fits perfectly with this summertime.  The song’s immediacy bodes well for the new album.  You can pre-order Mirage Rock HERE.  Check out the video below and the tracklisting after.  The group will tour behind the album, but no Cali dates have been set yet.

Tracklisting:

1) Knock Knock
2) How To Live
3) Slow Cruel Hands of Time
4) A Little Biblical
5) Shut-In Tourist
6) Dumpster World
7) Electric Music
8) Everything’s Gonna Be Undone
9) Feud
10) Long Vows
11) Heartbreak on the 101

Bowery Presents has released additional segments from the Dirty Projectors concert that was streamed this past Monday from Brooklyn.

Check out the vocal gymnastics seen/heard in the band’s performance of Beautiful Mother off of their 2011 collaboration with Bjork, Mount Wittenberg Orca.  We hear some debts owed to Laurie Anderson’s O Superman, but multiplied times three and adding some entrancing innovation.  Afterwards, check out the challenging, but rewarding, See What She Seeing, also off of the new album, Swing Lo Magellan.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3FG7dIhtyyw&feature=channel&list=UL

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RkqTZplbcdM&feature=channel&list=UL

We’ve recently been singing the praise of a few beyond-Adele artists, including Brandi Carlile.  Check out Carlile with full band performing for NPR’s Tiny Desk Concerts series below.  Carlile is adept and additive, and deserves much more than she gets.

While we’re dabbling in this genre, we were recently taken aback by the captivating phrasing of Bonnie Raitt as she sang Love Has No Pride with David Crosby and Graham Nash at the 25th Anniversary Rock and Roll Hall of Fame Concert.  Check it out below the Carlile set.  As good as it gets.  Raitt plays the Santa Barbara Bowl with the always-marvelous Mavis Staples opening on September 23rd.  You can get tickets HERE.

Frank Ocean’s been in the press a lot recently. Who doesn’t love Mr. Ocean?  Don’t answer that–we don’t like the answers.  Ocean appeared on the Jimmy Fallon Show the other night to perform his intriguing song, Bad Religion, with full string ensemble and The Roots backing.  Check it out below.  The lad can both write and sing a mean song.

Damien Jurado’s album, Maraqopa, remains firmly slotted into our Top 10 Albums of 2012.  Check out below (via Spin) a new video for the song Museum of Flight off the album.  The video humorously attempts to capture Jurado ’s recent five-week tour of Europe.  Damien will join the fabulous Megafaun for a European tour in August.  He’ll then come back to the States and team up with shinkas, Sharon Van Etten, for a handful of shows. See a full list of tour dates below the new video.

Tour Dates:
07/20/12 Portland, OR – Oregon Zoo w/ The Head & The Heart
08/03/12 Ravenna, IT – Hana-Bi w/ Megafaun
08/05/12 Arco di Trento, IT – Arco Summer Festival
08/06/12 Munich, DE – Muffatwerk w/ Megafaun
08/07/12 Dresden, DE – Beatpol w/ Megafaun
08/08/12 Berlin, DE – HBC
08/09/12 Haldern-Rees, DE – August 9th-11th: Haldern Pop Festival
08/10/12 Rees-Haldern, DE – Haldern Pop w/ Megafaun
08/11/12 Haldern, DE – Haldern Pop Festival w/ Megafaun
08/12/12 Utrecht, NL – Tivoli w/ Bowerbirds
08/14/12 Brighton, UK – The Blind Tiger w/ Megafaun
08/15/12 Leeds, UK – Brudenell Social Club w/ Megafaun
08/16/12 Glasgow, UK – The Arches w/ Megafaun
08/17/12 Glanusk Park, Wales, UK – Green Man Festival (AUG 17th-19th)
08/17/12 Newcastle, UK – The Cluny w/ Megafaun
08/18/12 Liverpool, UK – The Leaf w/ Megafun
08/19/12 Powys, Wales, UK – Green Man Festival
08/20/12 London, UK – Dingwalls w/ Megafaun
09/01/12 Seattle, WA – Bumbershoot Festival
09/07/12 Raleigh, NC – Hopscotch Music Festival
10/25/12 Washington, DC –

Old Crow Medicine Show has a new album about to be released entitled Carry Me Back.  Check the band out performing Ain’t It Enough in what appears to be a lit dungeon, as captured by The Avett Brothers’ collaborationist, Crackerfarm.  A sweet song sung from a swell cell.  We hear this one sung around a campfire with a group of friends.

Ain’t It Enough:

“Show me a river I’ll show you an ocean
show you a castle turn into sand
for we rise and we fall and we crash on the coastline
and only our love will last till the end
Fortune is fleeting your time is deceiving
our bodies are weak and they turn into dust
All following blindly but love is like lightning
strikes only one time, but ain’t it enough?

Chorus:

Ain’t it enough to live by the ways of the world,
to be part of the picture, whatever it’s worth
throw your arms round each other and love one another
for it’s only one life that we got, and ain’t it enough?

Surely all people were made for each other
join in together when the days turn to dust
so let the prison walls crumble and the borders all tumble
there’s place for us all here and ain’t it enough?

Chorus

Bridge: Late in the evening, feeling the wind blow tall through the treetops, warm in the sun
lying beside you, watching the moon rise, if that’s all there is babe, ain’t it enough?

Show me a river I’ll show you an ocean
stars just like diamonds shining above
where the heavens are beaming and all the world’s dreaming
peace everlasting, and ain’t it enough?

Chorus.”

Following Monday night’s appearance on the Letterman Show, Tom Waits moved over last night to the Jimmy Fallon Show to sit down with J-Fal for a tete-a-tete and to perform Raised Right Men off of Bad As Me.  Perhaps it was Questlove’s and The Roots’ palpable excitement over the legend’s appearance on the show, or J-Fal’s winning ways and rising stature amongst the musical cognoscenti, or perhaps the enthusiasm of the studio audience; whatever the case, Waits and the band brought even more to their performance than the prior night.  ?uestlove (@questlove) captured it well in his Twitter tweet:  “man. you aint lived til you seen @tomwaits sing in the flesh. (tonight on @latenightjimmy)”.  We have several times, and couldn’t agree more.  Long live Tom Waits!  Check out the performance followed by the interview below.

The incomparable Tom Waits showed on the Letterman Show last night for a chat and to perform Chicago off of his latest album, Bad as Me.  Waits is backed by about a hundred or so musicians, including his son, Casey, on drums and Los Lobos’ David Hidalgo on guitar.  Check out the song and then the interview after (the usual hilarity from Waits).  Keep on chooglin’.  All aboard!!!

Waits will also appear on the Jimmy Fallon Show tonight.

Both courtesy of the Audio Perv.

One of the best indie confabs, John Darnielle and The Mountain Goats, will release a new album entitled Transcendental Youth on October 2nd on Merge Records.  Their last album, All Eternals Deck, was one of our favorite albums (No. 16) of 2011, and their show at Soho was one of the best concerts of last year.  So expectations for Transcendental Youth are extremely high at Chez Lefort.  We could wax poetic and prolifically on the subject, but funnyman John Hodgman (The Daily Show, etc.) has done a far better job than we’re capable of below.  You can also check out Darnielle’s own explique of the new album HERE.  We can’t wait.  More sneaks and previews to follow.

John Hodgman:

“Biographical details that I have personally observed regarding John Darnielle and the Mountain Goats

John Darnielle is a human male and American musician who was born in Indiana.

Alone or in collaboration with others, he has been known as the Mountain Goats since 1991.

He grew up in Central California [TLR–San Luis Obispo], and has lived in many states, but now lives in North Carolina with his wife and child and at least one cat that I have observed.

I visited his home in the year 2011. I took off my shoes when I came in the door because that is my habit. No one made me do it.

John Darnielle’s house is not rockstar huge, nor rockstar glamorous. It does not have a home theater or rolfing center. It’s modest.

There is an office packed with shelves reflecting his preoccupations: pulp horror and philosophy and religious study. John Darnielle is fascinated with both death metal and the Holy Bible and speaks eloquently of the dark magic and elegance and grace of both.

Now I am going to tell you that, in the study by the stairs, I stepped in a little bit of cat vomit.

I can report that John Darnielle was not embarrassed. Because he knows it is in a cat’s nature to vomit, and because he saw an opportunity for kindness. He loaned me some socks, and they were argyle, warm from the dryer and very soft.

The house has a basement, which John Darnielle describes as “awesome.”

The basement is not particularly awesome. (I have seen some awesome basements.) It has some drums and guitars in it but otherwise is a fairly typical basement of a modest, middle-class home. Normal.

It is my impression that this may be why John Darnielle considers his basement to be awesome, for such normality was not necessarily going to be his fate.

Inside the basement is a box of a limited-edition, alternate vinyl version of his album The Sunset Tree, which came out in 2005. Each one is hand-painted by John: white sleeve traced with naïve snakes and swirls of bright color.

John Darnielle told me that he made these when things were going well in his career, but he was still not convinced he was going to make it…when he still thought he might have to go back to psychiatric nursing, which is what he did when he started writing and recording songs.

Those first recordings, you may have read, were made on a simple cassette recorder. And those tapes of just him plus guitar are full of hiss and urgency. They were made for one reason. Like these hand-painted LPs, even if all else failed, they were going to get out there, no matter what.

He has written almost 600 songs now, and some of them are very sad, dealing with hard drugs and tragic ends, hurting yourself and others, sicknesses of both body and brain, off-brand alcohols. They are told in beautiful, unnerving, specific detail, because John Darnielle is a very good writer, and also some of them are just true stories about his own life.

But many have noted that John Darnielle seems often very happy, and his demeanor on stage is almost exclusively unhaunted, ecstatic.

Anyone who reads his Twitter feed knows he takes great delight in his delights: vegan cooking, fat babies, hockey, the beautiful alchemy of Chemex coffee, Anonymous 4, playing music for people, loaning out socks when the time comes, basements.

These are the consolations; and if some of his songs suggest that there are real hells on earth, other songs remind that the heavens are equally close at hand.

(Sometimes they are even the same songs.)

It is my impression that this is the ecstasy John Darnielle is feeling: that thrill of having survived, escaped for even a second to enjoy those small transcendent delights, and to sing of them.

And I can report that if you are standing in the basement with John Darnielle and wondering how he survived this far, to stand happy in this heavenly basement, you may look down at the hand-painted album of songs you are holding and realize the answer is in your hand.

Like that album, TRANSCENDENTAL YOUTH is full of songs about people who madly, stupidly, blessedly won’t stop surviving, no matter who gives up on them.

I can report that it is a very good album and has many more instruments on it than those early tapes, including Peter Hughes on bass, Jon Wurster on drums, and, for the first time, a full horn section. And all of this makes a very joyous noise.

Everything I have written here is true, to the best of my knowledge.

I am not giving back the socks.

That is all.

John Hodgman
2012″